Studio Blog

Pardon the CSS dust; I'm reusing the divs/template I made for my Free Zine Friday blog (which will also be getting a bit of a reno). But I just spent a bunch of time on an in-progress zine and I'm dying to talk about it!

The main zine I'm working on right now is the next issue of my perzine series Unfair Maiden. This one is #7, what I've finally titled the "Material Grrrl" issue. I've had the idea for this subject for a long time--I want to explore my relationship to my enjoyment of material goods as an anticapitalist. It's something I feel I haven't examined thoroughly enough, so this zine is an attempt to do so.

I actually have quite a few bits and pieces that are done (in fact, one part has been done for about a year before I took a break). But the part I just finished was definitely the most involved, writing-wise. The section is titled "The Little Treat: Exploring justifications for consumption under capitalism". I even spent a hilariously long time (probably an hour) making a Seinfeld-inspired logo for the header, since all the titles of Seinfeld episodes are formatted "The [blank]". Anything to lighten up the subject, right? (Plus the Season 8 pattern totally matches my aesthetic).

The idea of this part was to explore the argument of "the little treat" in anticapitalist spaces and how it relates to morality. Like, what makes choices about consumption moral or immoral, and are there things we're (I'm) obligated to do, relative to my consumption, to behave "morally"? It was originally just going to be about how I felt about that argument (which I explain in the zine too of course), but to sort that out required so much more work than I thought! It ended up feeling like reading and writing philosophy essays from when I was in undergrad! (I mean, not just feeling like it, that's basically what it turned into!)

I ended up writing at least 5000 words (probably far more given the amount of stuff I cut/moved around), and the "final" essay at the moment is 2988 words, at least 8 zine pages but it'll probably jump to 10 once I format it. It might change a little. This is WAY more than I've ever written for a single section of a zine, and frankly I feel like it'll probably scare people off (it's scaring me off right now), but it's important to me so it's going in. I have no idea how I'll remotely be able to make it flow with the rest of the parts.

Anyway, since I was typing all this, I'm not sure if I can adequately express the amount that I "spread out" on my laptop, but I tried to capture the feeling in this screenshot:

Allow me to point out:

• my incredibly helpful file titles, "ZINE IN PROGRESS", "zineinprogress_222", and "Untitled" (which was also unsaved until this moment). All saved on my desktop instead of a folder, naturally.
• the text in a different font on the left, which is part of my first draft, approaching it from a slightly different point which I found to be too boring after spending hours writing it
• you can't tell, but I don't even mention the concept of "the little treat" until 1587 words in, when that is ostensibly the theme of the essay
• so many tabs across multiple windows, all vaguely related resources and Wikipedia articles I thought might be useful. I finally tried to close some and then realized hours later that I wanted to reference them later in the essay, so I had to go through my history and pull them up again
• my text notes that go anywhere from full drafts of paragraphs to lines like "that economics game!", which is a reminder for something unrelated I might want to make an entirely separate section about. Unlabeled, of course.
• 2050 extra words I like but now don't know what to do with. They will probably stay in these poorly titled files until years after publication of the zine itself.

Next on my to-do list: selecting font, images, and anything to make the portion more interesting than a wall of text without making it 10+ pages long. Then onto deciding what I'll do for my next sections!