Ramblings of Jeff Somers, author
A couple of years ago I was interviewed by a guy named Frank Marcopolos, who published a zine called The Whirligig. It was part of a series of audio interviews he did with other DIY-type writers. He’s reposted the interview on his blog, apparently under the misapprehension that I am in some way interesting.
If you’re curious, surf on over to Brooklyn Frank and listen to my stammering, half-baked thoughts!
They shut off the water to my room yesterday, leading me to suspect I may have actually misread the boilerplate in my contract, since I can’t blog for my corporate masters if I die of dehydration.
I’ve survived so far by drinking water from the toilet tank, which is a little rusty and. . .brakish, but that won’t last forever. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to decide if I’m being punished and, if so, for what. I have to admit the contract was lengthy and I was sleepy and didn’t read it very closely. I may be required to do all sorts of things.
I’ve been keeping myself busy by making copies of my zine, The Inner Swine. This is pretty involved. I have stacks of photocopies of the innards of each issue, and stacks of the covers. I also have a long-necked stapler, Put a cover on top of the 15 double-sided pages of each issue, staple twice in the middle, fold, and voila! One issue of my zine, ready to be stuffed into an envelope and mailed to the handful of people who cared enough to mail me some sweaty dollar bills in the mail. It’s a beautiful thing.
It’s also kind of labor-intensive. The Helper Monkeys used to help, once I’d trained them using my patented beer-no-beer system, but the Helper Monkeys long ago escaped, and even if I wasn’t trapped in this hotel room, forced to blog, the wife wouldn’t allow them in the house anyway.
It used to be worse. My zine used to be distributed by Tower Magazines within Tower Records stores, as well as an outfit called Desert Moon Periodicals, and I was at one time making thousands of copies. By hand. Using the fold-and-staple technique. With Helper Monkeys doing more crapping and flinging of crap than actual zine-making. This took forever, as you can imagine, but the upside was that my zine was showing up in stores all over the world and I actually got little checks in the mail that helped pay for everything.
Today, however, both Tower and Desert Moon have gone bye-bye as the world discovered recently that it is impossible to actually make money by selling zines, and I don’t have to make nearly as many copies each issue. Still, a few hundred is pretty tedious.
Why do it? Well, the zine will always be a place where I can be as dumb and ridiculous as I want, which is pretty damn dumb and ridiculous. It’s also a place where I can dump lazy, unrevised writing filled with terrible grammar and bad spelling, poorly researched opinions and bad, superbad poetry, and no one can complain. Or if they complain, I can then make mean fun of them in the next issue! Plus, if I didn’t, I’d just spend all that money on more liquor, which I think we all agree would not be good for Jeff. Insofar as you have any opinions on what’s good for Jeff in the first place.