I’m finally finishing up my fourth zine, Further Distractions, which I hope to print in time for the San Francisco Zine Fest on September 1 & 2 (see Events). So far I have the short fiction pieces “God’s Car Seat,” “I Say Your Name,” and “California,” a handful of letters, comics, and of course the assorted miscellany we’ve all come to love and/or be confused by. I’m still writing “This Is What I Mean When I Say Your Saturn Has Returned” and “These Are Just Words.” It remains to be seen whether they will (a) get finished, (b) make it into the zine, or (c) be relegated to my personal archive dungeon like so many b-sides.
I’ll be launching my Kickstarter page any day now to try to raise funding to print it. Donations will range from $5-$100, with a funding goal of $500, which will print about 300 copies of the zine, plus pay for the postage and supplies to mail zines out to funders. $5 gets you a zine and a sticker, with rewards getting more and more awesome as they creep along the scale.
I’m sketching cover designs now, and am in the brainstorming stages about how I want to assemble them. After hand-stitching, screen-printing, and painting about 800 copies of my last zine, I Have a Song For You, I promised myself I would make my next zine less labor-intensive, or at least less tedious. I’m thinking of having the printer do the cover image (in black, on blue paper), then adding spot color myself with Gauche or acrylic. I will also probably staple them instead of sewing them.
Here is one of my cover sketches:
The star dangling from a stick is a design I’ve wanted to use before, but I never had a good excuse. It seems to fit with the title Further Distractions (a kind-of sequel to my first zine Potentially Heartwrenching Distractions), so I’m going with it. I still wish I could draw better than a third-grader, but, you know, I can’t have everything.
Keep an eye out for more news about my strange new zine baby, and please consider supporting me by donating to my Kickstarter project when it gets rolling. I can’t wait to share what I’ve been working on with everyone!
Awesome! I’m so glad you’re doing another zine. 800 copies of hand-stitched, printed and painted zines is unbelievable. thanks for sharing with me some of those zines, which were much loved by me and others. one was sent to political prisoner Marie Mason (http://supportmariemason.org/)– I did have to take out the nice stitching, though, to get it through prison security!