I’ve been hovering on the edge of migraine country ever since my head exploded last wednesday night.  The 90°F temps over the weekend — when i was taking a papermaking class that was outside almost half the time — really didn’t help.  My most reliable migraine trigger is heat+light.  Yes, i moved away from the East Coast to escape the hot summers.

Earlier this week i began to have a sinking feeling that i’d chosen the wrong paper for the cover of Cipher #2.  The more i thought about the paper, the more i realized it’s much better suited to what i have in mind for Cipher #3.  (Yes, i’m already thinking about Cipher #3.  But then, i’m often thinking about what i’m going to do with my next zine, and so far i don’t think the “next zine”s have ever been what i once thought they might be, altho’ the ideas always go on the back burner for some future project.)  I thought i’d just push thru’ this hesitation since i’d already had about 25 copies made of the inside covers.  But today i finally copied off a few of the outside covers and i knew instantly that, yes, this is the wrong paper for this zine.  It’s hard to explain why, i just knew as i picked up the cover from the copier that it was wrong wrong wrong.  I think tomorrow’s scooter ride is going to include a stop by Paper Zone so i can pick out something different.  I’m thinking maybe something in a grey tone.

Tonight felt like a night for sewing.  A few weeks ago i’d cut out the pieces for a new skirt, so i sat down at the machine and started putting it together.  Andy had a party to go to, so it was just me and my sewing and my music.  (And the cats, but they were off doing their things at the other end of the apartment.)  My goal was to get as far as both side seams before calling it quits.  Naturally, when i switched over to the zipper foot the machine stopped cooperating.  I slightly loosened the tensions (upper tension and bobbin tension).  Nope.  I changed the needle.  Nope.  Not only would it not sew on the zipper, it wouldn’t even sew the piece of scrap fabric i test stitches on.  Sigh.  Thanks to complaining on Twitter, Andy and i already have a date to sit down with the trouble-shooting guide tomorrow to try to figure this out.  Please don’t conk out on me, 50-year-old sewing machine!  I’m sorry my usual sewing machine mechanic died!  I miss Gma, too!!

On the positive side:  I never did come down with a full-blown migraine, and my zine really is finished except for the covers, and this skirt will be as awesome as i thought it was going to be.

Now i’m going to curl up with one of my new papermaking books and just expect that tomorrow will be awesome.

PS:  Tinnitus still sucks.  This horrible shrieking in my ears can stop any time.

Ladies and gentlemen!  Our e-stenciler works!!!  [paroxysm of joy]  Once we’ve sobered up from our celebratory drinking, we’re going to start planning a test run of the mimeo/duplicator.

Rex Rotary 2202 (e-stenciler)

*  Today success smells like burning because the stylus actually sparks and burns as it’s making the stencil.

bring me a bottle of good sake & you can read it
Originally uploaded by wrdnrd.

Cipher #2 is inching closer to finished.  I’m still hoping to be assembling copies this weekend, altho’ i do still have to do the page numbers/table of contents plus add 1 last detail page.  Those things are fairly straightforward (tho’ certainly tedious, in the case of the page numbering), so i’m hoping to get them done tonight so that i can start running copies of the contents tomorrow.

Things with the cover are still somewhat up in the air because i’ve been hoping to do them on my awesome mimeograph/duplicator, but last night when we tried out the e-stenciller (which will make the stencil version of the cover which i will then use on the duplicator to run off copies) we couldn’t get the mechanism to engage properly.  I’m hoping that Andy will be able to attack that in the next few days.

The prototype that you see in the picture is at least twice as thick than the finished zine will be — the prototype is full of double pages and layout tape and so forth.  But Cipher #2 will be a bit longer than Cipher #1 was.  And on the one hand that makes me happy, because i love a zine that i feel i can sink my teeth into.  But on the other hand, wow, did i get tired of doing all that layout.

I have a love/hate relationship with layout.  I enjoy doing it.  I love the challenge of making the text and the visual elements work together.  I love balancing everything against the negative space.  I even love the challenge of doing layout cut-and-paste style instead of with a computer program (whether it be a simple form for work using Microsoft Word or whether it’s a literary journal using InDesign).  It’s something i really enjoy.  Up to a point, and then i hate it with a passion that burns like a thousand fiery suns. Especially when i’m working with cut-and-paste layout, the process quickly crosses the line from being art and feeling fun to being factory piece-work and feeling like a drudge.  And since this issue of Cipher was so bloody long, by the end i began to entertain notions of not doing fancy layout for the next issue — just doing a very simple printout of everything from inside my word processing program.

One thing i did change with this issue of Cipher was the font size.  And i feel bad about it, because i know it’s making the zine longer by a small handful of pages, which could impact how much i charge for the thing (tho’, as always, i try to only charge what i need to in order to cover copying/mailing costs).  But when i was doing a proofreading pass using the font i’d selected, i realized it was hard for me to read.  Maybe i need new glasses, but i’m also not going to ask people to read my zines with a magnifier.  I still used the smallest font size i could.  I suspect the biggest difference is that i used a different typeface than i did for Cipher #1.  Perhaps i’ll have to do a little comparison between serif fonts for the next zine, see how each one looks at various sizes and see which one gives me best readability at the smallest, most efficient size.

Now that the typesetting geekery has scared away everyone but Jess, i’ll muse aloud a bit about a few potential giveaways when this zine is finally ready.  Just before i put it up for sale at Crabby Media, i think i’ll have a few quick questions for people to answer to try to win a free (free shipping, too!) copy of Cipher #2.  I have 2 questions in mind that will be for people who already have a copy of Cipher #1, and 1 question for people who just like making random guesses about numbers of things.

Stay tuned!

This month i’ve been working fairly steadily on the final push to finish Cipher #2.  It seems like every zine-maker since the dawn of zine-time feels as tho’ they’re not putting out zines fast enough — how many intros have started with “I’m sorry this zine is so late?”  I had to squash that urge myself when i wrote the prologue to C2.  But what i’ve come to realize is that my pace, right now, is 1 zine every 2 years, finished in time for the Portland Zine Symposium.  I guess that’s not too bad.  I do kind of love having my zines debut at PZS because the Symposium was so instrumental to turning me into a zine-maker and it’s definitely one of the high points of my year (tied only with Wiscon).  I wish i could be debuting a zine at the Symposium every single year, but it does take me a long while to produce enough articles to put into a zine, and the editing/layout process is always a slow, tedious crawl thru’ Hell for me.  I think Dante went thru’ Hell faster than i can paste together a finished zine.

I guess i’ve always been like this — wanting a greater output to my name.  Back when i was writing poetry way more seriously than i am now [read the article in the forthcoming Cipher #2! (heh)] i’d complain to my dearest friend that i wished i were capable of producing as many poems as some of our other poem-writing friends.  She always gently reminded me that quality was infinitely to be preferred over quantity.  This is probably true — i’m sitting on enough crappy poems in my backlog as it is.  Why would i ever want more?

Talking so openly about working on C2, by the way, is making me slightly nervous.  One of my very, very few superstitions is that talking aloud about anything sensitive or important like this will instantly make the universe give me the exact opposite of what i was hoping would happen.  Want Cipher #2 to be ready to debut at the 2010 Portland Zine Symposium?  The surest way to have that not happen is to talk about it on my blog!  When i did the final layout and copying on Paragraph Girl i didn’t even tell Andy i was working on it — he was out of town on a business trip and i didn’t whisper a word to him when we’d talk on the phone.

Except this time i think that might not happen.  I’m actually feeling extraordinarily positive about putting together my zine.  The writing is finished except for 1 piece that has taken some serious editing (altho’ tuesday this week i think i found the final fix) and the epilogue.  I know exactly what i’m doing with the layout and design (for a change!).  I even have an idea for what i’d like to do for the single element of hand-touched design i like to add to my zines (each issue of Paragraph Girl and Cipher #1 had some rubber-stamping that was hand-done for each individual zine).  I’ve been so excited about working on C2 for the past few weeks that i’ve been blabbing about it on Twitter anyway, so it seems silly to leave wrdnrd.net out of the loop.

So i guess i’ll hit “publish” on this post and see what happens.  You better not fuck with me, universe!

Cipher is now available at A Room of One’s Own in Madison, Wisconsin.  I dropped off 5 copies during WisCon 33 this year.