Sunday morning.
Met a woman yesterday who’d bought a copy of no. 5 in Chicago. “Quimby’s!” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I saw it there on the shelf and said, hey, I know that place. So I bought it. It gave me,” and she sighed, “this feeling, that I. I can’t quite. It was – it was a very plane feeling, you know? A plain feeling. I’m not being very articulate.”
Which made me ridiculously pleased. Even if it wasn’t until this morning that realized I didn’t know if she’d said plane or plain. (Or something else entirely. It got noisy yesterday.)
One of the volunteers from Reading Frenzy (whose name I shamefully do not know) was thrilled to see no. 6 is out. “This is great! There’s this group of people who are obsessed with this zine.”
“Um,” I said, and I blinked, and I stupidly didn’t ask who or how or why. (If you’re reading this: thanks? Drop a line? I’ll work faster?) “I’m making the rounds next week,” I said. Reading Frenzy, Guapo, the library, the IPRC, Quimby’s, I really should get out to Q is for Choir –
And then she asked if it was ever going to get put into a book or something. “Maybe,” I said. “I dunno. I kinda like the whole episodic thing.”
Which – and yes, I’m slow; yes, I miss the obvious; I like to think my obliviousness is offset by the singular attention I can bring to strange distractions nobody else bothers to notice – ooh, shiny! – but saying “I kinda like the whole episodic thing” lit up a lightbulb over my head.
When I crack jokes about how this would be better as a comic if I could draw, or how it’s the TV show I’d make had I the money and the patience and force of will necessary to weld a crew entire to my bidding, it’s not because I dislike prose (heaven forfend) or because it requires the eyekick goshwow that prose can only echo dimly.
It’s because the thing I want to do, the episodic long-form storytelling, the discrete epic, has a long-established model in comics and TV to work within and market from, and it doesn’t so much in prose. MacAllister Stone took a chance, for which I tip my hat, but my formal peers are epic internet fanfiction serials – and while I’d never complain about the company I’m kept with, still: it’s not the sort of thing you expect to see when you go to a zine symposium, or click a Project Wonderful ad over at Gunnerkrigg Court.
“It’s a serialized adventure zine,” I’m telling browsers over and over again. “Every issue’s a chapter in the longer story, like a comic book, or an episode of a TV show.” And oh! they say, and I get it, but still: comic book. TV show. (Short story? Novella? Novel?)
So: the Why and the Wherefore, or at least what I’m telling myself they are this Sunday morning. (Of course, the other idea is that I’d be writing them faster much faster. Gin! Gin and soaking! Go!)
—posted 5745 days ago
