I probably mentioned this a couple of months back ... but I'm tyring to do "e-books" of my old poetry editions. I'm going to have a section with them up over on my Ning site with a PayPal "tip button" asking for donations, but I figured I'd just let my L.J. readers have at 'em without the begging. There was a version that I had up, but it was HUGE because it was pulled together via the .jpgs of the scans of the book. This is considerably smaller (although still 11mb) as I processed the scans through an OCR program and then put together "a book" in Scribus (the open-source version of MSPublisher, which I lost with everything else in the MS Office suite when my previously-legitimate copy's registration code went bad for some reason). I just wish I could figure a way to fix the strange thing that both my print-to-pdf programs do with Arial lower-case L's and upper-case I's (they render like they're bolded)!This is, I'm shocked to figure, my most recent collection ... Some Semblance of Decay which came out in 1996. As I've noted in here previously, I stopped writing in order to break the "neuro-linguistic feedback loop" that I'd fallen into. The place "where I wrote from" was deep inside an emotional mire which I would frame in words, crystallize into a poem, and then have those very same very dark states get pumped back in through typing it, reading it, doing voice recordings of it, etc. The only way to get out of that was to just stop (the folks who chastise me for being moody and negative these days have no idea what a twinkling ray of sunshine I am now compared to the way I'd been most of my life).
Now, "back in the day" I would write 250 poems a year (averaging 21 poems a month), so every two years I'd have 500 poems to work with, and I'd plow through them and pick out "the best" and eventually work that down to 49 poems (a 52-page chapbook, with a title page, copyright page, 49 pages of poems, and one page of commentary), which represented the most substantial bits of that time, this one the best 10% of 1994 and 1995.
I was sad to see that somehow my old poem site disappeared last month ... it was part of our AT&T package, so it should still be there, but I'm guessing there must have been some sort of deal where AT&T may have swapped that stuff out to Geocities, because the timing on it was very close to when the plug was pulled on that. I know they'd changed the system around there, as when I had been actively working on the site, it had been accessible via FTP, but when I got back into it (hoping to be able to just download everything I had in there) a few months ago, it was one of those "templates for idiots" sites with no way to access the file structure. I need to dig through old machines here to see if I can rescue the original files again (the older machines don't have USB ports, so I had to do file transfers via floppies being walked between machines, only to find that the flash drive that I ended up transferring everything over to quit working, suddenly appearing as totally blank!).
I have a HUGE backlog of poems that I would really like to get onto modern media ... over 2,500 poems left from the 80's and 90's, most of which are on 3.5" floppies and in PFS:Write format (I found that if I open these with a particular text editor I can get to the text minus the coding, but it is a long process of open-highlight-cut/open-paste-save over and over and over and over and over and over and over again), but that's something I don't think I have the time for at the moment (I may need eventually to invest in a scanner with a sheet feeder and just scan from the hard-copy files).
Anyway, click on the cover to download the new e-book ... it's way dark, but I still think most of the writing rocks.