08-18-2021, 01:33 AM
Automating the zine process? Well, the way Charles does it is unnecessarily labor-intensive, and I aim to smooth that out by using Publisher. It will gracefully stream text in, push pages out by template, and make special tricks like insets and side-bars easy-peasy. But the vast bulk of the work isn't physical layout. (Or maybe it is with Charles, but not with me.)
The big lift is in grooming the writers, curating the articles, maintaining the company/ad contacts, browsing the royalty-free photo archives, figuring out which bits to put in the zine and which to tease out on the forum or on social media, sandbagging stuff for future issues, and just maintaining some sort of vision without imposing editorial fiat. If you get all that stuff right, AND have a good set of writers, then you've got a good zine. Maybe good enough that it doesn't matter whether you use Publisher (like a noob) or grind it out one page at a time in Word (like a zen master).
And whenever I post thoughts like this on here, I have this nagging feeling that I should save it all up for editorializing in the next issue. But I get an idea, it starts rolling, and I end up hitting "post reply" before you know it. There's a magic to being a magazine editor. Charles has it. I'm not sure I do, but I feel I must try. We'll see how it turns out.
I'll end this post with a comment an amateur artist friend of mine posted a while back...
The entire experience surrounding the creative process is more fun than the final product itself. This experience includes: the thought process for being inspired, the decision-making whether to do or not to do the painting, choosing the size of the canvas, selecting the colors, doing the sketches with a pencil/charcoal/etc, doing a color study, staying up late thinking about the subject and obsessing over it, laying the first colors on the canvas and working the piece over and over and over again, abandoning the painting because it is not good enough; then weeks, months, or even years later looking at the painting again and realizing that after all it is worth rescuing... For me, all this is more fun than the final piece. At the end of the day only the creator knows the value of his/her creation.
The big lift is in grooming the writers, curating the articles, maintaining the company/ad contacts, browsing the royalty-free photo archives, figuring out which bits to put in the zine and which to tease out on the forum or on social media, sandbagging stuff for future issues, and just maintaining some sort of vision without imposing editorial fiat. If you get all that stuff right, AND have a good set of writers, then you've got a good zine. Maybe good enough that it doesn't matter whether you use Publisher (like a noob) or grind it out one page at a time in Word (like a zen master).
And whenever I post thoughts like this on here, I have this nagging feeling that I should save it all up for editorializing in the next issue. But I get an idea, it starts rolling, and I end up hitting "post reply" before you know it. There's a magic to being a magazine editor. Charles has it. I'm not sure I do, but I feel I must try. We'll see how it turns out.
I'll end this post with a comment an amateur artist friend of mine posted a while back...
The entire experience surrounding the creative process is more fun than the final product itself. This experience includes: the thought process for being inspired, the decision-making whether to do or not to do the painting, choosing the size of the canvas, selecting the colors, doing the sketches with a pencil/charcoal/etc, doing a color study, staying up late thinking about the subject and obsessing over it, laying the first colors on the canvas and working the piece over and over and over again, abandoning the painting because it is not good enough; then weeks, months, or even years later looking at the painting again and realizing that after all it is worth rescuing... For me, all this is more fun than the final piece. At the end of the day only the creator knows the value of his/her creation.