Tag Archives: fanzine

2006 – a year of creation

2005 was a strange year.
It’s the first full year I’ve had down here in London, and it is still down here as I’m only just getting used to it being my home rather than Edinburgh. Of the many things I’ve done in 2005, the most rewarding has been the baking.

gingercake mix

So it was only proper that I made a cake today, a further variation on the ginger cake in Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries with mixed peel in the place of sultanas on the grounds that I don’t have any sultanas in the cupboard and that mixed peel is the best baking ingredient in the world.

gingercake oven

I don’t think I’ve ever blogged so little as the past few months, and while the fanzine idea is great and is happening – it didn’t really catch fire in 2005. There’s all manner of longer pieces up my sleeves and I feel in the mood for writing more, not least because I now have a nice clean new keyboard to write them on.

baked ginger cake

So, as ever, the proof will be in the eating but the aim of the year is to bake and cook more. Take some photographs with the new camera (a digital SLR at last – now that’s a good Christmas and Birthday present). I would be offering you some delightful photos of London today were it not for the fact that the January sales were far too tempting, and also the light was the greyer than grey.

May 2006 bring all of you dear (dimishing no doubt) readers all that you wish. I’ll be raving over the next few days on the Music, TV, and even Books that made staying in during 2005 worthwhile. The Theatre, Films and exhibitions that made 2005 worthwhile have almost all gone in one way or another (though if you are in London see Ibsen’s Pillars of the Community at the National Theatre – it’s ace).

$END_OF_BLOG

…but beginning of something else.

I’ve been blogging for a number of years (five) now. There have been intermissions, fallow periods and even more rarely posting frenzies. However, the underlying trend is that I’ve realised I don’t want to blog just to vent my spleen as and when my whimsy suits.

So, I’m calling a day on my blogging.

Don’t remove me from your RSS feeds so fast though, as I will still be posting.

In the past year or so I’ve been reading a lot of fanzines, all from the navel of fandom into which I have neatly fallen into since heading south. Reading these has led me to realise that firing off the odd random fast piece of writing is not my thing. Instead I’ll be writing longer, more considered pieces – with a view to collating them as a whole later.

As you’ll see I’ve tagged this post as part of issue 1. It doesn’t exist yet, in fact this is all I’ve written. This is very much an experiment – but I think that with a little more thought into the writing I might just enjoy having this thing a lot more – and that’s what this is here for. For those of you who demand their fanzines be paper, I promise to bind the results up by the end of the year, and that is a binding promise.

In summary: all killer, no filler. And a special dead tree syndication method with high latency forthcoming.