Nyx – Page 298

December 6, 2014

Call for Submissions: Egg Zine!

Announcing open Submissions for Egg Zine: A Fanzine for Eggs! To be released early next year as full color a pay what you can PDF.

I’m very excited to be editing my first group zine. We’ve already gotten many great private submissions for the project but now it’s time to open submissions for everyone.

We’re looking for any work related to eggs. Comics, poems, short stories, illustration, recipes, anything!

Technical notes: full color, keep the size to about 5.5” x 8”, up to four pages.

Please send all submissions, questions, concerns, etc. to Joshua Jarrett at legit.email.address at gmail.com And remember the cut off date for submissions is New Years Day 2015.

I can’t wait to see the work and remember to like and reblog this post to spread the word!

Also, a special thanks to Lindsey for her great work on this poster!

Thanks!

Nyx says: How awesome is this? Eggs!

December 4, 2014

SGZ Now Open for Zine Reviews! + Podcast

Yesterday, I found out that a good way to get over hating your own voice is to make an eight minute audio track and then edit it. Wowza.

Audacity makes the whole thing pretty easy – recording, editing, etc – according to someone who doesn’t know much about audio… mechanics? Engineering? I even got to recognise what my taking a breath looks like in an audio file so I could easily delete it.

I swear I deleted at least ten seconds of breath noises alone.

I’m pretty happy with the results, given it’s the first time I’ve done it. By the end, I was quite enjoying the process and had grown somewhat used to my voice.

But it won’t be happening again soon.

I hate to say it because I’m actually eager to give it another go, but I just can’t make that time commitment to something that’s purely for the sake of itself. I spent a long time editing that file (you’ll notice it’s about six and a half minutes now as opposed to eight). Hours of editing. I’m not in a place where I can add that kind of time onto what I’m already doing. So text it is for now.

I don’t want to let all that work go to waste, though. Even if it was only for a one off. Here is my ‘podcast’ where I talk about zines and zine reviews. I hope you like it.

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TL;DR/DL

*SGZ is now open for reviews!
*I’m not reviewing e-zines at this point.
*I’m not going to put street addresses in my reviews – only PO boxes
*I won’t put up one star or two star equivalent reviews. If a zine just doesn’t work for me, I will pass it on. It won’t sit in a drawer.
*More audio spots probably won’t happen for a while.

December 2, 2014

Social Media Stuff

Well, I wouldn’t call it procrastinating, but…

Zine Ninja isn’t all that impressed with Twitter (then again, it’s hard to tell with him), but he seems to like having his own Twitter account. Especially when he figured out that his feed could be filled with all sorts of zine-ish tweets. So if you like Twitter and want to check it out, click here or find him at @zineninja

This definitely doesn’t count as procrastinating because I set it up a long time ago. SeaGreenZine also has a Facebook page. It’s mostly a feed for blog and Twitter posts, but who knows what it might turn into?

December 2, 2014

Side Note: What’s a Friend Book?

I mentioned Friend/ship Books in my Happy Mail post this week, and a question came up as to what the things are.

Friendship books (also known as “FBs” in their abbreviated form) are small booklets made by stapling paper together, or are sometimes just sheets or strips of paper. They are usually decorated and the person who starts the book writes their name and address as the first person sending the book. People often include a list of interests as well. The FB is then passed around from penpal to penpal, and can often also become a way for one to meet new penpals. Most people hope to see the book again once it is full so they add their return address to the back cover of the book too, or inscribe “Return to Sender” on it. People also sometimes make FBs for someone else rather than themselves, in which case they write the name and address of the recipient on the front/at the top. Some people find friendship books fun because you can see where they have been in a trail back to the original sender/recipient.

– Wikipedia

Here is one of the ones I received:

Post-its with black marker were put over the addresses, but you get the idea. This is one of the nicer ones. The others are a bit ‘rougher’.

Inside, people write their addresses (if they want) along with specifics in regards to the people they want (and don’t want) to write to them.

If I recall correctly, there are little codes that are used to designate these things shorthand. Ah, yep! At the bottom of the Wiki page, you’ll find the abbreviations.

So there you go! Some people find them annoying, some people think it’s fun to see where they get to in the world… (Once it’s filled up, you’re meant to send it to the person who made it/whom it was made for.)

December 1, 2014

Happy Mail!

Hello, hello!

There’s not a lot in my mailbox for Happy Mail this week. I did receive two letters, though.

20141201_125741

(I did think about blacking out my full name because 1.) Full name! and 2.) I prefer to go by ‘Nyx’, but it’s easy enough to figure out my legal name anyway.)

The smaller green letter is from a lovely woman in India who has some of the best penmanship! Crazy good stuff right there. I ‘met’ her on SendSomething.net – a great place to find other people around the world who love mail.

The other letter is an interesting one. He wrote that he found my name and address in an FB (friendship book). Talk about your past coming back to haunt you! Wow. I was pretty lonely when I first moved here nearly four years ago, so I put my name in a couple FBs. Then nothing.

Now, years later, a letter shows up out of the blue. Crazy! I almost wish I hadn’t put my name down, because I have sinced learned that I’m better with trades, swaps, sales and purchases than at writing lengthy letters about what goes on in my life. But it’s still pretty cool (and weird – definitely weird) to have something from so long ago pop up like that.

If anyone wants some FBs, let me know. I now have three.

Anyway, I’d better move along. There’s plenty to do!

November 30, 2014

Call Out for Some Help

Today is the final day for voting, so this post will be the last you hear of this. 🙂

2 Dec 2014 Update: Dark Echoes won! Thank you for your support!

In another life, I am not The Author or Nyx – I am an author. (If you’re curious about that stuff, I have an author blog.) I try to keep my zine life and my author life somewhat separate for the sake of my sanity aka organisation. But there is a bit of crossover needed on some occasions.

This is one of those times.

My third novel, Dark Echoes, has been been nominated by AusRomToday for the Cover of the Year Award. I’m very excited to have made it through the nomination round to be one of the ten finalists in the category.

This final round of voting is now up to the public and will be determined by the cover that gets the greatest amount of likes. There’s no signing up for anything, needing to like a page – it’s looking at the ten contestants and giving a like to the cover you think is the best of the lot. If you click the graphic at the top of this post, it’ll take you to the album. Click on the cover you like and then give the one you like the best a like.

It’s that easy.

There are a lot of great covers there, so definitely check everyone out. I do think, though, that Dark Echoes is in with a chance.

If I do win, it won’t be me alone winning. The business I get my covers from – Cohesion – is a small, local business on the way up. The cover designer himself (who works with Cohesion) is from the UK (and is amazing).

If, for some reason, clicking on the image doesn’t work, here is the direct link to the album where you can like to vote:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.742129079158300.1073741834.620418747996001&type=3

Many, many thanks from a self-publisher who dreams of success.

November 29, 2014

Call for Submissions: Crush Zine

Do you have a call for submissions? Let me know, and I’ll put it up on this blog

November 28, 2014

Look What I’ve Found!

This (probably) isn’t going to be a regular thing, but I did want to start a new category on this blog for when I find zine-related stuff in the wild, woolly internet. Zine culture can cause feelings of isolation, so I want to hoard a new collection of bits and bobs for people to connect to.

By bits and bobs, I mean videos, podcasts, etc.

First up! I was looking for a compromise between doing zine review videos and text reviews. Hello, AudioBoom. On AudioBoom, I found a snippet that not only talks about zines but talks about zines in Adelaide! Yay, Australia! Without further ado…

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November 25, 2014

Zine Ninja Adventures: Fun Times in Melbourne

Zine Ninja wanders as he pleases throughout the world. He decided to gift me with his presence on my recent trip to Melbourne.

Zine Ninja likes to take it all in. Even when the train hasn’t left the station yet.

Simple comforts make Zine Ninja happy.

Waiting for a tram isn’t so bad on such a beautiful day.

Zine Ninja loves Sticky! What? You can’t see him? That doesn’t mean he isn’t there…

Zine Ninja always likes to take time to hang with the locals. He gives the Melbourne Aquarium two swords up.

After a few too many drinks the night before, Zine Ninja needs a proper cup of wake-up juice.

Zine Ninja doesn’t always eat brekkie in Melbourne, but when he does, it’s a blueberry bagel with generous helpings of cream cheese.

***

That’s it for Zine Ninja for now. He’s off on another adventure somewhere without me. Perhaps he’ll bring pictures. Until our next adventure together…

November 24, 2014

Happy Mail – Sticky Institute Goodies

Well… This week is a bit of a different ‘Happy Mail’ with a few non-zine things coming my way along with me running around Melbourne for a couple days that included a trip to the one and only Sticky Institute. [Insert squeal of excitement. More on that later.]

These gems are pretty much zines not by that name. An awesome local author, O. Spaniel Murray, sends out these short stories every now and then. For free! This is my first set.

This little set of fun things came as an RAK for a planner/organiser group I am in. Blue is one of my favourite colours, and I do have a smidge of a stationery addiction…

I don’t know why my camera made these turn the kind of orange they appear to be here. They’re really a gentler orange. I thought these were hilarious, and I had to grab them. The first of my Sticky finds.

The next lot of goodies! I picked up a bunch of zines for review fodder.

For the life of me, I can’t remember where I’d heard of these before. Still, I had to get them both when I saw them.

A few more treasures that caught my eye.

I do have a thing for the A5 zines. I pretty much went with a variety of things – covers that caught my eye, titles that sounded interesting, so on and so forth. I figured that was as good a way as any to get a variety of zines to review.

I’ll have more to say about reviews and such in the next post. Until then…