This postFirst, a blast from the past: this week a year ago I was blogging about my favorite things, designing my first book, and posting my first (and only) vlog entry.
And now we return to our regularly scheduled programming. I suppose this is somewhat regularly scheduled, but it’s not exactly regular — there aren’t many unifying themes (at least that I’ve been aware of). Randomness is good. And that brings me to the topic of this post.
As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I’ve been planning to start a web magazine called Random: A Little Bit of Everything. Nothing too complicated (or serious, for that matter), more for fun than for anything else. And I’ve missed designing magazine layouts (I was editor/designer for the literary magazine in high school), and I’ve never started my own magazine before, so it was a no-brainer.
What kind of a magazine will it be? An eclectic one. The grab bag of magazines. Will it work? I have no idea. But it doesn’t hurt to try. It’ll only be published as a PDF — at least at first — and if it works then I’ll add an HTML front and perhaps eventually go paper. But for now I’m fine with just PDF.
Now, I could come up with all of the content myself, but that’d be boring (and exhausting). So I’m opening it up to submissions from any and all who are interested. E-mail me (my e-mail’s in the sidebar) with your material. Only digital submissions are allowed. The deadline for the first issue is Christmas Day at 4:53 p.m. (Why not? ;)) Unless I get enough material before then, that is. We’ll see. Articles, short stories, plays, how-tos, poetry, puzzles, news, reviews, art, and anything else you can think up — it’s all welcome. Tone-wise, too. Funny, sad, happy, somber, whatever. I’ll probably be asking some of you bloggers for permission to reprint posts I think would fit, by the way.
This doesn’t mean that I’ll publish anything and everything I get, of course. Only material I consider appropriate will be “printed,” and if something isn’t quite up to par then I’ll work with the creator to get it there, but in all reality I don’t foresee much of a problem. It’s a nice opportunity to see your name in print. Oh, the magazine will be licensed under a Creative Commons license, but authors will retain ownership to their works and will be able to further restrict the rights on a particular work if they so desire. Andsince it’s a voluntary, for-free thing, there won’t be any remuneration for accepted submissions. Sorry. :)
Having said all this, a little voice is whispering, “But what if nobody submits anything?” My reply: then it’ll be a short magazine. :)
