VIDEO MAKING AND GOLD MINES

I have a lot of things to do this Saturday. I can't get them all started or completed. Where did I leave off last night?

Now another thought erupts... the TPi chess DVD White Shockers which IM Andrew Martin made at my house in October. I could get it started. I remember some great stuff he put on it--seven items I believe on opening methods for downing your opponent in such a way as to put a blank expression on his face.

My son Rob had once asked if I would put up something on YouTube. This time the answer will be "yes." Maybe a short ten minute clip if I have one. Should it be the BEST one or one that is not as great as the best? There's only one way to find out and that is to go through all of them! A stint like that can last 4-5 hours and leave me bleary-eyed when done.

Then it's time to go to Borders, or Steak 'n Shake or some place to let my head unwind... or even work on another project that requires less intensity--I have plenty of them staring me in the face. How do I decide which?

The answer is fairly simple. While long-term good results can keep on keeping on, those bills are always lying there waiting to be paid. So the short of it is to go for some quick sales. I advertise my cataloged products as the "best" of chess stuffs out there. A lesson I am learning the hard way is this isn't always what seems attractive to a potential buyer. Week after week I get chess notices about this and that, and most of that is short-term, plausibly okay, but not very enticing. In other words, because it appears on NIC's lengthy list of books and DVDs that doesn't make it good--after all, they are "feeding" the machine (their business and all their employees).

People say they want the best but they also say the don't want to pay "that much" for it. I thought about that and before going to bed last night it hits me like thunder. A book like Moskalenko's The Flexible French is $25 or so. Twenty-five bucks that is chock full of goodies worth $500 or more worth of time and research to me. It's right there waiting to be tapped. Don't look at it as $25, use it as if it is going to make you a better player of the French because someone else, stronger than yourself by a huge amount, has done a lot of the work (not all, you still have to apply it). But the important question is: if I get to the point of learning what's in this book or on a video don't I have to try it out in a real event to see the fruit of "my" labors? I think so.

Now to the shower and after that to working on the DVD, a short-term and long-term project.