Well, all right, almost two weeks since I updated this personal journal; so I thought I'd spend a little time this afternoon getting down all the small stories that are going on with me these days. And here I guess is the news that's most pleasing to me these days; that the re-editing and re-publishing of all my old work, a grand project I officially started on New Year's Day, is going faster and more easily than anticipated, which I'm most grateful for. For those who don't know, see (and I'll try to make this short, for those who do), as a photographer in the 1980s/90s and a writer in the '90s/00s, I ended up self-publishing over 50 different books in one form or another, containing a rough count of a million and a half words and maybe 600 photos. Whether you think any of it is good or not (a matter for debate, in some eyes), it's hard to deny that that's a lot of crap to crank out in a roughly 15-year period, and that not nearly as good a job was done with the manuscripts and layouts for each as could've been done, or really should've been done.

I retired from professional creative output in 2004, in order to learn business administration and try to open an arts center instead; and that finally put a finite number on this previously ever-growing monster of an oeuvre, and finally gave me a chance to dream of a day when a "definitive" (i.e. not shitty) version of each of these books would finally exist. And I could finally be done with the damn thing, and just park those books at my site for good and let people download to their heart's content. So back in 2004 I started the process, by spending maybe a year doing a close edit of all my old performance work, a grand total of 400 pieces that I each performed publicly at an open mic at least once. And that was good, but exhausted me, and I ended up putting off the entire project for a year because I didn't even want to look at it.

So now it's 2007, and I've decided to put it all into high gear again, and see if I can't have definitive versions of all 50 books finally put together and ready for public download by the time the holidays roll around. And I'm starting with the performance pieces, just because I have to start with something, which I'm now putting out as an 18-book series called Complete Performance Work 1996-2004. And see, since I want these redesigns to be the last time I have to fuck with this old creative work of mine for a long time, I'm having to spend the time and effort right now to make sure that's true: I'm publishing nine versions of each title, believe it or not, just so that they'll all exist and I won't have to go back and keep tackling them. And so that just adds an insane amount of time needed to get each title of the 50-book project ready; not only a couple of hours in Adobe InDesign, getting the various PDF versions ready, but also some time in Microsoft Word and DropBook to make the PDB for Palm, and some time in my web browser adding HTML versions to this blog's database (for discovery by search engines, del.icio.us links and the like), not to mention some time in Cyberduck actually FTPing all this crap to the server itself.

Anyway, so it makes me happy that six of the books are done now, just a month into the process; that's as many as I wanted done by now, but frankly thought I was going to disappoint myself. The six books which are ready, by the way (shown and linked to above) are the ones making up the "Chicago Stories" series, or all the pieces I wrote for open mics back then that weren't part of a themed group. This is where 95 percent of the audience favorites come from, just crazy pieces where I screamed and cursed up a storm and talked about my penis maniacally for three minutes. The pieces themselves are not that different from previous versions of the books, simply that more of them now exist: what's new is that I wrote a 15,000-word essay to complement the re-edited material, explaining year by year what was going on in both my own life and in the poetry community in general to lead me to write those particular pieces; and a new 10,000-word essay, explaining the specific origins and backstories behind the majority of the pieces found in the series.

So next, then, are the relatively easy titles from the CPW series, which are the themed books I wrote over the years; 'relatively easy' I say because in general they're much slimmer books than the 'Chicago Stories' ones, and should take much less time to lay out. Then, the republishing of the three previous 'best-of' compilations, and the layout of a new fourth one; one I'm calling "Personal Favorites," which clashes with the existing "Audience Favorites" in sometimes intriguing ways, and again will contain a new introduction explaining why that's so. Then the omnibus version -- the 900-page one, that is, containing all the books in chronological order, that a person can download and print all at once if they're really that big a stalker. And then, ugh, time to hit one of the bigger books of my old catalog after that, all of which still need re-editing as well as a new layout; believe it or not, of those 50 books I've self-published over the years, at least nine of them have manuscripts of at least 30,000 words, all of which are going to just take a tremendous amount of time to re-edit and publish. You see why I'm pushing this stuff so hard right now, while I still have the motivation to do so?

Now, long-time readers know that I sorta believe in a sorta secular version of karma; or let's say that I definitely believe in the long tail, the 'wisdom of crowds,' the power of linking and of word of mouth, all of which are pretty much examples of secular karma. So for me, part of trying to get this gigantanormous project done this year is for legitimate professional reasons...and when I say 'gigantenormous,' by the way, I mean this includes not only the 50 old books re-edited and published, but also the first five years of this journal's archives, which is going to add yet another million words to my online material, as well as hundreds more photos, dozens of audio files, a handful of videos and even more, all of it browsable and searchable here at my main website's archives (i.e. The Jason Pettus Online Repository of Life Experiences™). I know that once these two million words and hundreds of media files are online, searchable and linkable, that lots of new random people will stumble across this work for one reason or another, and lots of cool new random things will happen because of it. I also know that my "authority in my industry" (to borrow a marketing term) will rise in the eyes of many, once all this material is finally online, and that this will help with my arts center down the road and when I get it up and cranking to full-time speed. Granted, it's a different thing than if any of this could directly generate revenue on its own; but it all helps in the grand scheme of things, believe me, I've been online long enough to know for a fact that this is true.

But I also admit, finishing off each of these books is like checking a little mark off my past, getting done with yet one more outstanding project so that it doesn't have to be screwed with again for a long, long time. Back in 2004 when I first switched careers, I think there were some people who had a hard time believing that I was sincere; now that it's two and a half years later and I'm still pursuing it, I do hope everyone now believes me when I say that I want to put my time as a creative writer mostly behind me, except for occasional projects done just for fun and in my spare time. Part of getting to that point for me is to finally have a "finished" version of all my old work available, something I'll be able to firmly park in that "/ebooks" folder and let slowly gather downloads over the years. It's a nice thing from a personal standpoint to have, especially when mainstream success eluded you like it did with me back then; it's nice to have a centralized, edited, professionally published body of work available, something you can point to and say, "Yeah, okay, there, that's what I did with ten years of my life, back in the '90s and 'aughts." I make no claim that any of it is great literature, although I do think there are some nice little gems scattered here and there; from a personal standpoint, though, it's very satisfying to start finally compiling a "finished" body of work, a physical object that actually shows where all my effort back then went.

Anyway, so that's that for now; and here's hoping that the republishing efforts keep going as smoothly as they have been.

All right, blah, this has taken me longer than I expected to write, so I'm going to try to wrap up. But here, before I go, some other short news...

--I seem to be gathering a growing audience over there, so I guess I should officially mention that I actually do another confessional personal journal besides this one, called I Am A Camera since each entry there is accompanied by a shot from my cellphone camera, posted in real time wherever I am through the excellent Palm client VOX provides for free to their users. Thanks, VOX! Man, I wish every online service made a Palm client that was as powerful and easy to use as yours; it's so simple to do for a mobile device, too, and I just don't understand why more online services don't provide such a thing. Anyway, before you bop over there, please realize that it is a more personal journal than even this one is, with short entries logged there in all kinds of intimate situations at all times of the day and night, containing sometimes very personal thoughts.

I'm maintaining enough online projects now that I have different types of audience members, who are interested in very different things -- those who like the smartass cynicism here at the personal site, or more "professional" journalism (cough, cough) at my Second Life blog, or the photo-heavy stuff I do at Flickr -- and I know that not all these people want to check out my intimate thoughts on personal subjects in the middle of the night accompanied by cellphone photos, which is why I make the warning before you go that that's what it is over there. For what it's worth, based on who keeps signing me up as a "friend" over there, it's mostly attractive liberal-arts undergrads with very active social lives who most want to check out my intimate thoughts on personal subjects in the middle of the night accompanied by cellphone photos. But you could've guessed that.

--My recent "mesh" event, by the way, was a big success; for those who don't know, this was a night last week where I hosted a party in my apartment in Chicago and one in Second Life at the same time, hooked together via text chat, streaming audio and Skype. You can read a full report here, and see lots of photos from both sides of the event here. I'm doing another one soon; let me know if you'd like to be involved on either side of things!

--Oh, and there's other stuff I could tell you about too; but I'm becoming so aware now of how long this entry has taken me, and how much more I still want to try to get done today, so I guess maybe I'll just leave it at this for now. I've got lots of first-step behind-the-scenes stuff going on right now too, by the way; as this winter and spring progresses, I hope to have a steady stream of new announcements and projects to mention here, some of which are meant for consumption and some for your contribution. Until then, here's hoping the rest of us God-fearing Americans avoid the horrific fate recently unleashed on Boston, the giant slaughtering bird-flipping robots that terrorized that populace and ultimately killed millions. A curse on you, Evil Lord Mingus, safe in your secret jungle lair off the coast of Bornia! One day the League of Righteousness shall put an end to your nefarious schemes to take over the Atlantic Seaboard! Excelsior to all you brave Freedom Fighters across Beantown Proper! Excelsior!!!