Month: November 2017

Hello, zine friends, and welcome to day 10 of ZineWriMo. Today is a day for trying something new.

Blackout poetry isn’t new to a lot of you, but if anyone is unfamiliar:

Blackout poems can be created using the pages of old books or even articles cut from yesterday’s newspaper. Using the pages of an existing text, blackout poets isolate then piece together single words or short phrases from these texts to create lyrical masterpieces.

– Scholastic

So that’s it. You take (make copies of) articles or passages from books – basically whatever text you want – and then black out words to make the remaining words mean something new.

I chose to make a copy of the info sheet for one of my meds and a copy of the first page of my third novel, Dark Echoes.

To be honest, I was a bit nervous. But once I got started…

I ended up with three, but I really could have kept going on for ages. It gets to be fun, finding alternate messages within text. I will definitely be doing this again.

Did you give blackout poetry a go? Did you like it? Let me know in the comments.

Hello, zine friends! I have no idea what’s going on in my brain, but I keep thinking it’s the 8th or the 10th. My brain just doesn’t want to accept the existence of the 9th.

Anyway, it is day nine of ZineWriMo, which means today is ‘Make a Zine for a Cause’!

This can be your local animal shelter or the Breast Cancer Foundation. It doesn’t matter what the cause is or the size of the cause; it’s about getting the word out there.

I got started rather late in the day, but I knew what cause I wanted to make a zine about…

Okay, so it’s a cause slash awareness thing in that there is a bias when you call it ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’, but people listen when you say the scientific name: myalgic encephalomyelitis. So my cause is CFS awareness but also the bias in the name.

Remember back when I said these daily prompts are meant to be fun – not stressful?

That’s why I am not stressing when I say… I didn’t finish the zine. Mini-zines are always more work than I think they are, and I don’t want zines to ever be a stress-causer in my life. (I’m not in love with the cover either, to be honest.) So I am going to call it at that for the day and say that a start is better than not starting.

How’d you go with today? What causes did you champion? Let me know in the comments.

PS. There won’t be any zine reviews this week, but it’s only a two-day blip. Zine reviews will be back and rocking next week.

Hello, zine friends! Today is Wednesday, which means it’s the first work on your WIP (work in progress) day for ZineWriMo 2017.

Today I took a little time to organise a bit of outgoing mail (that should have been organised a few weeks ago *cough*), but I spent most of my time working on the mini-zines I mentioned in my goals post. (Near pun not intentional. Hehe)

With the mini-zines Little Reminders 2 and Little Reminders 3, I do all the writing and drawing in pencil first. My writing tends to be a bit angled, so it’s good to make most of the mistakes in pencil before putting ink to it.

The pencil erases without harming the ink, so it’s winning all around.

These are so close to being done! Just a bit of clean up and colour, and they’ll be ready to join Little Reminders 1. I’m thinking of making all three into a pack on Etsy.

So what have you been up to today? Check any goals off the list? Did you get the chance to work on a zine? Let me know in the comments.

Hello and welcome to ZineWriMo Day 7!

For today’s task we have ‘stream of consciousness writing’. If you’re not familiar, SoC writing is where you simply sit and write without stopping. No matter what comes to mind, you keep that pen (or those fingers, if you’re typing) moving.

This can be a great way to dig past all those inner editor thoughts to get to some real gems inside.

Some people use it as an exercise, setting a timer for five minutes, ten, twenty… However long you want to try.

There’s also the site 750 Words that can be a great way to dig into stream of consciousness writing as well as get you into the habit of writing every day. I love how they also give you analytics on your writing.

There is a bit of fair warning when it comes to writing like this and letting it all spill out onto the page. If you’re in a bad frame of mind at the start or get into a bad frame of mind while doing it, you should probably not do it. These sorts of exercises can make those mind spaces worse.

There is absolutely no shame in protecting your Self and your mental health.

Did you try stream of consciousness writing? How did it go? Let me know in the comments.

Hello, hello, hello, and happy ZineWriMo. It is day six of this fine month of zine-ing, and today we have a simple but important thing to do…

There’s a saying in writing that you can’t write if you don’t read. In the literal sense, this isn’t true, but in the stylistic, inspirational, and other senses, it’s completely true. The same holds for zines, too.

Zines are a bit more complex than books in the loose definition of what a zine is. However, there in lies the beauty as well as the means by which you can figure out what you do and don’t want to do with your zines. It’s important to pick up zines from a variety of genres to suss out whether you like more cut and paste, fewer words, more colour, the ‘crappy copy machine’ aesthetic, so on and so forth.

Zine reading isn’t just for the beginning, though. I’d hope that if you’re making zines, it’s because you like to read them, too.

If you hadn’t noticed, I really like reading zines.

These are my zines that are next up for me to read and review – and these are just the ones on my desk. I forgot to grab a picture of the zine collection that I have from orders and ones people have donated to me from their own collections that don’t have anyone waiting around for a review.

So many zines. <3

I hope you all have a relaxed day and get in at least a little bit of zine reading. Until tomorrow…

Hello, hello, hello zine friends. I don’t know about you, but I slept in big time this morning and only realised later this afternoon that today’s task was to make a zine. Nothing like being late to your own party, eh?

Luckily enough I had the day to myself to work on a zine about the things that inspire me.

As per usual, I had no idea what I was going to make besides the idea from the prompt. So I got out most of my stuff.

The front and back covers popped into my mind first.

I don’t usually break out the ruler for zinemaking, but I wanted to be a little more careful than my usual version of whinging it. I liked thinking about the things that inspire me, though everything really falls under two categories for me – colours and people. Haha.

If you’d like to see the finished mini-zine, check out my Instagram for a little video flip-through.

Just to be clear, these prompts are meant to be fun. Not stressful. Not making you pull your hair own wondering how the heck you are going to do them. No one’s world is going to end if you miss a day or if you start making a zine of things that inspire you but don’t finish it today.

The only reason that I am going for doing all of the tasks on all of the days is because I came up with the daily prompts. I feel like it would be a little weird if I didn’t at least get close to getting everything done.

That’s me for today, friends. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your Sunday. I’ll be back tomorrow with some happy mail and a much easier ZineWriMo prompt for the day.