Jules Jones

Anyone got a copy of the first volume of Tales from Space City they'd be willing to give/sell/lend to aralias? Alas, Judith and I no longer have the paper master, let alone any copies. I do have the files. In Lotus Ami Pro format. Formatted for a Laserjet 4 printer... They're going to need importing into a slightly more modern file format and the layout re-done from scratch, which I'd rather not do if there's a paper copy out there in need of a good home.

ETA: a copy offered within 20 minutes! However, I would note for anyone thinking of purging their zines that there are other neofans out there who are Very Sad that they missed the zine era, and even if nobody wanted to take the zines off your hands five years ago, they can find good homes now. This goes double for Tales, because apparently even the first two volumes with a moderate print run never turn up on eBay. And those are the ones that won't be going on AO3 even if I do get a circular tuit, because I don't have permission to put much of the contents online.

Prompted by someone asking where to find more of Predatrix's fanfic, I have added a skeleton of Tales 1 to my account at AO3 and the mirror site at Word Press. Right now it has the editorial frontmatter, including the table of contents, Pred's "MSWank 5.0", and one of the filler snippets. I will add more things as I get time/energy to do so and permissions from people (remember that I did not get advance permission for online publication for the first 2 volumes). The AO3 version is set up as a collection, so any of you who already have copies of your stories on AO3 can also add them to the collection.

If you don't have an account but are happy for me to add some or all of your Tales 1 content to the "whole zine" file, please comment or email. I have a file around here somewhere of who gave me permission a few years ago, but I need to do a disk trawl for it. Likewise, if you did give me permission but have changed your mind since, please let me know.

I'm happy to add links from the TOC/stories to people's websites, LJs, etc, but that's something I'm *not* doing unless the person concerned asks me to.

I'm planning to put up the skeletons for the other zines, ditto, but at this point I need a break from peering at HTML.

Well, that's a top collection for Tales set up at AO3, and sub-collections for "Dead Boyfriend of the Week" and Tales 1. Dead Boyfriend is populated with the cover art by Spacefall, a contents list, and links to all the contents, plus I've added my own story to AO3 and put it into the collection. I'm stopping there for the moment, but will put up sub-collections for the other zines at some point. Next experiment is to upload the entire zine of Dead Boyfriend as a single "story" so that anyone who wants to can dump the entire thing onto an ebook reader. However, that can wait -- I've done enough zine stuff for one weekend, and it's time to work on the writing that I get paid for.

Setting up the collection for Tales 1 necessitated trawling my hard drive looking for the editorial and contents list, which took longer than it might, mostly because that was 13 years ago. Urk. I also found the permissions list for Tales 1, which was a serious blast from the past. I've lost contact with a lot of those folk, and not just because I've gafiated from the fandom -- some of them gafiated before I did, and a lot more thoroughly. At least I still go to Redemption.

The Dead Boyfriend page is now on a new WordPress blog set up in the name of the editorial pseudonym, complete with updated links and current availability of the treeware edition (i.e. OOP). This was decidedly less painful than working with Sites, and not just because I have at least some familiarity with WP's little quirks, so I'm going to go ahead and make WordPress the site's new home.

At the moment it has only the editorial material locally, and links to the stories on archives elsewhere (mainly Pink Asteroids). But something I need to consider for the future is whether to put a zine up as one single webpage, or to break it up into chapters (for the novels) or stories (for the anthologies). It doesn't make any practical layout difference for Dead Boyfriend because this zine was very plain internally, but most of the zines had a lot of filler material in the white space at the end of long stories -- ultra-shorts, snippets, amusing exchanges from the mailing list, oddments of art. They were explicitly designed to cram as much entertaining material from the list into a saddle-stapled booklet as possible while still being readable and nicely laid out, and they are very much designed and laid out as a treeware archive. A few items use typographical layout tricks akin to Lewis Carroll's "The Mouse's Tail". I'm going to have to think about the best way of putting that into a reflowable text display format.

Other things -- for now I'm inclined to leave comments on so that if people wish to comment on stories they can do so (which makes me lean towards a story per page format). I probably need to have a note somewhere to say that if people want their stories pulled or comments off, they should email

I now have all of my Stuff under one roof for the first time in a decade, and there is a lot of it, so I decided that I had to be realistic about the likelihood of me reading some of these again. Those on the list below are marked to go -- if you want any of them, speak up. And soon, because most of what's on the list below will be going in the next paper recycling collection if not spoken for. Mostly Blake's 7, a few other things. Some gen, some slash and mixed. There's a detailed B7 zine database at Hermit if you want to check what's in something and read reviews.

While I'm on the subject, I've also got a few profic titles of specific fannish interest, for either postage or for postage and what I'd get selling it through Amazon. One Daw edition and one Legend edition of Tanith Lee's Kill the Dead, hardback of Pat Elrod's "I, Strahd", paperback of the sequel "The war against Azalin", paperback of Lillian Stewart Carl's "Ashes to Ashes", and several copies of the first print run of Della van Hise's pro Trek novel "Killing Time" -- i.e. the print run that got out before the powers-that-be noticed how very, very intentionally slashy it was, and hastily ordered a reprint with censorship. :->

Also a copy of the reviled-with-reason Boxtree book. The one that I took savage delight in giving half a star on LibraryThing...

( list of zines )

I have rather too many fanfic zines, and not enough shelf space. I'm about to start weeding them, but I do want to keep an easily accessible record of what I've owned, and ideally my reviews where they exist. LibraryThing seems to be the answer, but I'm going to have to think about whether I want a completely separate account for that. It's not exactly a secret that a number of those zines were acquired as contributor copies, but it may still be polite to various parties to not tie the identities together that publicly. However, I probably have more than 200 zines, and I'm not sure I want to pay for another lifetime account just to record the zines.

OTOH, I do want to make the collection public on LT, because it will be a very easy way to track whether a zine is marked for disposal or has gone. That could be useful for people who'd like to ask for any of the surplus ones before they go off to a con charity table.

[rummage] yes, my old Approach database has more than 200 entries, and I've acquired more since I last updated that.

Shall think about this for a bit...