Well, greetings, all, and hello from yet another glorious Chicago spring day. It won't be spring here very much longer, though; I'm writing this on Memorial Day weekend, in fact, which means that it will officially be summer by the time I post it. It's a good holiday weekend this year, one that finds me feeling very happy and content, for a number of reasons; because of the warm weather, because things seem to be moving forward right now with all my projects, because I have a barbeque to attend later that I think is going to be a lot of fun, and will let me try out my new cellphone videocamera at something actually interesting for the first time. Perhaps the thing that has me in the best mood this weekend, however, is the realization I made earlier this week - that I am now officially six months away and counting, from being able to pay all my bills just from the companies I myself own and operate.

See, for new readers who don't know, I actually used to pursue a career as a creative writer, for ten years altogether, 1994 to 2004, and didn't do too terribly bad for myself: I self-published three novels and two travel books, won a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, ended up getting a lot of media exposure, went on a lot of tours, generated a lot of fans. The only problem, in fact, was that I could never end up translating those successes into real money - just a couple of thousand dollars, the best year as a I writer I ever had, which of course isn't nearly enough to live off of in the real world. And the older I got, the more I realized that this was never going to change - that I was just too subversive a writer for most mainstream publishing companies, too mainstream for most subversive small presses, interested in too many conflicting things for any marketer to ever be able to get fully behind, and be able to sell me to the public at large.

Now, apparently one of the things that a lot of people didn't realize before about all this, is that in 1994 I actually sat down and wrote out a ten-year plan for myself; nothing specific, nothing detailed, just a vision in very general terms of where I wanted to see my life being by the time 2004 rolled around. And I promised myself back then as well, that when 2004 finally did roll around, I'd sit down and actually examine that first ten-year plan, see where I had succeeded and where I had failed, build a new ten-year plan based on what I learned. Which is exactly what I did in August 2004, a process that took about a month altogether, where I learned this - that I had succeeded at just about everything on that plan, except for my desire to have a more stable lifestyle. I'm very happy with what I artistically accomplished, when all is said and done; just that I was still lacking a way to reliably pay my bills, to be able to have health insurance, to attract the kind of sane, level-headed woman I want in my life, the kind who refuse to go out with self-employed artists, because they're smart enough to know not to go out with self-employed artists.

So, the question became, how do I do this? How do I bring more financial and medical stability to my life, without completely turning my back on all the work I had done for ten years previous? And the answer is fairly obvious, of course - actually own and run an artistic business, instead of being merely the artist featured at these businesses. And so that's what eventually led me to the idea of opening an arts center, which eventually turned into the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (or CCLaP), of which an online form will finally be opening this summer, an early physical form in September. And it was the need of seed money for CCLaP that led to me really pushing my freelance work, to the point where I am now picking up more and more clients, more and more jobs. And it was hearing about the lack of artistic events going on in the alternative reality Second Life that led to me checking that out, which is now also a way I'm going to be making money here in the real world.

This week, in fact, has been the first time I've even sat down and looked at the overall plan and how it's going, since first making the decision back in August 2004; I've just been so fucking busy otherwise, you know, actually doing all the things needed to get me to the point where I am now. This is the frustration, of course, about completely changing careers in your late thirties or older; that you are smart and experienced enough now to want results to happen fast, but are still technically a newcomer to that industry, and must respect the steps taken there that everyone else has gone through too. In my own life, for example, I wasn't able to even start working on my own plan for starting up a business, until I had spent six months first merely giving myself the basic education that all business-owners need; all the practical lessons, for example, which a typical undergraduate might know, after getting an AA in business management. And that was extremely frustrating to me, as anyone who knows me can attest; but I needed that time and education, to teach myself about things like taxes, and properly estimating a budget for a company that doesn't yet exist, about "connectors" and search-engine optimization, leadership qualities and marketing theories.

And that's why this weekend is kind of exciting to me, I guess, because it's the first time in 18 months that a light has officially appeared at the end of the tunnel; where I can actually point to a specific date, and reasonably expect that I will be making all my money from self-employment by then. And that date is January 2007, in fact, which is technically seven months from now, but I'm calling six because a half-year sounds nicer. And the secret for me, it's turned out, is to simply break down the overall plan into a series of steps, each of which can be implemented at different times, based on the resources I have at the moment. So, for example, I'm still a good four or five steps away from the final piece of the plan, the one that will end up generating the vast majority of my yearly revenue; but I'm merely a week away from the first step, which I really can open right now with the resources I have,

Next week, to be precise, is when CCLaP's official website finally opens, at which point we become a public, interactive organization for the first time; this is when Nikki Patin, CCLaP's Director of Live Events, also starts jumping into the fray, when we start featuring artists from around the world, when we start officially accepting membership applications for the first time. I'm going to be able to do the whole thing, in fact, through simple little Paypal; for those who don't know, Paypal has recently released just a whole buttload of new tools and scripts for the small-business owner, that lets you use your Paypal account to create a more traditional eCommerce-style store and shopping-cart system at your site. So that'll let me sell memberships right at the site itself, without the person having to be a member of Paypal themselves, able to simply purchase with a credit card just like they would anywhere else. And I've already heard from a good ten people or so now, who have already promised to become paying members (at $50 a year) as soon as they're able; so if that's to be trusted, hopefully by Independence Day I will have a nice little seed bank of around $500 or so, for the arts center to work with, or maybe even more if I luck out.

What I'll be able to do with this, then, is to purchase some of the first equipment that CCLaP will eventually need to own; a speaker/amp/mixer combo, for example, which I'll then be able to combine with a whole pile of used microphones, mic stands and cords, being donated by a fan of the center, who used to own a live-music venue that is now closed. And then at the same time, this will also let me do two online things that I need for the next step of the plan: to become a Premium member of Second Life ($80 a year, when paid in advance); and also to purchase a legal copy of Nicecast, a program for Macs that lets you stream audio from your computer onto the internet. (I have the demo version right now, which works great, but which only lets you stream for 15 minutes before adding loud white noise to your signal.)

At this point, then, which I'm hoping for now will be around Independence Day (July 4th), the next step of the plan goes into place; where I start actually producing live artistic events within Second Life, despite CCLaP not yet being officially open. Because, see, one of the things I've been realizing about that place, the longer I'm there, is that it's not just full events from real life (RL) that I could port in; that I could actually produce exclusive in-game events as well, taking place entirely within that alternate universe, featuring only participants who are fellow players. For example, I've explained now how one can bring a live audio feed into a piece of land there, which is technically nothing more than one of these streaming "internet radio stations" that so many people listen to through iTunes anyway; but did you know that a Skype voice call can be sent to one of these streaming audio feeds as well? It can; which means that if you want to present a lecture in Second Life, or do a phone interview with someone famous, literally all you need are copies of SL, Skype and Nicecast running on your home computer. And did you know that Skype also allows for incredibly sophisticated conference calling, including a maximum of 100 people on one conversation, and with the call-starter having the ability to choose which of these people's mics are live? They do; which means you could literally be hosting poetry slams within SL, open mics, roundtable panel discussions, using nothing more than tech that already exists, most of which is completely free to download and use.

There's only one hitch, of course, which is that you have to rent bandwidth at a streaming server as well; exactly like renting space on a server for a blog, except this time with more sophisticated multimedia tech in place, roughly $300 a year for the kind of stuff I want to be doing. So thank God, then, that I've ended up becoming friends with this guy named Joseph in SL, who already owns this extremely cool slacker-nerd club called the Big Horn Lodge. And he already has a streaming server, which I can connect to here in Chicago simply by pointing my Nicecast software to its URL; and he's all into this idea of producing in-game artistic events, and has graciously invited me to do it at his club if I want, using his existing stream server. And so that's exactly what I'll be doing, starting like I said hopefully around Independence Day; I'm going to be starting what I think will be Second Life's first-ever weekly poetry slam, with competitors from around the world actually performing their pieces out loud, for an audience scattered around the world, using nothing but an internet phone line.

And this of course won't make me any money directly; but boy, it will certainly get me known in the grid as one of those people who Actually Knows What They're Doing. Because that's another thing you learn quickly about SL; that this universe is dotted with a tiny amount of people who Actually Know What They're Doing, who have been doing this stuff in RL for years already; surrounded by a huge pile of those who are Good At Talking A Big Game, 19-year-old dreamers who have a good idea, but lack any kind of experience or maturity to pull that idea off. When all is said and done, in fact, Second Life works remarkably like any other big city when it comes to this subject; that no matter how large it seems at first, no matter how difficult to penetrate, the list of legitimate movers and shakers there is in actuality quite small, and is surprisingly easy to both locate and get yourself involved with. And getting my weekly poetry slam up and running would do this for me as well; make me a mover and shaker, that is, get me written up in all the SL publications, and get people believing more in the eventual plans I have there.

And then at the same time, I'm starting up something completely new as well, something I had never even considered doing in my life until recently; I'm starting a live-music series in Chicago! Well, well, how about that? It's something completely away and unrelated from CCLaP, of course, as to not cause any conflict with our artistic mission; it is, in fact, just like the project above, something designed solely for a virtual audience at Second Life. See, for those who don't know, there are actually a whole bunch of live-music concerts that now take place in the grid there; like I said, all you need is a mic, a home computer, and a copy of either Nicecast for Mac or Winamp for Windows. (There are several other choices for both platforms, by the way; these are just the two most popular.) What a lot of musicians have taken to doing, then, is simply turning their nightly rehearsal in their apartment into a public concert, sending the signal into a specific piece of land there at SL, for an audience from around the world to gather and listen to at the same time. I've attended a bunch of these, in fact, and can attest to just how much fucking fun they are; imagine a real club, simply this one filled with cartoon avatars instead of flesh-and-blood humans, but still full of people talking and flirting, enjoying the music, "applauding" at the ends of songs and drunkenly shouting out requests. And now imagine the musician reading all these things on their computer screen at their end, responding to them in the mic out loud, so that you actually hear the response on your own computer's speakers on your end. Yeah, it's crazy! And it's really cool and a lot of fun, definitely one of the highlights of the entire SL experience.

Only one problem, in fact; that that musician is still fundamentally alone in an apartment in RL, and it just sounds lonely to hear each song end in silence and a little sigh from the artist in question. So that's why I've decided to open up what I'm calling a "microclub" in Chicago, which is basically a fancy word for my apartment, but all cleaned up and lit entirely with candles for an evening. And just like these other concerts, I too will be inviting a series of musicians to my place once a week, to do a little rehearsal-concert for a worldwide virtual audience; but in my case, we'll also be getting five to ten of the musician's friends to come over too, and to bring liquor. And so that way, the audience in SL is getting an even more freakishly realistic experience than they were before; not just a chance to interact, but to even hear applause at the end of each song, the sounds of bottles clinking, of cigarettes being lit, of drunken audience members talking in the background. And mind you, this is still with the virtual audience there as well, able to interact with each other in the same way, hopefully leading to a mesh between Second Life and real life that will really get people excited.

And the beautiful thing about living in Chicago is that it's going to be super easy to find musicians; I figure a simple notice sent to Craigslist, Chicagoist, Gapers Block, Pitchfork and the Onion should be more than enough to get a list of 15, 20 musicians ready to volunteer. And make no mistake, the musicians do actually have a chance to make money at these things; there'll be a tip jar right on the virtual stage, for example, that audience members can click on with their mouse to donate currency, as well as a direct link to the musician's website and iTunes album floating above their head the entire time. So in theory, an audience member can click on that and go straight over to the iTunes page that moment, purchase the album in the immediacy of the live show, just like rushing to a merchandise booth at a RL concert; and if, say, 20 people did this at a show, plus a number of them donated tips, it would not be unheard of for a musician to make an extra $300 in revenue just from that concert alone. Or, you know, maybe they'll make nothing; and just have this surreal, hopefully pleasurable experience instead, one that will get them notice and press from the mainstream media, as I'm expecting to happen as word starts spreading about this concert series. You know, just an evening of hanging around an apartment with their friends like normal, getting drunk and playing songs for them, but with this odd and charming little immersive cartoon thing added to it all, plus the chance to make real money. That's hopefully the way people will see it, which is why it will hopefully be no problem finding musicians to volunteer.

Now, these will be held at Big Horn Lodge as well; no extra cost to me, no extra cost to Joseph, so therefore no admission fees for the audience either, but instead completely free. You're probably starting to piece together, in fact, how I'm looking at these artistic events in SL overall; that they are not necessarily things to make money from directly themselves, but rather to generate interest in other, more traditional money-making ventures. And so that's why I don't feel much of a pressure to own my own club for doing these events, or for charging an admission fee; I mean, if Joseph's willing to host them for free, and I'm willing to do them for free, then why not? Why not just all of us simply have some fun at them, rather than worrying from the start how to generate an additional revenue stream as well, and especially while working out all the tech kinks involved (of which I'm expecting many)? They're publicity stunts, basically, press events, cool weird things that are designed specifically to get the media to do stories about them. Every half-page article we can get written about us, after all, means one less half-page ad we have to pay for (and a much more effective ad at that).

So then in September comes another big date, and the start of the third stage; the official opening of CCLaP as a physical organization as well, on top of an online one, although in a form still different than the final one I'm envisioning. (That is, I eventually hope to own my own permanent physical space, including room for galleries and a professional performance venue; for now, though, we are a "homeless" center, with existing venues around the city hosting our various events, using our website for keeping the staff, volunteers, artists and audience in communication with each other.) And then this is the point where I finally start making some more money; $20 an event, that is, whenever we make enough at that event to cover my pay, with us hopefully producing somewhere between six and ten events a month. So on a very good month, for example, that'd be $200 for me; which, yeah, isn't very much money, because the entire center is operating on a shoestring budget ($6,000 for the entire year) and there just isn't much room right now for employee pay, unfortunately. But then you combine that with all the non-center freelance I'm doing right now, which right now adds up to about $300 a month but will hopefully be more like $500 by then; and that's suddenly $700 a month, enough to cover my rent and most of my groceries, the two biggest bills I have in my life, since I don't own a car or house or kids or any of that other crap. And so if you add that up, that's what, about $8,400 a year I would make with those projects, under a very good scenario, probably more like $6,000 to $7,000 that I can count on.

And so this is how things will crank along throughout the fall and into the winter, with us hopefully building a slowly-enlarging audience for the center, punctuated hopefully by a number of specific events that flare up suddenly into mainstream consciousness. But then like I said, in January comes the final stage of this entire plan: of when I both start publishing paper books through CCLaP, at which point I start earning extra money yet again, and also when I finally start up my sex club in Second Life, which is where I'm expecting to finally start making some serious money. When all is said and done, in fact, I'm expecting these two things to add another $15,000 or so a year in revenue to my life, meaning that the various projects I'll be doing will hopefully be resulting in a yearly total income for me of $21,000 to $24,000. And that is just about exactly what I make in Chicago as an administrative assistant as well, which is what I'd be doing if I weren't running all these little businesses, so a number like that would be perfectly fine with me, if I could manage to achieve it.

Oh, but, there's an entire other entry's worth of writing involved, to explain how I'm expecting to make $15,000 a year from something as silly as a virtual sex club for cartoon characters; it's an outrageous-sounding amount, I admit, and takes quite a bit of explaining to show how I'm planning on doing it. So why don't we just save that for tomorrow, shall we? All of this from today is enough for you to chew on for now. Oh, but I will say this; that if people want to start thinking about this beforehand, imagine my sex club not competing with other Second Life businesses, but rather real-life naughty-dating services like Nerve Personals and AdultFriendFinder.com. That is, imagine us offering the same kinds of things -- a chance for people to fill out detailed profiles, post pornographic photos, have private IMs with other members, use a sophisticated search engine to find specific matches, even meet up physically with others once a year in Chicago -- but simply for those who play Second Life, and who are looking for exceptional sexual partners both in and out of the game. And it's not unusual for heavy users of these other services to spend $20, $30 a month on them; so in this context, mine is actually going to be a bargain, at merely $10 a month. And if I can get 150 people to want to pay this kind of money for this, out of the 250,000 people who now play Second Life, that will generate my $15,000. But like I said, lots more tomorrow on how I'm exactly going to convince people to spend $100 a year on this in the first place.

Well, okay, and one more thought before I go today...

You know I've got this new cellphone, right? A Palm Treo 650, in fact, a step up from the 600 I've had for the last two years, that works pretty much the same but with a bunch of new built-in features. One of them, for example, is a full-motion videocamera, which I've been using to shoot little movies around Chicago the last week, which I've been posting over at my YouTube account. (There are two new videos there, in fact, since my last posting; you can go check them out now, or wait until tomorrow for me to directly link to them here.) Anyway, another thing I now have is a full-featured MP3 player; which when you combine with my headphone adapter and expansion card, means that I can now carry around 10 CDs worth of music with me wherever I go, about the same as when I carry a wallet full of actual CDs around with me. And that's very cool, needless to say, plus takes up almost no battery juice on my device at all (since video display isn't involved), which means that I've been recently listening to a lot of music again.

I was just listening to an '80s band called Wall of Voodoo a little bit ago, in fact, which reminded me of my old college friend Kurt Kaiser, who's now a retail literary executive in the Pacific Northwest, and the father of something like 22 children now with his poor exhausted wife. See, my friends and I were always getting Wall of Voodoo mixed up back then with this other band called Aztec Camera, and Kurt was always having to correct us, because Kurt's actually the brother-in-law of the keyboardist of Aztec Camera (or at least was back in the mid-'80s, when these conversations would take place). And so that was always super-duper cool, of course, because whenever the band would come into town on tour, they'd hang out with Kurt and me and all our friends, and go to parties and get drunk with us, and all the rest of the things that made us feel all cool and hipster-special.

And then of course I can't think of Kurt and Aztec Camera without also thinking of another '80s band called The Wolfgang Press, who by all rights should be the ones being celebrated at these cheesy retro events at danceclubs, instead of the endless Kajagoogoo and Thompson Twins and all the other shit my friends and I couldn't stand in the first place. See, The Wolfgang Press was a British band, right, except they had this real famous song on college radio called "Kansas," which seemed to be about some serial killer in a car, driving his way to Kansas to murder someone famous. And my friend Kurt always swore that the song was actually about the Kennedy assassination, that it was supposed to be from the viewpoint of Lee Harvey Oswald, driving his way to that fateful day in the '60s. Except the problem, of course, is that Kennedy was killed in Dallas, not Kansas, which Kurt always claimed was a mistake on the part of the band's British lead singer; and so that's why they had this famous creepy dance song about a serial killer driving out to the middle of nowhere to assassinate someone famous.

Anyway, I don't have even the slightest clue if that story is true, but I can never think about the band without thinking of Kurt, and of the passion which he used to tell that story. And so that's why whenever I hear Wall of Voodoo, I always think of both Aztec Camera and Wolfgang Press as well, and of getting high in dorm rooms and swapping strange indie-rock conspiracy theories, with a bunch of fellow dorky beret-wearing stoned weirdos. Kurt, if you're out there still reading, drop me a line sometime!