kaleidotrope

Oh, the things that I’ve zined

I spent most of the day, except for some much needed time in the beautiful weather outside, working on layout for next month’s issue of Kaleidotrope. At least, I’m still hoping it’s next month’s issue, and I’m pretty confident in that hope, but still, I’m pushing things a little late for an April publication. I’ve still got three print issues to do this year, before I move the zine online. I’m expecting to keep it as a quarterly, at least for the first year, to see how that works out, with something like 25-30 stories a year. I think I’ll miss the thought that goes into layout of a physical, printed zine but not the layout itself, miss the construction but not the tedious building, kerning, cutting-and-pasting.

I also managed to watch this week’s episode of Community and the first episode of the third season of the UK Being Human. And 9 — which, as I noted on Twitter, is a richly imagined, detailed post-apocalypse, but it’s a bit too bleak for a children’s movie, and the story is a little blah for adults. I’d have to say I agree with everything the AV Club’s Tasha Robinson says here. It was beautiful to look at it, but overall a disappointment.

Though at least this means I can finally send it back to Netflix. It’s ridiculous that I’ve had this out since December.

Sunday is as Sunday does

A rainy Sunday. I did the New York Times crossword, I watched a little Red Dwarf, I did a little editing for Kaleidotrope*, and I wrote this:

Waiting for a train that never comes is an occupational hazard for a temporal operative, time loops being anything but a freak occurrence on this kind of job. There are whole chapters dedicated to it in the standard operating procedures, endless shelves of academic books detailing their adverse (and, on rare occasion, surprisingly useful) effects, and no time agent is ever graduated without first experiencing at least one such linearity-fracturing event first-hand. But it was still starting to piss Veronica off. She needed to be back uptown in half an hour, and her agency handlers weren’t going to care if that half hour for her simply failed to occur. That was from her perspective, and her perspective alone, and the agency had a habit of simply not caring about any individual agent’s personal experience of cause and effect. If the time loop didn’t end, then she was damn well obligated to break free from it on her own.

Which wasn’t going to be easy. One of the reasons that time loops filled the pages of so many books was that were just so many different types of them, endless indices enumerating the various causes and remedies — and misjudging either one of those could just make matters worse. Some loops were the product of over-ripe neutrinos (whatever that meant); some were caused by more fundamental problems in the time-stream, fractures and tears at the subatomic and even quantum level. And Veronica was no physicist, just a covert operative caught in the wrong place at the wrong constantly-repeating-time. The only supplies she had were the handful of documents she’d packed for her meeting uptown, coded reports and tedious spreadsheets, and the pocket umbrella she’d brought along because they’d promised to send her back to last Thursday when the meeting was over. She seemed to remember that last Thursday it had been raining. Nothing she was carrying was going to set the time-stream back on its course; none of it was going to make her subway train appear.

Based on this writing prompt from my friend (and fellow writing group member) Maurice. I did not manage to work the word “confute” in there, however.

* Have I mentioned that starting in 2012 I’m almost definitely taking the zine all digital, dropping the print edition in favor of what will probably be a quarterly online version? I may have just hinted at this over Twitter. Anyway, that’s the likely plan, once I get through the next three (fully booked) issues. I’ll talk about it more soon, I’m sure.

Wednesday various

The end of the week

Just a quiet day at the office, with not a single subway ride all day.

I’m looking forward to the weekend. I have no specific plans, beyond finishing this short story and mailing it off, running a few errands and mailing off a back issue of Kaleidotrope, and maybe enjoy a good scary movie or two. That, plus some late-night, in-costume capping are about the extent of my Halloween plans.

Still, it’s nice to have the weekend here again. It seems like so long since the last one.

Tuesday various

  • Paul, the World Cup predicting octopus, has gone to the great octopus’ garden in the sky.
  • Sony will stop manufacturing the Walkman. In other news, Sony was still manufacturing the Walkman. [via]
  • Further proof that science fiction is more about the time it was created than about the future: 5 Things ‘Back to the Future’ Tells Us About the Past. [via]
  • Meanwhile, Realms of Fantasy closes shop. Again, and this time it looks like for good. I’m really disappointed by this news, not least of all because I subscribed in their recent save-the-magazine effort. It raises questions about the viability of print magazines in general, which, as somebody who puts together a twice-yearly zine, is something I’m quite interested in. Realms was a good genre magazine, and I’ll be sorry to see it go.
  • And finally, kind of weirdly tying all of this together in a way: The Space Squid Cuneiform Clay Tablet.

    Of course, it’s not a real squid…and a squid isn’t the same thing as an octopus anyway…but there’s something fascinating about a zine (Space Squid) “printing one of their issues on the ultimate form of Dead Media: inscribed in cuneiform on a baked clay tablet.” Maybe that’s what Realms needed to do. Maybe that’s what I should do with Kaleidotrope. It’s a funny and clever stunt if nothing else. [via]