We’re on week II of ZineWriMo and I’ve been quite busy zine-wise as you can see in this long post. I’ve spend this week brainstorming, preparing, and creating the beginnings of multiple mini-zines and I also continued writing and lay-outing the splitzine I’m making together with Kirsty. Hopefully we’ll get it done by the end of the year or early next year! Here you can see the work in progress of some of the zines I’m currently making… The first photo contains pages for the splitzine and the rest is for upcoming mini-zines:
“Create a zine ideas book,” said the prompt for Thursday, but because I already have some I’m just going to show you those. In the big “wild at heart” notebook I keep lists of ideas for future zines, postcards, comics, crafts, etc and the small one I always carry in my bag for sudden ideas, sketches, and notes. In the photo on the right you can see some glimpses of pages from the “wild at heart” ideas notebook.
The small notebook is almost full. I started it in the beginning of the year so it would be nice to choose a new one for 2020. These are the options I have… (yes, I know, I have a large empty notebook collection and these are only the A6 sized ones, and not even all of them…). The ones at the top are ruled and the “schoon schrift” notebook has those bullet journal-type dots, and the ones at the bottom are blank. Do you have a preference? 🙂
Guess which one I chose for 2020?
This notebook prompt fits well with Sunday’s prompt of making/updating your creative travel kit. Here is a photo of what I usually take when I go out to make zines with friends at a café: a backpack (that can be attached to a trolley – useful for taking lots of zines to zine fairs!) with a folder for paper, a little pencil bag for drawing supplies, and space for a laptop if needed.
On Friday, I forced myself to go to the copy shop to make new copies of Dirty Lesbian, Same Heartbeats #13, and Same Heartbeats #14. I write “forced” because printing zines at the copy shop is my least favourite part of making zines. I’m always nervous about it and sometimes things go wrong even though I’m quite experienced at printing zines by now… This time I noticed a bit too late that I was printing 150 copies of one zine instead of 50. But I managed to stop the print job without asking help from the staff at the copy shop – so that experience and copy-machine-confidence did come in handy. Then I walked all the way home (15-20 min walk) with a box and a backpack full of freshly printed zines because all the trams were full of students going home for the weekend… Dedication!! Anyway, I’m happy it is done now because I had nearly ran out of these three zines. Now I can start to fold and bind them at ease while watching Community, YouTube videos about guitar effect pedals, or interviews with and live recordings of Veruca Salt…
Saturday’s prompt was to connect with other zine makers and that fitted perfectly with attending Girls Go BOOM (mani)fest in Ghent: a festival about fighting sexism in music with talks, spoken word, a guided tour of the building in which the Girls Go BOOM Clubhouse is housed, a screening of the brandnew short documentary they made (which features some quotes of yours truly), and concerts. Girls Go BOOM also released their zine MANIFEST #1 and there was a zine table by Out Loud distributing a selection of cool queer zines including KWIERzine made by a local queer collective called KWIER. So yes, a good space for zine connections! The photo below shows CuNt & Paste, one of my zines, on display at the Girls Go BOOM Clubhouse together with (a reprint of) the legendary punk zine Sniffin’ Glue:
For ZineWriMo, I intend to post some photos of the ziney snail mail I receive this month so now is the time to send me ziiiiines! The first mail of November comes from Emma Falconer from the UK: It includes her zines Fanzine Ynfytyn and Film Photography 101 as well as some glow-in-the-dark plectrums! So cool!!
Finally, because it’s Zine Writing Month and we all need some distraction in between creating stuff, take a look at this great blog called Zine Cats! This photo is taken from that website:
Aren’t we all zinesters in residence, wherever we are creating our publications?
Echo Zines 
I love the many notebooks you have! It’s like what I wish I could do every time I walk into an office supplies store and buy ALL the notebooks I see.
My favorite one is the guitar one. But the plain black one is also cool. Very metal 😀
haha, same here. maybe i can use those two for music-related notes (pun not intended). 🙂