I've had a busy week trying to juggle a bit of subbing articles, writing and designing some pages, transcribing an interview and finishing off a huge scanning project. Only one thing fell by the wayside, which is an article I'm supposed to have finished by the end of the month... but the end of the month seems so far away at the moment and I didn't want to put everything else on hold.
What do you mean "We're already a third of the way through September"? Oh, well, I guess everything will have to go on hold next week.
I'm still undecided about what I'm doing with this magazine. There are a number of choices... keep it slim so I can keep it coming out regularly under my own steam, make it bigger and produce fewer issues a year. I want to include lengthier features and interviews than has been the norm of late, and that means two things straight away: either lots of pages, so you can present a number of features, both long and short, that will attract a broad audience, or a slimmer but regular publication which forces you to split long features across issues. I'm really not keen on the latter, so the question is, how big should I make each issue.
I've been thinking of 64 pages, maybe as many as 72 — which is a lot of work. Then there's an impish voice that pops up in my brain that says "Why not go all out and double the page count, do a proper quarterly book." I'm tempted. I really am. It would also increase the price, but maybe that's not a bad thing... it wouldn't double the price if I were to double the pages.
Damn you, Imp! Now I'm seriously thinking it might be possible. Features wouldn't need to be split, and there would be room for comics and (my favourite!) comic indexes. I might be able to run some material — some extensive index material, my history of old pirate publishers — that would otherwise have to wait twenty years before I could get it finished, if it were to be in book form. But serialised in twenty page chunks... I could do that!
The more I think about it, the more I think that Imp might be right. It might make October an impossible deadline, but let's see what happens.
With my thoughts dominated by this new project, I haven't had much time for anything else. We were hosts of a pub quiz held over Zoom on Saturday, which went well — I think we got the right mix of easy, guessable and impossible to guess questions and we varied things by having a "guess the year" round and a multiple choice round. Everyone seemed happy and we're doing another one at the weekend , although not hosting this time.
We've recently finished watching The Umbrella Academy season two, which was as good as the first outing, having just the right levels of action, humour, silliness and weirdness. Much better than Condor season two, which I spent most of wondering how the supposedly super-smart intelligence agent could be made to look any dumber, having lost a Russian defector, helped cost an innocent man his freedom (and, eventually, his life) and given away everything to the Russian mole in the CIA he knew was there but couldn't help confiding in. Idiot.
I'm stalled on The Plot Against America —I'm a couple of episodes in and it's good, but I find I'm not in the mood for it at the moment. Instead, I'm watching Snowpiercer, which I'm really enjoying. Based, of course, on a comic that was previously turned into a movie. The changes made to spin it out into a 10-part TV series hasn't stretched the show completely out of shape and made it unrecognisable. At the same time, it has introduced a police procedural element that works and ends after a few episodes in a way that powers the rest of the show's plot. I'm six episodes in and still gripped.
(* The image at the top of the column is based on the covers of the two Longbow books. The real covers you can see in the column to the right. I still have a handful of signed copies available, which I'm still offering with a 10% discount if you buy both volumes.)
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