Month: November 2017

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#ZineWriMo Day 24: Zine With Friends!

Hello, zine friends, and happy Friday!

I hope you all are doing well. I’m a little fuzzy on time zones, but I think my American friends may be all sleepy and full of stuffing after their Thanksgiving feasts. (Or am I calling that a little early? Either way, I hope those celebrating have a wonderful day! I do miss pumpkin pie a lot this time of year. 😉

To be honest with you, I’m feeling a little blue today. You see, today’s prompt is:

Zine With Friends!

no offline friends here in Murray Bridge just yet, so I’ve been sharing pics of what I’m doing on my Instagram stories, but it doesn’t feel the same. I also just so happen to be finishing up a zine about the two friendship breakups that happened over the move and, yeah… Blue.

So please tell me you’ve been having a great Friday, zines or not (though aren’t Fridays always better with zines?). I’m going to go enjoy a doughnut and finish the zine I’ve been reading so I can post the review here soon.

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Zine Review: Insomniughhh 1

Insomniughhh 1
Ashley
https://sites.google.com/view/insomniugh

This zine may be about living with a circadian rhythm sleep disorder, but I loved reading in the intro that this zine is Ashley’s step back into zinemaking after about twelve years. <3

Insomniughhh 1 is a short but informative introduction into what a circadian rhythm sleep disorder is and what it’s like to live with one.

Ashley’s disorder comes in the form of feeling the need to go to sleep at 2.30 to 3.30 in the morning. From what the word ‘circadian’ actually means to a breakdown of sleep studies, Ashley provides a lot of information in what feels like more than fourteen pages.

I love how informative this zine is. I didn’t know much about sleep disorders beyond the basics, and I loved learning more. I especially liked the larks and owls part. Most people have heard of night owls, but I’ve never heard of nor thought about its morning counterpart. (Spoiler: Larks)

I had to chuckle in sympathy when I saw CBT on the ‘What They Tell You Works’ list. (More power to you if it works for you, but it’s handed out like a wonder drug.) I liked how Ashley followed that with the ‘What Works For Me’ list. For me, it served as a reminder that what ‘they’ say is not the be all and end all for options.

The sleep study part was an eye opener, however. As someone who got a ‘something is wrong, but we’re not sure what’ from her own sleep study, I found some hope in finding out that sleep studies aren’t useful in circadian rhythm disorders.

Insomniughhh is a handwritten zine, but I had no trouble reading. It has a nice balance of text and pictures. The text occasionally skips outside the margins, but not too badly.

If you want to learn about circadian sleep disorders, then this is definitely a great zine to start with.

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#ZineWriMo Day 23: Make a Wordless Zine

Hello, hello! It’s a week and a day until the end of November, and today’s ZineWriMo task is:

Make a Wordless Zine

Now it’s time for a confession.

I got caught up in making Don’t Call Me Cupcake 9.5 and completely lost track of time. The annoying things is that I’m so close but not finished yet. So I’m afraid I don’t have a wordless zine. (Trust me, you don’t want to see my attempts at art anyway.)

Instead, I offer you Plague. I reviewed this ages ago, but it’s the zine/comic that came to mind when I thought of ‘wordless’. It’s grim, dark, and oh, so good.

Despite not having the wordless minizine, I will have a zine review coming very soon.

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#ZineWriMo Day 22: Work In Progress Wednesday

Hello, zine friends! A bit of a late post for me today, but that’s because today’s prompt is to work on zines in progress, and I have been working hard all day! It feels good to make progress on these zines after feeling creatively blocked for quite a while.

Checking back in with my goals:

*Complete ZineWriMo – don’t miss any days
*Complete all ZineWriMo mini-zines
*Complete mini-zines: Little Reminders 2, Little Reminders 3
*Complete all writing for Don’t Call Me Cupcake 9

Bonus round:

*Complete Dear Anonymous 7
*Complete Don’t Call Me Cupcake 9 (just the proof copy to take care of)
*Complete Don’t Call Me Cupcake 9.5 (in progress – nearly there)

I also finished up Missives From Murray Bridge 3! I wanted to finish Don’t Call Me Cupcake 9.5 today, but I didn’t quite get through all the bits and pieces.

How’d you go with things today? Did you get into any zine goodness? Let me know in the comments.

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#ZineWriMo Day 21: Share Your Favourite Zine Tools

Hello, zine friends! Anyone want some warmth because there’s this place in South Australia that is getting pretty toasty…

Kidding. Here we are in the third week of November, usually the home of the third week slump, third week drag – whatever you want to call it. This is the time when it’s hard to keep focused and keep going. That’s why we have daily prompts to keep us going when we don’t want to have to think about stuff. 😉

Today’s task is to share your favourite zine tools. Now I love my needle and thread for binding, and I love my bone folder for nice, solid folding, but my favourite tool that I don’t get to use enough is…

The Japanese screw punch!

This little lovely is the superhero version of your standard hole punch. Where you can’t punch things like chipboard with a standard hole punch, you can with this. It comes with various sizes of ‘bits’ to put in it to create different sized holes.

But why talk about it when you can watch two short videos I made just under a year ago?

Here are part one and part two of me explaining the punch and how it works.

That’s me for today, zine friends. Let me know about your favourite zine making tools and how you’re doing this wonderful ZineWriMo.

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#ZineWriMo Day 20 – Try a New Genre

Hello, zine friends, and happy start to the coming week (if Monday is your Monday, which it’s likely not, so I don’t know where to end this mid-sentence sidenote…). Today for ZineWriMo, we have the challenge of trying out a new genre.

Genres in zinedom are a little looser, a little less defined than in the literary world – but that’s what makes it fun, right? In general, though, there are a few (listed in no particular order):

*Your usual literary genres for fiction writing: fantasy, sci-fi, etc
*Poetry zine
*Comic
*Collab zines – zines containing pieces from multiple people
*Info/Educational zines
*Perzine – a personal, memoir or biography style zine
*Fanzine – a zine all about that thing/person/band/movie/game/etc you love
*Politizine – a politically oriented zine
*Music Scene Zine

So on and so forth. There are heaps of different takes, mixing and matching, and the like.

I was a bit stumped for this one for a while. I make a perzine, and collab zine, and have made info zines. Poetry, any sort of artistry, politics, and music all fall under this hazy veil for me, so I didn’t know what to make that was outside familiar territory.

Then it occurred to me…

Fanzine! I’ve never made a fanzine before, and I just so happened to make the cover for this one just yesterday. Haha. Go figure.

I’m a planner, so I’ve been scribbling down various notes and things for how I want to structure my fanzine and what information I would like to include in it. I’m very excited all over again to tear apart and examine a show I really love.

How did you go with today’s task? Did you try a new genre? Let me know about it in the comments!

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Happy Mail Monday – Trades Edition

http://giphy.com/gifs/rainbow-lol-gif-vomit-LwIw5RCH3hwGc

Hello and happy (mail) Monday to everyone. It’s my favourite day of the week where I get to share the beautiful bits and bobs that brightened my days by landing in my post box and thank those who were so generous to mail things to me.

Zine trades! This pack of zine-y goodness comes from Nina in Belgium who has quickly become a regular zine trade partner. ^_^ A little pleasure of mine is being able to get the entire series when I find a zine I like, and I’m slowly trading my way to having all issues of Same Heartbeats.

Definitely check out her blog – Echo Publishing – because she’s just finished her latest zine Same Heartbeats 12 as a part of ZineWrimo. (And she has so many other zines to check out, too!)

Thank you for trading with me, Nina!

How cute is the little bunny?! So adorable.

This set of three wasn’t a trade and thus was a lovely surprise from Rae in sunny Queensland in Australia. I’m so excited to connect with more Australian zinemakers. (Especially ones who like cute stickers. 😉 ) Rae also happens to be a part of the Hanging Affair zine exhibition, so if you’re in/around Brisbane on December 1st, check it out!

Thank you, Rae!

I am slowly working my way through my ‘once I’ve moved’ wishlist, and I am very excited to cross off ‘Trade with Pen Fight Distro‘. It started as ‘order from’ but when I realised that my order would cost just as much as shipping over some zines for a trade, I figured a trade could be just as fun.

Pen Fight agreed!

They even threw in this badge that I really love!

Thank you so much to Pen Fight Distro for trading with me and for everyone who has made my little world bubble a happier space with the mail they send.

I’ll be back in a tic with ZineWriMo Day 20.

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#ZineWriMo Days 18 & 19

Hello, zine friends! I hope you are having a lovely weekend. It’s turned out to be a little bit toasty in my world bubble, but after a lot of rain, I am happy to have it.

Alas, I just couldn’t summon the energy to put together a ‘make a zine’ kit last night. Not when my office was ‘in transition’…

It’s slightly less messy today, and I actually have my computer set back up, but I am typing this with my back to all the mess. Haha. The way I had things just wasn’t working, so what’s a person to do other than rearrange the furniture?

I did get back on the ZineWriMo track today.

Day 18: Create a Make a Zine Kit

Yay! A little kit with stickers, washi tape, die cuts, a mini-zine blank, and my mini-zine about zines: What’s All This Then? Ideally I’d like to put a small pencil or sharpie in there as well, but if I’m going to mail this, that makes it immediately more complicated (aka expensive). But I think this could be a fun place to start.

Day 19: Make a Fanzine

Fanzine! This isn’t actually a finished zine thanks to time and energy levels, but I did make a collage and whip it into shape for a fanzine cover. I thought about making a mini-zine, but I have so much to say about this show that I wouldn’t know how to squish it all down for a mini.

Why are there two? I haven’t yet sorted out whether I like it more in black and white or in colour. Thoughts?

That’s me for today. I will be back with Happy Mail and more ZineWrimo goodness.

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Zine Review: Thoughts of a Queer Marshmallow #3

Thoughts of a Queer Marshmallow #3
Queer Marshmallow
Queer Marshmallow

Thoughts of a Queer Marshmallow is a quarter-sized full-colour perzine about processing thoughts on past relationships (both with self and with others) and changing from those childhood dysfunctional behaviours.

Aesthetically, Thoughts of a Queer Marshmallow is a pretty chunky, text-heavy zine. I like how QM used different washi tapes on the bottom of most pages as well as to separate sections. It made the ‘heaviness’ of the text a little lighter – especially because it’s printed in colour.

This zine isn’t a zine to be taken on or read lightly. There is a lot contained within about about abusive relationships – familial and romantic – nightmares, and self harm. I found myself remembering a lot about the abuse I dealt with in my childhood thanks to a number of things that I had in common with QM.

I did admire how QM’s self reflection included the ability to be honest about their own past toxic/bad behaviours and how that impacted others. It’s all too easy to sugarcoat one’s own role in things, but QM doesn’t. It’s all right in there with everything else.

There were a couple things that were confusing for me in this zine. One was a sudden change of tone at the end that felt aggressive and without warning. I was most of the way down the page before I realised that it was a letter to someone.

The other thing I make note of because I think it’s a good point for zinemakers: With acronyms, spell it out at least once before using it full time. Even if you think people know that CW is ‘content warning’ (I figured that out), you can never be sure who your reader is. I had never for the life of me heard QPP before and had to stop reading to look it up. (Queer Platonic Partner) And if your reader has to look it up, you can’t guarantee they’ll find YOUR meaning for the acronym.

Thoughts of a Queer Marshmallow 3 is a relaxed pace zine filled with the inner thoughts of someone processing the ramifications of abuse. If you can take the prodding to your own history, then this zine could be a good example of starting the path of healing.