So for those who don't know, today marks the eleventh anniversary of me moving to Chicago, an anniversary I celebrate every year as one would a birthday or minor holiday. And as regular readers know, today also marks the first anniversary of me changing career goals, from that of a professional writer to that of a small-business owner. So I figured today would be as good a time as any to sit down and reflect on how the past year has actually gone, and what's in store for me over the next twelve months.

So first, let's get the obvious out of the way, which is that my mental and emotional state has experienced an almost 180-degree turnaround since this point a year ago, and that I have the career change to thank for all that. I mean, last year was just...not a good year for me, which is about as understated as it gets, with the long version just too sad and pathetic to write out in detail here. And in hindsight, I realize now that most of that can all be boiled down to a single issue, which was my growing frustration over my literary career.

I'm proud of everything I wrote in the ten years I pursued writing as a career, don't get me wrong. I think they're all fine projects, and I'm still proud to have my name attached to each of them. And I'm proud of the following I was able to build for my writing as well, and the accomplishments I was able to pull off in that decade, which in my opinion is nothing to sneeze at - around 20,000 readers a day here at my journal, over 40 books published (including six full-length ones), lots of book tours (both domestic and international), a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a second-place finish at a National Poetry Slam, and lots of others, all of them pulled off without a single bit of help from the actual publishing industry.

But the thing to understand is that publishing is a business just like everything else, and that your success in that industry depends on a lot more besides whether or not you're simply a good writer - it's also all about how easily your book can be marketed, how easily you yourself fit into a predefined niche that can be quickly explained to the press. ("He's an edgy poet!" "Oh, I see, he's an edgy poet!") It's about whether your book happens to be about the big new hot trendy subject that's selling a lot of other books as well. It's about how well you play with others, and how little a stink you raise when things don't go your way. It's about the author's willingness to give up some of their freedoms, some of their rights, in exchange for your book being printed and sold in a way that you couldn't handle just on your own.

All of these things have major influences on whether or not a writer can make a living from their writing - of whether they can get publishing contracts, and with the right company, and with the right distributor, and with the right retail support, and with the right promotional support. When it comes to the issue of the arts and money, it starts becoming a vastly more complicated equation, which is where I came up short in my own career; because the fact of the matter is that I was never able to get anyone in the publishing industry interested in my work, back when I was actively pursuing it, no matter how many successes I had or how many people counted themselves as enthusiastic fans of my work.

Artistically, I'm actually kind of proud of that - that my work transcends a lot of traditional demographic lines, that I have just as many suburban tech workers who like my writing as I do edgy urban artists. I like that I have both a straight audience and a gay audience, and that I'm respectively seen by many of them as a "straight" author and a "gay" author simultaneously. I like that I have both liberals and conservatives as readers, readers of every race on the planet, readers of every age group. But man, this is not what a publishing company wants to see - they want to see you strike really close to home with as specific a demograhic group as possible, so that they can then go out and publicize the book to that specific group as much as possible. And this was always the big weakness of my writing, that it didn't appeal to just one specific group out there (or, to be more crass about it, there were always things in my books that would piss off every specific group out there, which is where I really had problems trying to pitch my stuff to publishing companies).

We all expect this from the big publishing companies, of course, the Random Houses and the Simon & Shusters and all those other dinosaurs who are rapidly going extinct these days without any of the executives seeming to realize it. What may surprise people, though, is that even the small, edgy, artistic publishing companies are like this as well, which was really the downfall of my career as a professional writer. I mean, I'm even friends with a lot of these small-press people, and they still wouldn't touch my work with a ten-foot pole; the owner of Soft Skull Press, for example (and I kid you not about this), actually laughed in my face a couple of years ago when I suggested that they publish one of my books. And so it went with all the others as well - my friends at Manic D Press didn't want to publish my work, my friends at Incommunicado didn't want to publish my work, my friends at Kapow didn't want to publish my work, my friends at McSweeney's didn't want to publish my work, and just on and on and on.

I could've stuck with the writing, don't get me wrong, could've started devoting a lot more time, money and professionalism into printing my own work, getting it out to bookstores, scheduling tours and interviews and the like. But man, if I'm going to do all that work, and not have a single larger organization support me, why not just go all out and actually run a business? That's what I asked myself last summer, anyway, as these realizations starting settling in. If I'm going to devote 40 or more hours a week to the business side of the arts in the first place, and if I'm going to do it without anyone else's help, why not do something that would actually make me a decent amount of money, instead of the barely-scraping-by level which is pretty much the most any self-publishing author can hope for?

And so that was the point that I started thinking about opening an arts center instead, and to do something business-related with the arts that would have a much more profound impact than simply running my own small press. Although technically that's not exactly true - I actually first envisioned this center in the way it's being created while in Munich in 2003, while staying with this amazing photographer named Sebastian Unterreitmeier. I was sitting there in his apartment one afternoon, in fact, looking at all the fantastic photos he had hanging all over, and I thought, "Man, how great would it be to have a place in Chicago where Sebastian could show some of this work? You know, some place that's friendly to underground artists, but would still give them all the 'big deal' stuff a museum might - increased revenue, increased number of fans, this really great credit to add to their cirriculum vitae?" Technically, that was actually the moment this arts center was born.

And how goes the center a year later, you might ask? Well, it depends on how you look at it, as I was telling my friend Mars the other night. In empirical terms - that is, the physical things you can actually hold in your hand or point to - things are no further along than they were a year ago; the center still exists mostly just as a PDF document at this point, with no real assets and no serious money raised. But I prefer looking at this whole process in the longer view, which frankly has to be done in this case, simply because my actual plan is such a complicated one, and requires such an insane amount of startup money to begin in the first place. In fact, when I first made the decision last year to try to open this center, I even said to myself that the process might take up to ten years to complete, and that I was deliberately going to take my time and do things in the slow, exacting way such a center deserves.

In that context, then, things with the center are actually going fantastically. In the last twelve months, for example, I have moved legitimately close to knowing just as much about business as a freshly-graduated 24-year-old MBA holder, but without the benefit of the actual MBA - I've read maybe 100, 150 business books in the last year, hundreds upon hundreds of magazine articles, thousands upon thousands of blog entries from business specialists. I've become friends with a growing amount of business and marketing veterans over the last year, because of me simply writing to them and bugging them incessantly, and am now receiving free advice from these people (really great advice, I might add) that they normally charge $400 an hour for to their corporate clients. A year ago I didn't even know what a business plan was, and now I not only have one but one that is impressing a growing amount of these business veterans I've sent it to (although, Lord knows, certainly not all of them).

And at the same time, there's a growing public awareness of the center as well, which is yet another piece of the vast jigsaw puzzle we call "the startup process." I have a growing amount of outside organizations getting interested in the center, and verbally expressing an interest in being involved with it once it opens. I've had professors who have wanted to know about it, and artists who have wanted to know more, entire artistic departments at a couple of local college campuses who now know about and support what it is that I'm trying to do. And like I said, all of this is an incredibly important part of the process, because it's likely going to be because of one of these people that I will eventually meet the person or people destined to fund this center - that brave soul or souls willing to actually hand over a check for $200,000 (160,000 euros, 120,000 pounds) and believe that I'll know what to do with it. I'm already assuming that my money is going to come from a private investor instead of a bank, and this is simply an important part of that process - of just getting as many people as possible to talk about the center themselves, at cocktail parties and fundraisers and while talking with their doctor, because you never know which of those random listeners is going to eventually be that person to hand me a check for $200,000.

So what's next for me? Well, I'm hoping that it'll be a full-time job - because Jesus, this fall will mark three straight years now of having to cobble together a life out of occasional freelance work, Paypal donations from online readers, and lots and lots of money borrowed from friends, family members, my building manager, complete strangers and the like. And I don't even know how to begin to describe the stress that comes from three years of unemployment, and just how profoundly one's life changes in that kind of situation. Of just how quickly you get used to the idea of only eating four days out of every seven; of seeing only two movies a year, and not owning a single new CD of music; of never getting to go out with your friends, of sometimes not even accepting invitations, because you feel so guilty about the fact that they're going to have to pay for you; of reading all the books you're interested in at Borders, one chapter a day, because you can't afford to actually buy any of them. That's an entire journal entry unto itself, and one I have no interest in writing, because it's just so stressful and frustrating that it makes me want to smash my head through a plate-glass window sometimes. So I'm hoping that that will finally change sometime soon, and that I actually will have money coming in again on a regular basis.

And at that point, I'll be ready to move into phase 2 of the startup process as well - basically, actually finishing the business plan, running off a zillion copies at the local Fuck You Store (Kinko's, that is), and actually pitching it formally to potential investors. And that's all exciting, but is still a long ways off, so I haven't really started making specific plans yet regarding all that.

And my love life? Well, er, I'm still not too terribly excited about the idea of dating again, to tell you the truth; my last ex-girlfriend really did do an awful lot of psychic damage to me over the way the relationship ended, and I'm still not really at a point where I'm excited about jumping headfirst into such a situation again. But who knows? I mean, that's the whole thing about love and attraction, is that you can't really schedule it like you would a visit to the gym; you never know when you might just meet some random person one day under random circumstances, and have the experience of meeting them just smack you in the gut like the pathetic hairless ape you are. (In fact, I actually had such an experience recently - but again, another story for another day, that's not nearly at a point where I'm ready to talk about it here yet.) So like I said, who knows? Maybe a year from now I'll be dating again, or I'll still be single, or will have gotten back into swinging. God only knows.

Anyway, I'm going out for a drink tonight to celebrate Moving Day - and poor sad Jason doesn't actually have anyone to have a drink with, so if you're in the city and feeling like tying one on for a completely random reason, feel free to drop me a line. If I ask really nicely, maybe the bartender at Holiday will give me a cupcake. Or, you know, at least put a candle in my Jello shot or something.