hope | (no subject)

i went upstairs to bed but sleep was elusive, so i came back down here until my brain stops running around in circles and flops down in exhaustion instead.

right, so, you lot can be my test audience.

ZINES. liek.

i've been reading lots of articles on fan culture and fanwriting and slash for my essay, and pretty much all of them written back in the ~~good~~ old days before the internet had secured its stranglehold on geeks around the globe, so they're all talking about zines and how cool they are and stuff. which. made me go: "haha, you don't have livejournal and we do," but it also made me want to make a zine myself. now, i am well aware of the fact that zines, in their traditional role, are (as

mcee pointed out) somewhat obsolete, but i am somewhat endeared to the idea of a lotrips zine for its retro charm and guilty pleasure. plus, i like to make work for myself. i love the idea of recruiting authors, making people write, betaing and editing their fics, putting it all together, making it look pretty and sharing it with the world.

then there's the issue of what it would have in it - i bandied around the idea of focussing it strictly on a pairing (my thoughts drooled along the lines of dombillijah), but then that would be too specialised - probably not enough people would want to buy it to make it worthwhile. and fanart as well? probably not. fanart isn't really such a huge thing in rps ~~(thank fucking god)~~, and i think less people are interested in it anyway. no, what i wanted was an sordid volume of juicy, quality, yet-unpublished porn. so, i had established that i wanted ~~porn, and lots of it~~ quality porn from quality writers, with a variety of characters and pairings that could satisfy more than one subgroup on my flist. in a tastefully presented volume. that i could stroke with devious glee.

so how would i choose what would go in it or not? how would i recruit authors? i was reluctant to put out a call on a high-traffic list or community as, lets face it, most of the things posted to the high traffic places are not what i would call 'quality'. so i would prefer to ask writers to contribute. which brings up issues of taste and whatnot, but hey. what can you do? i consider myself to have good taste, and adequate intellectual functions to define what i think is 'good', and fuck youse all, it is my zine and i'm not publishing crap. so. i would like to choose which writers i would like in the zine (perhaps with suggestions from others, heh), which made me think: hey. it will pretty much be a dombillijah.com production, why not get my hostees to write something? like, each of my hostees? there's around 25+ of them now, that could work (what do you say, my beloveds?). 25 quality stories, around 1000 (preferably 1000++) words each, unpublished online, well edited and presented in one tasteful volume.

and while we're on that topic, (i thought, as i was in the shower,) why not make it liek, a dombillijah.com (/rosiesamfrodo.com) fundraiser type thing. obviously i wouldn't be wanting to make a profit from it, so the 'retail' cost of the zine would cover basically postage and production. dombillijah.com costs a certain amount each year to run, which isn't ludicrously high, but is still almost unaffordable to impoverished students such as ourselves. the tip jar has been successful enough to allow us to purchase a year's worth of space for dombillijah in itself (not sharing with rsf.com any more), but it is an ongoing cost. why not have it so like, a dollar or two from the price of the zine went to the coffers for the upkeep of our beloved ~~empires~~ domains?

so anyway. then i decided to make a poll in order to ascertain if anyone would be interested in a zine in the first place, which has so far suggested that yes, people would be interested though i suspect that when it comes to the crunch of clicking on that link on their flist that says "buy this zine!", most will not follow through, but someone also brought up the issue of defamation.

i don't believe there's been a real person fic zine published; it's beyond common knowledge that there are fictional people zines around, and have been since before mullets were really, really cool. obviously the production companies know about them, and overlook them, for whatever reason. but real people zines?

jedinic was adamantly against the idea, saying that if one of the actors got their hands on a lotrips zine, hell would be to pay in the form of a defamation case. do you think that's possible? it would be distributed, not-for-profit, along the private rather than public lines of communication, and not in any way marketed as truth to anyone, let alone anyone that could do some damage with it.

thoughts? knowledge? opinions? suggestions? ideas? on defamation and everything that came above it ~~including the icon omg wtf his little FACE~~ would be extremely welcome. cmon people! discuss! if you managed to read this far.

thanks.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That's not totally meta-- or well, it is, but it's also a good idea. I have dipped into very geeky places where, say, coders gather to make 'art' - it's called demo-making, I'm sort of part of a group doing that (small executables that produce moving images and music when you run them on a computer, yes i know like this it sounds lame but it's a thing, okay) - and these people have online zines, also executables. It's not a website, though there's a website too, but you have to download each issue and 'watch' and browse it, it's like a mini CDrom application, if you will, with articles and graphics and sounds and contributions from the world over, liek. There's an editor/publisher behind it, with editorial choices made and all.

I've been thinking for a while that something like this in the world of fanfic would be nifty.

And while I'm here let me answer the original question (though i haven't voted yet):

I'm all for it, little profit included. In my LJ memories (they're a mess but) there's a section keywroded 'legal' with links to entries where people have discussed various fanfic / fandom issues, and I seem to remember I've seen a few times knowledgeable people explaining that in a lot of ways, RPF is more legal than FPF, since there are no trademarks on real people. Sure, they have a right to their image and stuff, but as long as you label it clearly as fiction, you're not even half as bad as sleazy tabloïds spreading unfounded rumors-- arguments like that.

Onviously I do not know how solid your case would be, but I think you can find an answer out there, and checking my memories might be a good start, er.

I'm all for it in ANY case, cos I'm unresonable like that, and cos I'd love it, and would gladly pay for it, and think it'd easily stay under the radar of the bad PR sharks heheh.

And I'm not bitter at all to not be one of your hostees, nono. is bettah anyway cos i never finish what i start and deadlines type things are bad for my health

(but in an online zine we could also have audioporn, think of that!)

*makes time to record the end*

i actually considered the cdrom idea - even just an audio cd, because dude, *audiopron* heheh. i still do like the idea of a cdrom to send out, but hmm. having something printed would be rather cool.

hmm.

heh, good ideas can be stored up. We (you, whoever wants, I dunno) can do both. liek.

Zines are COOL, yo.