SE London Zine Fest

Whoops. Looking at this blog it seems that I haven't updated since August. (This is partially because my poor elderly notepad broke and I've had to make do with stealing other people's internet machines when I can.) Anyway, I've published three more zines since the last post and will update properly soon, but today's is just a quickie.

I'm going to be at the SE London Zine Fest on Saturday. I'll have blond hair rather than pink but you should definitely still come over and say hello.

Zines For Sale

To buy any (or all!) of these zines, add up the prices and paypal that amount of cash to zisforzine at hotmail dot co dot uk, along with a note telling me which ones you're buying. Zine prices include shipping within the UK. If you're outside the UK please email me first so I can calculate shipping costs.

xyz #1: Intro to Genderqueer 24 pages inc. cover, A5, £1 The very first issue of xyz! Slightly more picture-heavy and possibly easier to read than later issues, this one includes articles about etymology, ways to talk about gender, hormone alteration, and gender identity in the 18th century. Click to read a review.

xyz #2: Kids and Babies Issue 24 pages inc. cover, A5, £1 Written just after I'd started working at a play scheme, this is all about gender in childhood. It includes articles on Mermaids, the gendering of play, -aternity leave, and Disney villains. Click to read a review.

xyz #3: Femme 28 pages inc. cover, A5, £1 As you can probably guess from the title, this issue is about femme as a presentation and a gender identity. In it I talk about the ways femme has been maligned in society, the colour pink and what it means, make up, queer politics and how the medical establishment pathologises femme.

Kidfest

Three people under the age of ten have now applied for stalls at Camden Zinefest. This is bemusing. Are their parents zinesters? Do their parents know about this? Do they know each other? How are they going to get there? It is a mystery.

Some things that have been going on

Cath reviewed xyz #2 at Spill The Zines. This is my second review ever, and I'm dancing around and grinning like a loon still two days later. Is that a normal reaction? If so, I might have to review more zines on this blog, so I can spread the love.

Right now I'm trying to figure out how to sell zines outside of zine fairs. I'm not very good at social networking, and I usually turn around and spit when someone mentions the word 'Esty', but I do now have a paypal that works. Would it be OK to just make a blog post where I list all my zines and then tell everyone where to paypal money to? I reckon if I put everything up for £1, it should cover things like stamps and paypal fees. Maybe. Just about. This sort of laissez faire attitude is why I'm going to be poor forever. Oh well.

In other news, I'm starting to think it's possible a distro is sneaking up on me. Friends keep handing me zines and asking if I'd be willing to sell/trade them for them. Which is... pretty much what a distro does, really.

Camden stall applications

July is here and I've put up stall applications for Camden Zinefest. So far, one application has been filled in, which made me gleeful; I've also got a couple of zinesters I'm fairly sure will be coming even without filling in the form. I haven't exactly decided much about applications. I've said on the website that I'll email people before the end of August, so cut off time is some time before then, I guess. I really hope enough people want to come that it's not too tricky. I laid some fliers out at the Women's Library Zine Fest and they all got taken, though I'm not sure how many were by people who were also zinesters.

In other, non-zine-related news, I went for an STI test today. It took less than a minute as was easy as cake. The blood test hurt a bit but enabled them to tell me my HIV status on the spot (negative, as expected). Results for chlamydia, syphilis, gonorrhoea and hepatitis take a week or so; confident that they'll be negative as well, since I'm very cautious about both my sexy times and my needle use. The whole thing was far easier than I'd expected. If you're a sexually active adult, I'd urge you to go get checked out. It's easy, it's free, and nobody touches your junk unless you ask them to. The THT website will be able to find your nearest clinic.

Zine Fest at the Women's Library

I'm going to be at it. Lots of other brilliant people are going to be at it. You should come. That is all.

Finally!

I've finally gone and set up a website for Camden Zinefest. Well, y'know, sort of. It's a blog that I'm pretending is a website.

Things I have done:
- Designed a logo
- Designed a website
- Designed badges
- Confirmed the Pirate Castle (yarr) as the location
- Figured out how to fit everyone into the Pirate Castle's hall
- Designed a flier
- Printed and made badges (only about 30 so far, am hoping to do 100 total)
- Figured out an application form for stalls

Things I have yet to do:
- Design a flier
- Print fliers
- Design a programme
- Print programmes
- Print and make badges
- Figure out how much of everything I should print
- Figure out an application form for stalls
- Find people who'd be willing to lead workshops
- Confirm stalls and workshops once they've been finalised
- Get in touch with Anarchist Teapot and see if they'll be willing to come down to London for a potentially tiny event
- Persuade some people that they'd like to volunteer on the day
- OH SO MUCH MORE.

October Zinefest

Winter. It's cold, it's grotty, and there's nothing on. Wouldn't it be nice to have some zine-related event to tide us through to the next summer? Not anything big or showy, just a little, no-strings-attached winter zinefest in London with thirty or so stalls. Maybe some workshops and a kitchen in case people want to get a snack.

Wait a second... where do I know in London that has a hall, a clubroom and a kitchen? That's fully wheelchair accessible and central but very quiet in winter? Oh, that's right! The Pirate Castle, the community centre where I work!

So I had a chat with my boss today, and he's very generously allowing us to use the Castle either for free or for a nominal fee. He just needs to know the date. At the moment, I'm looking at either the first or second Saturday in October, where we could have the space from one o'clock onwards. Every so often, though, I'll pinch myself and ask: seriously? Are you really going to do this? So far, I've been answering a steady yes; but I need your help!

Organising a zinefest is not a one person job. It can't be. That one person would eventually crack under the pressure (and you don't want to see that, it ain't pretty. I tend to get naked when stressed). That's why I'm asking any interested zinesters in the London area to get in contact. Things I really, really need help with:

The internet. Yes, I know that's vague. I'd be fine(ish) with coding a site, but where to host it? And how does Facebook work? WMZ is pretty much the only corner of the internet I'm fully comfortable with.

Idea bouncing and organising. Blimey, I haven't even got a name for this zinefest yet. If you're thinking 'well, I'm not a geek, but damn it can I keep a schedule!', or even 'hmm, I'm pretty good at errand type stuff': yes, message me, please.

Artistry. If it was up to me to design the leaflets, they would be written in biro and gluestick. Anyone who's ever seen one of my zines can tell you that my aesthetics are... spartan, to put it nicely.

If you've got a different area of expertise, or even no expertise at all, I still want you! Like I said, this is right at the very beginning, where everything still needs to be done.

Hopefully this zinefest is going to be small but perfectly formed. I'd also like to emphasise the skint DIY ethic I remember from the zines my dad used to read when I was a kid; stolen turns on the photocopier rather than £5 silkscreened photography zines.

If you're still interested, email zisforzine at hotmail dot co dot uk.

And please, pass it on!

London Zinefest

I am desperately trying to finish xyz³ in time for London Zine Symposium, which is this coming Sunday. Not an easy job - I have four more articles I want to write and three days to do it in.

If anyone else is going, I'll be the shortarse with the pink mohawk. You should come over and say hi.

Coldspot #1

Coldspot #1
Author Gill, Eire
Contact coldspot at yahoo dot ie
Website http://www.flickr.com/photos/gilll_

This is the first art zine I ever read so I'm not sure if I'm its target audience. In fact, I'm not even sure 'read' is the right word: the only words in Coldspot #1 are Gill's contact details at the back. My visual illiteracy means I have been putting off this review for a while now (not including the panic when I thought my brother had put it in the recycling and had to figure out whether I could still write a review of it... fortunately, I found it under my bed).

Coldspot is a full colour sixteen page photography zine, printed on high quality paper and hand bound. Some pages have just one photo on them while others are grouped. A few sets of the grouped photos are by theme; for instance, one page shows a row of votive candles on one side and a crackling home fire on the other. The first thing I thought of when I saw this was coming home from church in the evening and changing into my pyjamas for bed. In fact, the next few photos are of home settings, so this may have been deliberate. I couldn't tell whether Coldspot was meant to be a continual narrative, but Gill's slightly fractured photography style leads me to believe these are parts of her life we're being let in on. Definitely check out Gill's website for more neato art photography.

Mandy Palmer and me

I joke about trash 'cause it takes class to be enlightened!
I joke about sex because it's funny when you're frightened!

I've written a brief zine, called I Fought In A War, about my experiences with the military complex. This is a zine I'll only trade, rather than sell, because I'm picky about who gets to read it. At the start of it I put a brief warning: [this zine] is intensely personal and some bits were very hard to write. I should imagine they might also be hard to read. So that you have sufficient warning, this zine contains references to assault of all kinds (including sexual and physical), abuse of authority, violence, organised religion and military culture. I put the warning in because although the zine doesn't discuss any of these things in real depth it seemed like the decent, human thing to do. I've never had a bad reaction to anything I've read in a zine, but I've always appreciated people who put warnings in them so that I can ready myself or avoid them entirely if I'm having a bad day.

I've reread my own zine and the worst thing that happened was I felt slightly uncomfortable at some bits. Definitely nothing I couldn't handle. And then... Amanda fucking Palmer. Today I was listening to one of her songs on the bus. Actually listening to it rather than putting it on to dance around to while I tidy up. The two lines up there? Made me throw up. I started to panic, got off the bus, and threw up on the pavement. It didn't occur to me to just take off my headphones or stop the tape, which on reflection would have been a much more sensible course of action. It did, though, give me a renewed sense of respect for people who take the time to put warnings in their zines. It's such an easy thing to do, and if it stops someone having a panic attack or other bad reaction, totally worth it.

Trip report

Brighton Zinefest was amazing. Completely, utterly amazing.

Saturday was workshop day. I managed to squish in all but one of the workshops, although I didn't get to attend all of them in full. The day started out with vegan cookery, ended with survival discussion and had all sorts of things packed in the middle. I learnt how to screenprint without using a camera bulb and how to rock a beetroot salad (and some stuff about zines I guess). That evening there was a fundraiser gig at the same place to help pay for all the spaces hired. Since I hadn't managed to get much sleep the previous night (because OMG BZF!), I ended up falling asleep on the sofa while a very loud electropunk band played about twenty feet away. Talk about sleeping like a sailor. I was awoken by a very sweaty guy collapsing next to me. Since sofas at gigs are not exactly the most comfortable places to sleep, I went and asked my lovely host if she could show me the way to her house, which she did, even though she had been tending bar. It is amazing how generous and friendly a lot of people you meet in the zine world are.

Sunday was the day of the fair. I managed to hitch a lift from a guy with the car to the place it was being held. Once I saw how steep the hill up there was, I was really fracking glad I hadn't tried to walk. I got there earlier than the start and was the only person upstairs when I arrived, so I spent some time trying to make my table look pretty (and measuring and remeasuring to make sure I didn't take up more than half of it). My fellow table occupants had a very smart looking art zine that I would have assumed was an actual magazine had I seen it in a shop. Fortunately the guy sitting next to was more my type: a grotty activist punk called Andrew Lips who still uses myspace but has some pretty good music on there that you should definitely go check out. Andrew also runs a distro of sorts, ie has a batch of zines carried around in a box held together with parcel tape.

The first couple of hours were pretty quiet and mostly involved people wandering around checking out each other's stalls. It was after lunch that things starting getting busy. Also, there were kids. And when I say kids I'm not talking about the fabulously mignon little pixie who writes Peach Melba. These were actual, primary-school-attending children. Which was a bit of a problem since I'd taken patches I'd made to try and pay for my train fare. Embroidered patches saying things like FUCK Y'ALL and SHOOT YR RAPIST. Every time one of them ran up to my table to have a look at the knitted monkeys I also had, I was forced to sweep all my patches behind the stall so they wouldn't wander back to their parents and ask 'mum, what does that mean?'. It hadn't really occured to me that there would be kids attending which turned out to be a massive fuck up on my part.

The patches were actually pretty popular despite their frequent disappearances. I only had a couple left by the end of the day, and wished that I had made a few more. I managed to sell out of xyz 1 entirely, and was left with only a couple of copies of issue 2 after Tukru bought five for Vampire Sushi (yay!). I'd say that out of all my zines, xyz 1 moved fastest, followed by Hunkerdown, then D and finally poor old xyz 2. Maybe because it has a baby on the front cover? Still, someone came along saying they were setting up a UK parenting distro, and was the zine aimed at parents? So there's a potential use for all the copies of xyz 2 I have left over.

I kept running downstairs in a panic because that was where Sarah Tea Rex was tabled and she was the only person I'd met before Saturday. "Sarah, help! Someone with grubby hands is touching all my zines!" "Sarah, I sold a zine!" "Sarah, the people next to me are all smart and fancy!" She was very nice about it and did not tell me to shut the fuck up and go back upstairs once. Props to that lady.

Anyway, I returned on Sunday night tired but happy and with a stack of zines that I'm going to be working my way through and possibly reviewing once I get the time. I'm starting my new job tomorrow, so we shall see how everything goes.

Whoops!

...Might have screwed up on that one.

The ticket I bought to get down to Brighton? It was for last weekend. Not that it would have mattered all that much; it turns out I've lost my travelcard, too, so would have had to either hide out and hope and conductor didn't come past, or repay the full fare.

Ah well, at least this way I get more of my precious sleep.

I've been quite busy this past week at the RFS but I'm going to update tomorrow with either a review or a new list of zines I've printed. Promise!

Brighton Zinefest 2011

Ten days ago I got an email telling me that I'd got a stall at Brighton Zinefest. After doing my celebratory dance (feet wide apart, lots of air punches) I started to worry. I had wanted to know what time the workshops were starting before I booked a ticket down, but now, three weeks before the fair started, there was still no timetable on their website.

Fuck.

I tried doing some internet research and eventually came upon BZF's Facebook page. There, it said that the workshops were starting on Saturday at ten. No problem! I could book an early bus down and sleep on that. Then I looked at the bus costs. ...OK, so maybe not the bus. Strangely the train turned out to be cheaper than the bus at £5 return instead of £9.

I booked my ticket and felt very pleased at my organisational skills until I was told the workshops would probably not start until midday. Since it takes me an hour to get to Victoria coach station from my house, my organisational skills ended up costing me four hours of sleep.

Funnily enough, this has not dampened my Brighton enthusiasm. I've been very generously offered a couch to sleep on so I don't have to worry any more about finding/affording a place to stay. The workshops all look really enjoyable and interesting, and I'm looking forward to meeting new zinesters in real life. With two weeks to go, I can tell this weekend is going to be great.

Next week I'm going to get myself to the copy shop and print out ten copies of each of my zines. Other things to do: find a place for my dog to spend the weekend, plan how I'm going to get to Victoria station, figure out how to fit my zines in my backpack, make vegan peanut butter cookies for my fabulous host. Wish me luck!

Currently printed zines

I don't have zines that are in print and zines that are out of print. For me, those would be unnecessary categorisations. All it takes for one of my zines to come back into print is a trip down the library to use their photocopier.

However, recently I've been thinking about the advantages of using my local copy shop. I would have to print approximately thirty copies of one of my zines before they became cheaper than the library. When I first starting making zines I was sure that was a ridiculous number; there was no way thirty people would want a copy of what I'd made. Then I started trading, and got picked up by Marching Stars, and suddenly thirty copies didn't seem like such a huge number after all. Now that using the copy shop has become the cheaper option I can certainly see why people would choose to label their zines as in/out of print. That doesn't mean I'm going to. If someone wants a copy of one of my zines, I'll just pop back down to the library.

So instead I'm going to go on what I have right now. These are zines that, if someone wants one, I can just stuff in an envelope and put in the letter box. The price I've put after each is what it costs me to photocopy them; I'm more than happy to accept trades of roughly the same page length/size from within the UK. To buy them with cash instead, email me so we can swap addresses.

xyz issue 1, Nov/Dec 2010, 68p, A5, 24 pages inc. cover A few articles on etymology, one on hormones, some pretty pictures and some history. This is a pretty basic genderqueer 101 zine.

xyz issue 2, Jan/Feb 2011, 68p, A5, 24 pages inc. cover Babies and kids! How children relate to gender, raising a gender-variant child, gender in children's media and other articles.

Hunkerdown issue 1, Feb 2011, 54p, A6, 36 pages inc. cover This zine is a reaction to how the mainstream media play poverty against ethics when it's perfectly possible to have both. It includes articles on foraging, benefits, how the new craft movement is harming more people than it's helping and how to get around on a budget.