SO, I'm often asked a simple question - 'How do you do all the zines?" Lately, it's been harder and harder, and for the first time in my fannish life, I've got a bunch of material backed up, waiting for a Drink Tank or a Journey Planet or an Exhibition Hall or whatever new zine I launch on an afternoon when the sun is out and I've got nothing better to do. 

These things happen. 

So, I started thinking, thinking about how I create. I know why (IT'S SO MUCH FUN!!!!) and I know when (in all those moments when I should be doing something more productive), but the how is an interesting note. I mean, the technologies I use are actually pretty simple: desktop publishing software's at least as old as the Macintosh, PDFs nearly that old. That's simple. Create some boxes, drag some art, make some outlines, find a few quotes. Easy peasy, right?

Yes.

The thing that's hard is finding a way to actually do it. There are times I want to relax, to do nothing but close my eyes, put my head on a pillow and let the world slip away. You might know this concept as sleep. I'm not actually very good at that. Sleep apnea has been hard on me, and I've suffered from insomnia since at least college. Bummer. One reason I keep my computer so close to my bed overnight is so that when I wake up at 2:38am, head throbbing and nose stuffed like a post-fight boxer, I can pull MacKenzie (my MacBook) and start putting something together. There I'll be, my CPAP mask still pushing air through my nose with that weird engine noise whir, with the laptop balanced on my belly, writing and writing, usually about nothing at all, and trying to connect dots with lines, and lines with boxes. Seldom does it work, and often it's just terrible, but there are times when it's far more fun to just create something and know that it'll never see the light of day. 

It's hard to edit yourself in the middle of the night! 

Well, for me, it's hard to edit myself whenever. I'm no good at it, and honestly, my best stuff is instantaneous, off-the-cuff, now. Then again, my worst stuff is instantaneous, off-the-cuff, now. There's no other way I create, I just go and go and go. I was reading Harry Warner, Jr.'s All Our Yesterdays column (it's on eFanzines.com) and he said everything he did save for a couple of chapters of All Our Yesterdays (the book) were first draft. That heartened me, the greatest fan writer who ever lived did things in much the same way I do them. The only difference? He had talent. 

Here's How to Create a Zine The Garcia Way!

Step One - Write at the weird times. Lunches, while cooking, when you're waiting in an airport, in the car waiting to pick-up the kids. Don't set aside time to write, just write. Once a word hits the pages, let it stand there. If it jumps out at you again, then maybe fix it. Just write. The writing is the hardest part. 

Step Two - Lay it out. Get yourself a layout program, and start to put the writing into shapes. I suggest rectangles. Do it fast. Why? Because you'll notice things that need to be fixed if you take your time and you'll fix them. Then you'll find more, and you'll fix them. And you'll find more and more and more, and you'll wait and wait, and want it to be perfect. Perfect is the enemy of the Done. Done is most important. Even if you're moving fast, you'll notice things, and if you keep going fast and notice things, you should fix those fast. 

Step 3 - Put it out there. That's the easiest part, whether you're using eFanzines.com or your own site or whatever, just getting things out there is the most important part. Never stop yourself from putting things out. Even if you're not 100% happy with what you've done, and I'm seldom happy with what I put out, you need to get it out there because if you don't, you're doing nobody any favors. Think about it like this: you can create something and keep it to yourself, and guess what, you're a diarist! That's a proud and noble tradition, true, but what it doesn't do is draw people in. The key to zines, and by extension blogs and podcasts and In Other Media, is that you're drawing people in to your creations, your thoughts, in a way, your life, and to do that, you've gotta get it out there. 

My way is probably the least good way, I admit, but it works for me because it allows me something that I love. It allows me to interact with folks, often in a one-way presentational form, but even that is an interaction. People ask why I keep creating if I'm not going to get any response or feedback on it, and I simply say "Because I love creating." I love doing zines, and when it's not just me, when people send articles, send art, send eMailed Worlds of Comment, it becomes even more fun. 

I love doing zines, and I don't plan on stopping or slowing anytime soon!

I was lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of Catherynne Valente's up-coming novella Six-Gun Snow White. Now, right from the beginning you can tell where things are going with this one, no? It's a re-telling of the Snow White story set in the Old West, and it's a beaut of a tale. If I had one thing to say about it, and I will be writing about it in the first 2013 issue of Exhibition Hall, it's that it tells a story of forces greater than love: hate and greed and jealousy and sorrow and loneliness and death and nature and on and on. It's such a rejection of the traditional views we're shown in fairy tales, maybe not a rejection, but certainly it does not take the trail most-traveled upon. 

And with the Writing/Writers issue of Journey Planet coming up (and the Deadline is February 15th, and you should write something! Journeyplanet @ gmail.com) it got me thinking about the ways in which we see fantasy interacting with the worlds we know. We all know the Old West, the way the boards creak under the weight of a coming shoot-out, the smell of gun oil, the weight of big iron, the sight of wide hat brims shading steely eyes. We've been soaking in Old West imagery for a century-plus, and when a story can take advantage of that warehouse of concepts we all walk around with, it best better. Valente's prose is wonderful, she reminds me of Ian McDonald in a way, and in Six-Gun Snow White, she powers us through the setting and gives us snippets of what we would be ultimately familiar with, things like the town of outlaws or the Silver Baron's Castle on the Coast. Of course, it's all different, but we recognise it and can make the story fit the world. When Snow White goes on the run, as she must, we see her world is dark dark dark. The ways in which Valente honored the West as a place of magic and cruelty (and ultimately cruel magic) was a blade perfectly fitted to the handle of the Snow White mythos. 

I also should say here, I've never actually read a Snow White story. Sure, I've seen at least half-a-dozen filmed versions, but never read one. Mea Culpa. 

There is a tradition of Weird West Tales. The West was a place of mystery, of a kind. It was the kind of place where you heard stories, sometimes even read newspaper articles, of strange things happening. You might hear of the Thunderbird shot out of the sky, or a Wild Man the size of a standing bear, smelling of dead meat and horse leavings. These things are strange indeed, but even the things that actually happened, like the green skies over the desert, were odd enough. Playing with the images and characters of the Old West, not to mention Native American imagery, gave Six-Gun Snow White so much more power that any of the filmed versions, for sure. It is a very American slice out of a very European tradition. 

The story is one that's told, like those rumors of Thunderbirds and Demon Cattle, and it is told to us in a way that often makes you wonder if even the teller knew the strangeness surrounding it. Too often the teller of tales in the West are stunned by the spectacle, and here that is not the case. It's all strange things that happen in a strange place with strange characters, but they are not strange for the sake of being strange. They're strange because magic is strange, and everything that makes up these characters is a kind of magic, and a kind of magic that can only take place in the West. 

Or maybe Western Europe...

When Six-Gun Snow White is released on February 28th, you should go out and buy it! It's a great read, some of the finest writing you'll ever see. It's a fun read, and even when we see the narrator switch-up from Snow White to someone else, we're still pulled along behind 'em through the scenery, and what wonderful scenery it is, too.

The term 'herring-fucker' gets thrown around a lot these days, but no one flings is better than Jesse Bullington. In The Folly of the World, Jesse throws around a lot of words, and pretty much every single one of them lands perfectly into place in a plot that at first had me looking backwards-and-forwards for connection and control functions. It's not Bullington as a writer, but me as a reader that was having issues, but when it all came into view, when I could feel that there was a direction and it was clear, I was as drawn in as I have ever been with a novel by an author I've not yet read!

The characters are so richly drawn, and the historical setting of Dordrect, a part of Holland (also known as Dutchlandia) which ends up an island following the Saint Elisabeth floods, is wonderfully portrayed. It's the introduction of the awesome Jolanda that really moves the story, introduces a sense of disquiet to pretty much everything that happens after we first encounter her. She is exactly what the plansmen of the novel, Sanders and Jan, are looking for as she is able to retrieve the real focus of the story. There's a set of dynamics at play between the three mains that is so complex that it did take some serious attention. I thought that the way the characters played off each other, and used the entire situation of the story and the setting, to be very dark and twisting. 

Not Twisted, but twisting. 

Every step of the way, Bullington is making you love and hate every character. At times, I was thinking "Poor Jo." and at other "Fucking Jo!" and the same about Jan, and ESPECIALLY about Sander. It's hard not to like a character who walks to his execution excitedly in the first few pages, and while I thought Sander was a lot of fun, he was dark dark dark at time, and a heavy bit of action at others. 

While the characters are great, I did find myself a bit ragged reading in the middle. The prose worked, hard and dark and disquieting, but the plot seemed to take too many steps of the music that was playing. A lot of time is spent on character development, which is good, but at the same time there are stretches where I'd have liked some movement. The opening is one of the most engrossing I've ever come across, and the finish is a bit harsh in its brimstone, as it were. At 400+ pages, it's something of a tent-pole novel: highest on the front and back, a bit slack in the middle. 

I would say that The Folly of the World is a fine novel for readers who have a fondness for depth and for the kind of prose that goes straight at your throat. Bullington isn't a light read, no doubt, but the prose is so good, the characters so very layered, and the setting so looming, that you'll be dragged under faster than you can imagine. 

Chris

This has a lot of Spoiler-y content, so you might wanna not go through it unless you've seen Skyfall. 

You see, I did a run-through of all the Bond films leading up to the Bond issue of JP (which, if you haven't read it yet, it's up at (http://efanzines.com/JourneyPlanet/JourneyPlanet14.pdf)
and I finally watched Skyfall a couple of times, and had a lovely chat with John The Rock Coxon (and you should be reading him at Chickensinenvelopes.net now, as he does AWESOME stuff!) and he pointed out that it was no less sexist a movie than any of its predecessors. He pointed out that the female agent couldn't hack it, was put out to pasture as an office worker to be there for Bond to hit on in the future as Miss Moneypenny. I thought for a moment and found that I both agreed and disagreed. 

You see, yeah, I can see where John's coming from, that the only two strong female characters in this movie are M and Moneypenny. You know what happens to M if you've seen it, but we lose Moneypenny to the trill of the Office. This is after she performs both admirably, and less-than-admirably, in the field. Does choosing to not be a field agent make her any less of a important figure? I don't see it that way. She settled down, and I think this talks more and more to Bond's inability to settle down; his deathwish. She's smarter than Bond and knows when to get out with her life. M said it long ago: Double-0s have a short life expectancy. It is not unreasonable to leave that, no matter what gender you are, and Bond doesn't have that option, largely out of his own sense of duty. And Moneypenny stands as almost as tough an agent as Bond, especially when she tracks him down, obviously without his knowledge. 

Now, what interests me the most is that we finally have a reason for the Moneypenney-Bond flirtation. Watch Skyfall and see all the points where she takes the lead, grabs Bond by the sensual short-and-curlies, and then apply that to the back-and-forth that the two shared in the various other films. It finally makes sense. The two work beautifully together in the film, and my guess is that the two of them in the future will see Moneypenny taking more of the lead. I can't wait to see what they do with it, but there are so many options!
CHris