Column: Editor’s Note

Column:

Editor’s Note

By Lindsay Gibb

If you’re like me and you read a magazine from back to front (at least the first time through) you may have noticed something different. Then again the contents page could have given it away, or even the contributors page, if you pay attention to that.

What I’m trying to say is, we’ve made changes. They’re big changes structurally, but content-wise they’re little. Sections are gone, features and excerpts have expanded and we’ve added more pencil sharpeners and fiction. It suddenly seemed the obvious choice, taking the ezines, music and video sections out of the magazine. It doesn’t mean we’re rejecting these artistic media, rather, we didn’t feel they needed entire sections devoted to them anymore.

The ezines section will be more useful online, where people can click on a link to look at a site, rather than type in some long combination of letters, numbers and backslashes only to find they typed it wrong or the site has gone down. The music section was fun, but all alternative media covers music to exhaustive levels, so we opted to get rid of it as well. Video we decided to remove for similar reasons. Writing about films we’ve seen at festivals doesn’t help our readers when they have next-to-no way of finding them when they aren’t orderable or available online. Obscure is great and all, but our job is to make the obscure things more accessible, not to rub it in your face that we saw it and you didn’t.

This move also helps to maintain our focus. Ultimately this is a literary magazine for people who are interested in independently published work and the culture around zines. We’ll still tell you about films, music and ezines, just through pencil sharpeners, features and online content when something relevant makes it onto our radar, rather than through sections we’re forced to fill.

Oh yea, and we added comics. We put out a call for comic artists to submit their work and we picked four. They will run on our web-site with monthly updates and each issue we’ll run our favourites in the print magazine, in case you missed them online. We’re still looking for one more comic, so send me your stuff if you’re interested.

Anyway, enough describing it, this is it. So read it and see for yourself if it works better or if we’re all fools.

Speaking of fools, this is the comedy issue of BP and instead of trying to write something funny for my editorial (which would have been quite painful) I decided to take an online quiz to see what kind of sense of humour I have. When in doubt, waste some time taking an online quiz, I say. Here are the results:

“Your humor’s mostly innocent and off-the-cuff, but somehow there’s something slightly menacing about you. Part of your humor is making people a little uncomfortable, even if the things you say aren’t themselves confrontational. You probably have a very dry delivery, or are seriously over-the-top. Your type is the most likely to appreciate a good insult and/or broken bone and/or very very fat person dancing.” Mmm, fat people dancing doesn’t really make me laugh. A fat person blowing up (à la The Meaning of Life) however, now that’s funny.