Mike Daisey

I haven't updated the site due to my lovely experience of Finishing My First Book, which feels rather like the passing of a gallstone, except the passing takes three months and the gallstone is actually a 250 page manuscript.

Amazingly it has entirely quenched all of the romantic notions I had of the writing process--I really believed that it was going to be a romantic chance for my deep, poetic soul to blossom, which I never would have admitted to anyone. Now that it is finally over I can say with surety that it was *not* that, and in fact it was better than that...it was taxing, trying and demanding to be confronted with the scale of a book, to rise to a higher level of expectation than I've ever been given before. Much like liquor and unprotected sex I predict that it is a dangerous addiction that I will be drawn to for the rest of my life, and

I've been looking over the site as I finally return to it, blowing off the cobwebs and making sense of what we have here, and I think I'll be running things a bit differently. Look forward to more frequent updates to this page, with more askew comments, observations and deductions.

Overall there will probably be less Amazon.com on a day-to-day basis. I've started work on two new shows, and the time has come to let the other areas of my life back in. About time, I would say: I personally get so sick of Amazon.com some days that I can't even see straight. Once you've worked there, lived there, survived it, discussed it, made guerrilla films, done a show on it, run the show for six months, had 400+ interviews, national exposure, and then written a full length book it is covered. The horse's ghost has come back from the dead to beg me stop beating it. I can take a hint. It's ironic: I left Amazon to change my life, and that certainly happened, but in many ways by acting as a surrogate for thousands of others I feel sometimes like I stood still, basking and bathing in the same period of my life again and again.

At the same time know that the show and the book have been polished and refined through this process to a point I couldn't have even conceived of a year ago. They're damn good, and it's a real pleasure to know material so well that it's in your bones. And even if *I* get tired of the subjects once in a while, that doesn't mean that the stories have stopped or even grown cold...it just means that I shouldn't try writing or performing a follow-up derivative:

7 MORE DOG YEARS! or
21 DOG YEARS TWO: DOGGY STYLE! or
MORE FUCKING AMAZON STORIES

as my sell-out follow-up book or show or graphic novel. 21 DOG YEARS will be the endpoint of my dot-com commentaries, especially as I don't plan on working at another Internet bookseller again. Instead I want to work on new material, remount older stories I've told, like the ones I've been workshopping at Galapagos, a hip Brooklyn arts space and bar that I'll tell you about another time.

So this will act as less a PR voice and instead an open journal, with more frequent updates that I don't slave over but rather offer up hot, so that they can percolate to people I know and don't know. With the show and the book undergoing so much polishing and perfecting there needs to be more messiness and immediacy, since stories are by their nature both of these things. In honor of that this post will not be spellchecked: man, I am a goddamn daredevil, aren't I?

md