I spent a good chunk of the day working on Kaleidotrope, namely formatting and layout for issue #12. With luck, it will be printed and mailed within the next couple of weeks, just barely making the July date. (I’m actually putting “Summer 2011” on it, though I don’t expect anyone’s going to raise a fuss.)
On the one hand, I’m going to miss layout, which I used to do in Word and have for almost half the issues done in Publisher. It makes the whole process feel more like editing and publishing, crafting something rather than just reprinting it. On the other hand, though…god, it’s a nightmare. Not this time so much, since I only have three contributors — the cover art, a novella, and a long-form poem — but in general it’s often tedious work. Lots of cutting and pasting and kerning and typefacey-like things.
I’ve more or less finished. I just need to plug in a revised bio from one of the contributors, then tweak and/or write the regular horoscopes. Then I’ll figure out what I’m going to do about printing. Luckily, there’s fewer copies that will need to be mailed out, since there are only those three, and with the move to put the zine online I haven’t really been pushing for new subscribers. Again, with luck, I’ll have all the copies I need printed by next weekend and have all of those mailed by the weekend after. That’s still July, with a whole day to spare.
Other than that, the day was pretty quiet. I watched an episode or two of Burn Notice and the first of Torchwood: Miracle Day. I’m not yet sure the latter continues Torchwood‘s trend of getting increasingly better. (The first season was a mixed bag, largely bad; the second was mixed as well, though mostly quite good; and the Children of Earth miniseries was some of the best damn television I’ve ever seen.) But I liked this new one and I’m looking forward to more.
And that, plus some reading of Kaleidotrope slush and a quick trip to the bank, were mostly it for Saturday. It’s amazing what can fill up a day.