Okay, so here's what's going on with me these days:

1) First of all, we're getting ever closer to the opening of my new arts center, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (or CCLaP); the first version of its website, for instance, goes live in about a month. And this is bringing more and more responsibilities and duties that are needing to get done; like, say, actually building this website that's set to go live in about a month.

2) Plus, I've fallen behind my year-long "Getting Things Done" schedule when it comes to two activities: getting my latest travel book published, and getting the archives of my website imported into this new version. And I'm realizing that what I'm going to have to do to get these done is probably just go on an entire sabbatical online, and not interact with the web at all while I'm in the middle of them.

3) And then, lo and behold, I was actually able to raise the $600 I needed to get this new Intel Mac Mini I've been going on about here. (Although admittedly, I ended up generating most of the revenue through freelance work I did here in Chicago, not reader donations.) Anyway, so that means not only setting up the new Mac; and not only bringing all my old apps, files and preferences over from my old Mac; and not only trying to turn my old G4 into an external hard drive for my photos and music (which apparently is a super-easy thing to do, using a combination of Firewire cord, OSX's Setup Assistant, Disk Target Mode setting and Bonjour IM protocol - we'll see, anyway); and not only playing with Front Row for the first time, and my new groovy remote control; and not only installing Windows XP through the new Boot Camp partitioner; but also starting to play the alternative-reality videogame Second Life seriously for the first time as well, which of course was the whole point of getting the Intel Mini in the first place. So needless to say, all that will be cutting quite profoundly into my overall time soon as well.

And then 4), of course, I've got a growing amount of freelance work I'm starting to do in Chicago as well, and hoping to pick up more and more such work in steadier and steadier amounts. And so there's X amount of my day that needs to be devoted to that kind of work as well, an amount that will be doing nothing but increasing.

And so these four things are starting to lead me to believe that I'm going to need to cut back on this personal journal here, probably for good, because there simply aren't enough hours in the day for me to do both this journal and all those other things. I mean, I've mentioned here before that it takes me roughly two to three hours a day to write one of these entries, when it's written out to full size (2,000 to 3,000 words) and is about something particularly interesting. When I was doing this on my mobile device, it would then take me another hour to post it and get it ready to be viewed; with the home connection now, of course, that's quite less, but still adds to the overall time. And giving this kind of commitment to my personal journal was fine for a long time, as long as writing was fundamentally what I was trying to do professionally as well.

I mean, that's an important thing to remember about this website, is that it's one of the last vestiges left in my life of my pre-2004 lifestyle, when I was a professional artist and trying to write for a living. It made sense back then to devote this many hours a day to writing this personal journal, because keeping an enthusiastic crowd around who liked my writing tended to help all the other projects going on in my life; the tours, the books, the online experiments and the like. In my post-2004 life, though, where I have set aside most of these pursuits to open CCLaP instead, this doesn't make quite as much sense: my main priority now is to convince people to become fans of other people's writing, not my own; plus, a large audience no longer matters to me, when it comes to doing in-house writing and other freelance work.

Once I made this decision in 2004 to switch careers, I've been slowly putting steps into place to shut down that entire old part of my life: I finally said completely goodbye to performance poetry (which I technically first did in 2001), I gave up going on literary tours, I gave up writing full-length books (save travel books, which I just find too much fun to give up). And so I suppose it's time for a change to come to this personal website as well, it too largely being the product of a time I'm no longer living. I mean, the journal won't disappear; I just think it might become more like the other personal blogs of editor-in-chiefs, like Andrew Huff or Nick Denton, where maybe I'm getting around to sticking something up here once a week or so, whenever I have the time away from all my professional duties.

I should make it clear that I'm not expecting this to diminish my online presence; in fact, you could argue that once CCLaP's website is up and live next month, I will be increasing my online activities if anything. I will have an entire center's website to run at that point, after all, and I'm expecting anywhere from 5 to 20 updates a day; plus I'll be maintaining the CCLaP wiki ("The CCLaP Guide to Being a Self-Sustaining Artist"), plus our Ning-based "Chicago Cafe Network" (a new social network just for Chicago visual artists, and the cafes that feature them), plus our Flickr group pool, plus our YouTube group pool, plus our event calendars at MySpace, Upcoming, Craigslist, etc. Fuck, are you starting to see why I might possibly need to cut back at this personal site in the future? Plus of course finally getting all the archives imported here, plus all the final versions of my '90s books published, plus the new hyperfiction project this summer ("Archimedes," more below), which is in actuality going to be a "resume" I can submit to alternative-reality-gaming companies (or ARGs) where I'm trying to get a job right now. Plus getting the latest travel book finally published, plus hopefully picking up more freelance work, plus starting to get serious in Second Life.

It's just that in all these instances, my main point from now on is mostly going to be promoting other people and organizations, not talk about myself. And that's fine; that's what I want, in fact, and is why I decided to become an arts administrator in the first place. Because that's the job, I think, of someone who administers an artistic event or venue; to simply create that blank space for others, then to step back and let them actually fill it. I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to be the rockstar of the evening, in the middle of the limelight all night or whatever; hell, I did it for ten years myself, and can attest that it's a lot of fun, and gets you all this attention and laid all the damn time too, and all kinds of other fringe benefits. But that's not my priority anymore; my priority now is to make more money, and to have a more stable lifestyle, one that can hopefully lead to health insurance and more regular international trips and whatnot. When I first made this a priority, in 2004, I happily agreed to step out of the limelight in order to make it happen, which I've been slowly doing in the year and a half since.

So anyway, that's what's going on with me these days. So if there's a lot bigger of a slowdown soon between journal entries, you're now equipped with the information to know why.

So yeah, plans are still in place to create my newest hyperfiction project, "Archimedes," this summer. The quick backstory, for those who need it:

Since 1997 I have been creating artistic projects within a cutting-edge genre called "hyperfiction;" like those old "Choose Your Own Adventure Books" you read as a kid, but these online, a lot more technologically complex, and definitely for grown-ups. I've only done it all these years as a hobby, knowing that there was no practical way to make money from such endeavors, happy to know that I was merely pushing the envelope and defining new rules for this intriguing genre. But lo and behold, time has caught up with us hyperfiction creators, and there is indeed an entire new job class out there for people with our skills. It's as the puppetmaster, in fact, for an Alternative Reality Game (or ARG), a brand-new type of online entertainment that has gained sudden new credibility and popularity just within the last year (including full-page articles in the New York Times, Wired magazine, etc).

I am an insane fan of ARGs, duh, for the same reason I'm an insane fan of hyperfiction; in fact, I developed a near obsession with one called "The Beast," back in 2001 to promote the film A.I. And last Christmas, in fact, I finally discovered the identity of the puppetmaster behind that one, a brilliant underground science-fiction novelist named Sean Stewart. And it turns out that he belongs to an entire agency that creates ARGs, 42 Entertainment, the same people behind the "i like bees" ARG to promote Sony's "Halo 2." (In fact, rumor has it that they might be behind the ABC show "Lost"'s upcoming ARG, starting this summer right after the final episode airs. But I do not know if that's true or not!) Anyway, so I wrote to Sean, and he wrote back, and he gave me all kinds of useful advice (much of it inadvertent) about how a hyperfiction author can come to the attention of a videogame company.

So I've decided to create a new hyperfiction project this summer, one that deliberately plays like an ARG, except with all the pages hosted at my own website to save on money. There will definitely be all kinds of different looks to different pages, though; like, one running theme is that every character belongs to this one fictional social network, so each of them will have a fake profile in the game that you can access. And these will not only look like typical MySpace pages and be cool that way, but will also be helpful "cheat sheets" to see which other characters this person actually knows, direct links to them, direct links to their journal entries inserted randomly throughout the story, etc. (And this also solves a problem I had with my last hyperfiction project, by the way, of where find public-domain photos to illustrate your characters; the characters in Archimedes will only have cartoon icons describing each person, a supposed free service of this fictional social network they all belong to.)

Anyway, so the site's going to have as many of the bells and whistles of a full ARG that I can get away with, because that's what I figure will impress ARG companies the most; audio files, for example, actually recorded by people around the world in different accents, reading my script as specific characters, supposedly in that section of the world themselves (South Africa, Germany, London, etc). And some pages will look like emails sent back and forth between certain characters, and in some threads you'll learn that it was BCC:ed to a certain character as well, which then changes the entire dynamic of the story. And there will be hidden pages, and information hidden within well-known pages, and information hidden as comments in the source code of certain pages, and all the other sneaky little tricks that will hopefully impress a startup for a new ARG.

I'm titling it "Archimedes," by the way, because of one of the many mathematical illustrations he did in his life; specifically, one showing a series of hexagrams (six-sided figures) meshing with octagons (eight-sided), perfectly and into infinity. And so this is the structure I've used so far to at least graph the beginning of the story: that the project begins at a dinner party being held in Chicago among eight friends, that each of these people have six friends, and that this is the cast of characters in "Archimedes," whose lives intersect in these interesting and sometimes messy ways. Of course, this doesn't mean the full list of 56 characters that one could theoretically get from such a set-up; most of these friends will be common friends of two or more of the dinner guests, for a grand total of maybe 25 characters altogether. 25 will be rough enough; the most I've taken on before has been roughly 12 or 13, for my 1998 project Creamed Corn.

Unlike my previous projects, I want "Archimedes" to have a definite if hazy timeline to the thing; that is, that you're definitely moving from a point A to a point B in time and narrative, not getting much of a chance to hop back in the story except via flashback. And this is quite different from, say, Creamed Corn, where the whole point is to be able to flash backwards and forwards in the storyline from anywhere else in the story. I definitely want "Archimedes" to tell a more straight-ahead story this time, but done through a myriad of characters, situations, locations and emotional threads. Instead of one book with an infinite amount of storylines, think of it as many books written about the same storyline and set of characters, but with this book concentrating on these five or six, and that book concentrating on another five or six, but with three of the characters being in common between the two books. And you can read through it all and then go back to the beginning; or abandon a certain storyline if it loses your interest; or step sideways enough to be in a completely new storyline within the narrative, if you want to take the time.

So since the main work doesn't take place until this summer, my main duties so far have been only to jot down interesting situations and characters for use in the eventual plotline. So I've definitely got this dinner party, for example, which both kicks off the story and keeps getting returned to throughout; and I know at this point that one of the party-goers is a former Olympic silver medalist, who is a sexual swinger now as an adult in her mid-thirties, but is really laid-back about it, which amazes her drunk female friends when they find out about it at the dinner party. And this will hopefully lead to what I'm calling a "node," important for my particular project: they are special topics embedded within the project's grid, freefloating of any particular plot or character grouping, where a whole bunch of disparate characters will end up interacting with the topic. You can think of it really as a literary "router," when it comes to the subject of hyperfiction; a place for your reader to come together with links to a bunch of different story threads, if they've decided that they want to hop off one and join another.

In this case, for example, the node would form when this woman accidentally lets it slip at the party that she's a swinger; this of course starts slowly gaining the attention of all the other drunk slackers at the party, who are at least fascinated by swinging if not having the courage or lifestyle to participate in it themselves. And of course almost all of them have at least one crazy story about a sexual encounter in the past, so this becomes the node: all these different characters sharing their story about crazy sex, as each of them end up getting sucked into this drunken swinger conversation going on in the kitchen. As you can see, the subject of a "node" has to be a general enough one, and put into the right context, so that it can generate tremendous random feedback from a variety of unrelated characters; a saucy talk about sex at a drunken slacker dinner party, for example, is a great one, as all of you who have attended drunken slacker dinner parties can attest. And that way you're able to build a fully three-dimensional "grid" for interacting with your story; not just spokes radiating outward from the center (the various plotlines of the various characters), but horizontal movement between storylines, via these nodes that pull a bunch of them together at once.

So anyway, lots more weirdness like this: part-time lovers exchanging podcasts between Berlin and Cape Town, odd scanned-in puzzles from a mysterious stranger's Moleskine, etc etc. You know, something cool! Something strikingly odd, vast in scope, and that will hopefully make an impression; something to get me a job with one of these damn companies, hopefully.

Anyway, so lots more on this as the summer approaches. Sorry, I know, didn't mean to get you all excited about this; all the boring archives and travel-book stuff comes first. Oh, and for the truly nerdy, you can think of the actual storyline grid as a series of "event" and "transition" rings, concentric and spiraling outwards, each of a different width depending on how important that particular event or transition is to the overall story, with the individual character plots spiking through them as radial spokes, and with nodes within the rings that act like a rubberband around a stack of straws, pulling them all together tightly at one concentrated spot. Er, this will make a lot more sense once I get to actually draw it out as a grid; but like I said, more on that this summer.