So, dear readers, why don't we step into the Wayback Machine today, and go back to the years 1994 and '95? Because I got an email out of the blue yesterday from someone I haven't regularly thought about since those years. She never knew I existed until just recently, but boy, I've sure been aware of her existence.

As regular readers know, I moved to Chicago in 1994, from a small collegetown in Missouri, and before that from a rural area outside of St. Louis. And man, I'll tell you honestly, my first six months in Chicago were the craziest, the fullest of random adventures, of probably the entire 11 years I've now been here. I think it's that way with everyone, really, for all kinds of reasons. There's the pure thrill of suddenly being somewhere big, for example, so unused to having so many choices for entertainment, always going out to all of them simply because you can. You're much younger then than you are now, obviously. You're the most aware of your surroundings then, because everything is new and to be soaked up like a sponge. You experience a lot of scarily intense ups and downs, suddenly being in this city with millions more people than you've ever been accustomed to, no matter how many times you visited the city beforehand and thought you knew what it would be like to live there.

My first year in Chicago, really, was a time of dizzying highs and lows for me; great new friendships, great terrors, scrambling every day just to survive, 25 and loving every second of it. Random sexual encounters with random people, other new transplants who didn't know what they were doing either, warm romps in curiously empty bedrooms, and you didn't know what it all meant afterwards, because you were fresh out of college and not used to casual sex yet, so you'd try dating for a little bit, until realizing that no, it was just two new transplants feeling lonely in the big city one night. It was a time of fast maturation for me, a time of falling in love with the city quickly and profoundly, drinking in each and every detail of the entire glorious, messy thing.

One of the things I used to do once a week back then was to visit a used bookstore in Uptown called Shake, Rattle and Roll (next door to the infamous Green Mill), dig around the back stacks, pick a novel completely at random based entirely on how cool its cover was. There was something magical about that store, I don't know what it was, where I could always find great unknown novels, just by picking one with a great cover in the back stacks. This is how I discovered Mark Leyner, Banana Yoshimoto and others; you got me.

And this is exactly how I came across this novel called Some Girls by a writer not known to me named Kristin McCloy. And it's about this girl in her mid-twenties, who moves to Manhattan's Lower East Side in the early '90s (yes, same time period and location as Rent) from rural New Mexico, who just happens to go through the same exact dizzying highs and lows I was going through that exact moment too. Wow! Talk about a blow to the heart, man. Why, she even had this crazy, fucked-up relationship with her sexy mysterious female neighbor, who may or may not be a sex worker, who is always flirtatious but always holding so much back, who will get drunk and fuck you one night but then show up the next night with someone of the opposite gender. Hey, just like my first year in the city!

So I really fell in love with this book, and started just talking about it all the time to my friends, and even buying up new copies for friends' birthdays and the like. And here's where it maybe gets complicated to get across in a journal entry, how I was not exactly in love with McCloy herself because of all this; I was in love with this beautiful book, this wonderful story she had told and the minimalist way she had told it, about a person going through the same exact very private, very confusing emotions that I was too, that I thought no one else was going through but me. You know what that's like, to find a writer like that; it's happened to you before, I'm sure. You're not in love with the author for it, but you develop a fascination with them; you wonder who this person could be who could put together such a great novel out of thin air, and of course how much of it was based on them.

This was in the mid-'90s, of course, in the beginning days of the web, when there wasn't nearly the amount of online resources there now are; I couldn't track her down then, but that was nothing unusual, because I couldn't track down a lot of people then. But then the years progressed, and nothing new ever ended up appearing about McCloy; she never published another book, never penned a magazine article, never made any public appearances. And as these years progressed, she became a sort of poster child for this type of writer who I often get fascinated with; who write just one or two really brilliant novels, then suddenly disappear off the face of the earth. Like dude, Kirstin Bakis, author of Lives of the Monster Dogs? What the hell happened to her? It took us eight years to hear about Donna Tartt after The Secret History. What about Astro Teller, author of the phenomenal Exegesis? Or DB Weiss, author of the absolutely mind-fucking Lucky Wander Boy?

McCloy represented all of them to me, precisely because I had connected to her book more strongly than any of the others; I've ended up reading it, in fact, maybe six or seven times now in my life, and in fact am thinking about doing it again. I always thought what a great chance it would be to finally let her know this whole story, and what her novel meant to me; and especially now that I'm older, and my crushy little love of it has worn off, now that I'm more comfortable with the world in general. And what do you know? Why just yesterday, I got an email just completely out of the blue from McCloy, who apparently earlier that day did a Google search on her novel for the first time in eight years. And came across some old remarks of mine in an old page of my site that's now gone but still cached at Google, and dropped me a line out of the blue, belatedly thanking me for my eight-year-old remarks.

Wow! And what an amazing time for her to contact me, I think, right when my arts center, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (or CCLaP) is to open this September, precisely to help out writers like her. Oh yeah, that's the other thing; she's starting to do searches because she's finally completed her third novel, coming out this fall, and is starting to get back into the publicity swing of things. So I've got a chance now of actually hosting an appearance by her here in Chicago, if she goes on a tour and decides to come here (which she better; her publisher is Simon & Schuster, after all, and they can goddamn afford to send a novelist out to a couple of cities). And this is opposed to ten years ago, when I was just a beginning writer in my mid-twenties, and would have nothing better to say than a gushy little fanboy letter; now I can actually invite her to Chicago, am actually in a position to offer something as a fan that can actively help her career. I love that!

Plus, I've asked her now if she might be interested in doing an email interview with me; about why she stopped writing for so long, what that was like, what it's been like to following the long-term cult-like success of Some Girls, what that's added to her life over the years. So here's hoping she'll say yes to the interview, which of course I'll just reprint here at the website as a journal entry, for all of you to enjoy as well. What an amazing random occurrence this week, man! See, it's for reasons like this that I really, really love being on the web sometimes.

Wow, big news about my reader fundraiser for a new Intel Mini; $250 in the last two days! Yowza! Admittedly, a big chunk of this is from a friend of mine in Chicago recently hiring me to do some "evangelizing" for his new internet start-up; I can tell you more, as always, as soon as they're ready to go public with the site. Anyway, he paid me my first paycheck in advance, so that I could put a big chunk of it towards the Mini; so that's why I'm so close to my overall goal now. (Although, a bit of bad news as well - the low-end Mini is actually $600, not the $500 I thought. Okay, so almost halfway there, then!)

Why am I'm saving desperately for a Mini right now? Oh, so I can play the alternative-reality videogame Second Life, that is, which I've been obsessively talking about here; so much, in fact, that I just set up a damn new category at my site about it, so that I could just point people to it and be done with it. And, oh yeah, I also set up a new RSS feed for it as well, for people who would just like the entries here specifically about SL. Oh, and I haven't given up on the idea of perhaps being an evangelist for Linden Lab either, the owners of Second Life, much like the relationship Heather Champ has with Flickr; I just wrote yesterday, in fact, to the Vice President at Linden in charge of marketing, to see what he thought of such an idea. Can you tell that I'm kind of committed to getting into this game right now at all costs?

I'm so excited about this; about getting involved with something straight out of my '80s teen dreams of a William Gibson 'cyberspace,' actually come to life now and ready for me to explore. So excited as well that I'll actually be able to make money there, just from being a cool artistic live-events producer, just like I am in the real world. That I could actually earn a Premium membership simply from being a cheerleader for Linden Lab, and posting new content each day about all the latest stuff I'm learning just as a player. So won't you please help me push this project into the point where I can actually play? Here's the Paypal link:

Only $350 to go (or 200 pounds, or 275 euros), plus another $72 for a year-long pre-paid Premium membership, to make things super easy. I do hope you'll give some consideration into kicking in $5, $10, $20, whatever your particular job and career can afford you, without it taking any significant dent out of your budget. I and many expectant artists in Second Life thank you!