moechus

Insane fantasy or realistic possibility? (I would appreciate it if people read the whole thing and commented honestly.) Years ago (2005 or 2006?), I started a blogsite, www.allthingshuman.com (name based on the line from Terence: “I regard nothing human as alien to me”). I posted links to news stories on all conceivable subjects (usually with some snarky headline or comment as I currently do on FB), a Poem of the day, a Game of the week (from a database I have of 60,000+ games not available on ChessBase), an occasional essay on something (see https://allthingshuman.com/category/original-content/ for some examples), etc. See https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/www.allthingshuman.com for archived pages. In 2006, I went to the Chess Olympiad in Turin, Italy and live-blogged from there. Before leaving, I promoted the site in the chess media. At one point, I was getting a few dozen (maybe even in the hundreds) daily views. Then the site went dark for nearly a decade. First, it was infected by a virus, then seized by a cybersquatter. Eventually, I got it back and started posting fairly regularly but I never bothered promoting it and never had more than a handful of viewers. I had vague ideas of doing more with it but never executed on them. Then, three years ago, I took a full-time job at a law firm and no longer had the time to do anything with site beyond the occasional post.

Three years later, I definitely need to make some changes. I just turned 67, am working too many hours (and suffering burn-out), not spending enough time with my son and wife, and am just generally exhausted and depressed. Retirement is not an option. I never expected to have a wife and kid and itinerant chess journalist/part time lawyer/legal assistant was enough to live on (barely) but I have no savings and we live paycheck to paycheck.

Which brings me back to allthingshuman. Is it possible to turn this into a second career that would pay the bills? I need to earn $8 to $10k a month to keep the household solvent. Is it conceivable/possible that I could get a thousand people to pay $10 a month for a daily poem, weekly chess game not available elsewhere, occasional essay, news links accompanied by snark, links to unusual occurences, signs from above that defy interpretation, etc.? I could add reviews of books, restaurants, etc. I could maybe offer a monthly or so podcast. I went through my contacts and have several published authors, grandmasters, experts in various fields. If I could persuade a few of them to give me an hour of their time, I could cover, if not all things human, a lot of things from backpacking to finance to hypnosis to science, etc.

Thoughts? Opinions? Advice on how to make it work? Absolutely bonkers or vaguely plausible?