IT'S ALL ABOUT THE WASHINGTONS
So I finished the damned zine (Issue 61! How does one make 61 issues of anything?), and thanks to a screwup at the printers this afternoon, I'm going to take a loss on it. It's winding up costing more to print than I'm selling it for. Which brings me to the faint conclusion that maybe something's wrong with the way this is all going. If this thing is going to survive, it's going to need advertising, or someone on the staff is going to have to get a day job where they can copy it on the sly. I could never do it at work: it wasn't so much that I would have been caught, so much as the machine we had was inadequate for anything more than making grinding noises and screaming grey murder at anyone who attempted to sacrifice some painstakingly crafted invoice to its infernal document feeder-cum-memory hole. (Although pulling the thing apart searching for some shard of document that got stuck way up in that place that would be easy to reach if one arm had three elbows and a long skinny ET finger with sticky stuff on the end of it was a great way to kill off the slower afternoons.)

So I've got 40 copies (32 pages, digest size), and all the whining and kvetching about free copies for everyone stops this month. They're just not leaving my grasp until I get some Washingtons coming back the other way. The fact that I spent 50 bucks I no longer have, um, to invest in the project just makes me bitchy this afternoon.

There's probably a mood-affected-by-weather-change issue in there too. And I don't mean all this. I'll mail you a copy if you want one. Just let me know. But you'll have to wait until I sell these and find a songwriting office-drone (there's only about 5 million of them in this scene) to do some dirty work for me.

Still. I'm going to have to find a real printer, or the zine is just going to get smaller. I found out you can read 4-point type, so there may still be hope for my profit margin.

I think of you even when we are apart.
Love, Rupert Freaking Murdoch the 3rd.