make a zine

I found one at a boot fair this morning for the princely sum of one of the English pounds. OK, that’s punk enough for me.

I’ve actually come to the conclusion that I have enough material, potentially, for three different zines.

One full of general geeky my-dysfunctional-life-by-an-ageing-Gen-Xer kind of stuff.

One full of gross-but-cool medical stuff.

And one full of stuff on art and spirituality, which ties in nicely with my other goal of that nature…and allows me to go nuts with my own artwork. And which will also, hopefully, at some stage tie in with the website.

So, bits and pieces accumulating for each of those, and it’s just a matter of which one has the requisite number of bits first…

It was a great learning exercise. I was certainly reminded of my strengths and weaknesses while zine making last weekend. I used to be such a perfectionist, but now I’m much more relaxed now. The perfectionist inside me reappeared, kept wanting to alter things, change my mind, make things better. All for an A3 page’s worth of printing! A 2 colour print process was used, which was also great for learning. I think I’ll try at least a couple more, as I can only keep learning as I keep going :) For me at the moment, the more creative outlets the better!

What I have so far: an inside-cover collage explaining what it’s about, a weird collagey/cartoon thing about existential thoughts on having a cold, a fact-based article on Pap smears (told you!), a CD review, and the beginnings of a rant on whether or not women really hate each other.

There’s also a 4-page cartoon story (on yellow legal paper) about depression, recovery and the power of cheap music, which is such a dorky, sad teenage thing that nobody in their right mind would publish it. Meaning, it’s perfect zine material. I scanned this and printed it on the good cartridge paper as an experiment, and it seems to work – I can print both sides without it bleeding through. This might work for the whole thing, and I want to go color, but hubby warned me to check the cost. I have no idea what color copying costs these days (swallows hard), but hey, who expects to make any money on these things?..

Two things happened this week.

First, I actually got my finger out and jotted down some ideas, and I have some cool stuff already…some of my own cartoons, some ideas for collagey type things which I have to go find appropriate images for.

Is there a theme? Basically about life here at Dork Towers: philosophy, rants, obsessions, cat Zen observations, cool music as and when I find it, things that may or may not be poetry, probably a fair amount of near-TMI (but fascinating and necessary) medical stuff, and, I have been promised, my husband’s photographs. (He does Lomography, so this should be fun.)

Also, I was out this weekend bemoaning the fact that I have trouble finding zines where I live…then I went to a craft/rummage sale at an arts center, and what should I pick up but not one but THREE zines. One about local music and stuff, one about birds and one about taxidermy. All of them reassuringly weird and scarily well put together. The fact that stuff like this is going on in the area is good to know about.

I’m crossing out write a book in place of this one. Putting together a zine is much more doable than getting a book published. Plus, I will have to do everything from writing to binding and distributing.

I’ve joined a few zine groups to help me start. Also, I have a few zines coming in the mail I found through Etsy. Checking out what people are doing and how they do it would be a pretty good benchmark for a process, though not limiting.

There are several ideas floating in my head. I’ll be plotting soon!

have chosen some images – COOL CLIP ART royalty free – focus on adult student/teacher dynamics
started indesign work – need nori’s help on this
next job – type up the script and layout images
add cutups? for back and front cover??
add a WORDLE of the script – could be interesting (in colour)
centrefold? cutup text piece?

So I figure…I write, I draw (ish), I have this odd mind that comes up on occasion with stuff which, if not actually cool, might be of interest to other odd minds over cookies at 3am. The chances of any publisher thinking that kind of thing from me is of huge monetary value are slim to ‘what shape is a donut?’...so I figure, why not cut out the middleman and just write stuff and get it out there?

A couple of years back, at the UW bookstore in Seattle, I saw what looked like a very cool book called ‘Whatcha Mean, What’s A Zine?’ by Esther Watson and Mark Todd. Intrigued, I wrote down the title and promptly forgot about it. Last year I found it and put it on my Christmas wish list, and lo and behold, look what Santa brung.

Now, what I need to do is actually get my head round doing some of the things suggested in it. I thought of just stapling together a random bunch of ‘stuff’ from various places round the house (because I have that kind of house where a random piece of paper is more likely to be an evil cartoon or a plan for world domination than a common or garden grocery list). But that’s maybe a little too random.

I shall give it some thought…and maybe get one of those wacky huge staplers while I’m thinking about it.

Sat 24th may is the deadline – Zine Kook has invited me to be on her MCA Zine stall with Rebecca!!! YAY! can’t wait. A lot of material that needs to get out there. Read over manuscript for “I require your full attention”. happy with the title.

I get bored myself when zines are only text-based – esp if the text is unimaginative and there’s no consideration for layout/typography/design etc) so I’m wondering how to spice this one up a bit. There are 2 images – one of the fake me and a fake one of him

concerns – privacy (anonymity is secure)
Motivation?
inititally the motivation was a kind of test – and a turn on

Fantasy… what can I say about it?

take responsibility if you are gonna put it out there – it’s so important …

We started our own zine written entirely by our readers. This ended up being a full colour tabloid circulating 35000 copies monthly! Check out www.ezymedia.com

I’m working on my third issue of cupcake revolutions!

http://etsy.inkigirl.com