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!