My Writing Course

So I'm sitting here trying to think of ways I can continue to buy Fancy Feast for Crum the Cat. Several people have proposed that I ought to start doing dokusan sessions online via Skype and charge money for them. But that idea, frankly, makes me want to vomit. Dokusan, for those who may not know, is a private personal interview with a Zen teacher, usually conducted as part of a sesshin or Zen retreat. Though participants usually pay for Zen retreats, and though some of that money normally goes to the teacher, it is not customary to charge specifically for dokusan. Besides which, if it's not done in the context of a retreat it isn't really dokusan, at least in my understanding of what dokusan is supposed to be.

I've been sending my resume out to colleges and universities who run writing programs to see if they'll hire me to teach creative writing. Then it occurred to me. Do I really need a university to hire me to do that? Maybe I could do that myself and eliminate the middle man.

My upstairs neighbor Dave teaches writing at the University of Akron. So I went up there and asked if I could borrow a syllabus from one of his classes. I looked it over and figured I could adapt his strategy to an online course in creative writing to be taught by me.

I'm thinking I could offer a ten week course with 4 - 6 writing assignments that I would personally evaluate. Students would get the benefit of my experience as a professional writer, which is something I've been doing for at least ten years before Hardcore Zen came out in 2003. I was writing all sorts of stuff for Tsuburaya Productions. And before that I wrote for zines and science fiction mags. That's like 20 years as a writer, not even counting the comic books and shitty poetry I wrote starting when I first learned to write.

I couldn't help get anyone published. I could tell you how I went about doing it. But I have no connections that are going to work for anyone else. I can show you how to make your work publishable, though.

In order to make this worth the time and headaches it would cost me, I'd have to charge at least $350 per student. I may have to charge more, in fact, because it would be a whole big bunch of work for me. The going rate for online writing courses appears to vary between $300 and $800. Although I haven't been able to find any examples of someone like me, an independent published author, offering such a course. I'm sure such examples must exist somewhere. I would imagine the prestige of the writer in question would determine the price. Does anyone know of a writer who independently offers online writing courses?

So the question I'm asking all of you nice folks is: Would you be interested in taking such a course? I doubt that most of the regular contributors to this blog's comments section are going to want to do it. So I'm hoping to hear from a few ordinary citizens. This page gets a thousand or more hits a day. So I know that it's not just those same five guys reading it.

Remember Crum the Cat is depending on you!