My zine is done. I did my traditional thing for zine good luck, kiting a check, and printed everything last night. I thought it would only take a few minutes, and I went before eating supper. I wanted to wait there until they were done, and I spent over an hour in Office Depot, looking at the computer stuff over and over. They have some nice furniture that would never fit in my apartment there, and I found some crappy computer books, but otherwise it was a long wait.
By the time I got dinner, talked to some people, etc. it was about 10:30 and the folding and stapling operation only yielded about 50 zines before I couldn’t see straight. I’m hoping to finish tonight.
Today’s disaster was trying to find a post office – they are well-hid in Seattle, and the USPS web site lists addresses of buildings that were tore down in the 1900’s or postal jeep repair facilities. I spent all of my lunch hour trying to find one, no luck. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get there. It’s not as if I need a couple of dollars worth of 32 cent stamps – I need some pretty esoteric stuff – 23 cent coils, panes of 55 cent stamps, priority mail envelopes, etc.
After the dust settled last night, I sat in bed with the first issue I assembled, and read through it. I like the stuff, and it’s satisfying to see it in a booklet format. Maybe in a few months, after I’ve forgotten everything about it, the thing will look better. I’ve read through the whole thing 27 times in the last week, so it’s still pretty burned into my head.
Now I’m suffering from some strange post-partum-ish depression with this zine release. I like the zine, but I don’t know of that many people who will read it. I liked it back in the death metal days when I knew I could sell as many zines as I printed, and I had plenty of other people to trade ads, tapes, zines, and readers with. I’m not sure this zine will live another issue, partly because of this, and partly because of money. It would cost me almost $1000 a year to just give away a quarterly zine like this, and I could be doing cooler things with $1000. Hence, the feelings of unease.
I was reading some of the diary criticism stuff on the web – I can’t believe people take themselves that seriously. I write this online diary as a small side project, a way to tell my news to the people who follow it and a way to later go back and search for things or use the electronic records for nostalgia or whatever. There are people who must spend all of their time writing these great academic philisophical tracts about everything, and doing intricate html with imagemaps, high graphics, and everything else. Here’s some insight into what it takes for me to create this page: I hit Control-X Control-J, and then if it is a new page, I hit Control-C Control-T. Then I type the text, save it with a Control-X Control-S, and log out. It is indexed automatically. If I “had” to do anymore, I wouldn’t keep this journal – I’d stick to paper. Oh well, different strokes for different folks.