In no particular order:
- I’ve been looking forward to this weekend for a while. You see, while my parents and sister go out of town on a camping trip, I’m staying behind. This means that I can dig out my room which, although not quite matching the destruction wrought by my namesake hurricane, explains why my mom gave me the sobriquet back in the 1980s. So yeah, my big goal this weekend is to dig it out and hopefully keep it from descending into entropy again.
- The other thing I want to get done this weekend is to write is my much delayed Baycon report, so that I can stick it in At Ungodly Hours, my contribution to one of the APAs I belong to. After it goes out there, I’ll probably post it to the blog as well, so you all can read it. I know you’re all looking forward to it.
- Speaking of which, I noticed that there doesn’t seem to be any mention of who received this year’s Baycon gopher awards. While I didn’t expect one for me, since I do gophering because I really like helping out and the rewards are somewhat immaterial, I’d really like to know which of my fellow gophers was crazy enough to earn such things. So I’m sad that I haven’t heard since it’s usually announced by now, or so I thought.
- Also, bringing up my APAzine means that I want to mention that I’ve got a soft deadline for assembling the pieces of the first issue of Rhyme and Paradox. That date is July 15th. The issue will be somewhat art-short (which is okay), but I figure I need to get started somewhere. I don’t expect to reach
levels of fanac, but I think it’s important that I get going on this, or I’m never going to do it. - That said, I have been absolutely lousy about getting back to those of you who expressed some interest in what I’m doing. So here’s the short of it. My ‘zine is called, as noted above, Rhyme and Paradox, and it’s a zine written for the subculture I belong to, which is science fiction fandom. You can see many examples of these ‘zines at efanzines [1], a wonderful resource ran by Bill Burns, who deserves all the mad props that he gets. In specific, R&P is going to be on the border between a genzine and a perzine (general fanzine and personal fanzine, for those who aren’t up on the terminology), and it’s going to be a hybrid, which means it will exist both electronically and in print — the latter because there are folks in the community who either don’t use the Internet (I know, heresy, but…) or prefer paper. It’s definitely not-for-profit — I fully expect that it’ll be a hobby and thus an endeavor that will, in financial terms, always be in the red, although I will gleefully accept money thrown my way for helping with postal/printing costs. Um, yeah, I think that’s about it for the moment. Feel free to ask questions below and I’ll try to be better at answering them. And for those of you who say “I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter”, you had better mean it.
- Also, while I say that it’s a cross between a genzine and a perzine, I’m totally open to anybody who wants to write or draw for it. That’s part of the fun of doing this. Also, here’s the best part — it doesn’t necesarily have to be about science fiction as long as it’s interesting. There’s some folks in the community who are die-hard pro wrestling fans, for example. Doesn’t have much to do with science fiction (although it seems to fit rather well into fantasy, I think), but it’s in sfzines. So the field is pretty much wide open. My due date for R&P1 is, as I said, July 15th, and I think R&P2 is going to be early/mid October. (Yeah, I’m looking at quarterly production schedules for the moment.)
- Other than that, things seem to be going fine in regards to the day job, although there are times I wish I had more time in the day. I also wish I had more time to write, but that’s never going to go away, so…
- Also, unrelated, I wish I were going to Montreal for Worldcon or SJ for WFC, but you know, I’m a grownup now and have car payments, which means that, well, fun but expensive trips are out of the question for somebody who is only part-time at their job.
Anyway, if there’s anything else you want to know, I open the floor for questions.