#17 & #30

#17: Put out issues #16 & #17, completed 3.24.11
#30: Finish piece on queer identity and publish in a zine, completed 3.24.11

My life, interests and priorities have changed a lot since I started this list, and it hasn't even been a year yet. Some of the fitness goals were a bit hard for me to get motivated about, but when we adopted Chance I started jogging with him every day. And now I'm in training to try out for roller derby, and made a workout schedule for myself, so things like doing yoga twice a week happens every week now. Also, I made this list a few weeks after attending the Chicago Zine Fest last year. I have been publishing zines for the last ten years of my life, since I was 15. It's something that's always been important to me, as well as feeling at home in the zine community. I slacked a bit for a few years during college, only publishing one zine every year or two, instead of twice a year or more. I always explained it away as being busy with school. And after I went to the CZF I was inspired! I wanted to start doing my zine more seriously, and so this list contains a lot of items related to making and promoting zines (publish queer piece in a zine, publish two issues of Checkered Past, submit zines to five distros, leave my zines in 5 places, table at a zine fest). And so, I signed up for the CZF this year, and decided to finish up those two issues before the fest. I finished up CP #16, which was such a long, hefty issue, that I didn't have the motivation to do a lot of interesting layout design with it, I just glued the printed out pages onto maps. And then it came down to CP#17. The prospect of gathering the material/writing for it and putting it together was so...unappealing. I just really didn't want to do it. And at first I decided not to at all. At the last minute I decided to put together a mini-zine of one section I was going to have in CP#17: interesting stories from my time working in a hotel. So I did that instead, and threw together Hotel Stories in lieu of CP#17. And I'm glad I did.

But it just made me realize that my heart's not in this anymore. It probably hasn't been for years, or I would have been making zines no matter how busy I was. I don't really do that kind of writing anymore, and I guess I don't have a desire/need to put my life out there for others in the same way (I say while typing in a blog...psht). I'm more comfortable just living my life and keeping it to myself.

So, I think I'm done making zines, at least for now. CZF was sort of my last hurrah in the zine community, and it was a great way to go out.