Junot Díaz

I remember liking Junot Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, so I read his short story collection This Is How You Lose Her. It's horribly misogynistic - like, it's about misogyny, and not really in a self-reflexive way - but it's fun, sort of. Until the last story, in which Díaz is more or less talking about trying to sleep with his undergrads.

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I still like the short story collection, though. This is one of those things, like Louis CK's "Jizanthapus" bit, that I'm just going to have to have complicated feelings about.

Legend of Haiku Zine, Part 2

I finished the cover! Finally!

What happened is that I wasn't able to communicate to the cover artist that there needs to be blank space on the image for the title. I suspect that, if we had been communicating over email instead of through Twitter DMs, this wouldn't have been an issue. Live and learn, I guess. In any case, this wasn't anyone's fault, just something that needed to be taken care of.

The artist was kind enough to send me the original Photoshop document, which had well over a hundred layers. Since the cover image is a forest scene, with lots of details and textures and light dappling and layer effects, it took me about seven hours to figure out how to edit the image properly so that I could put in the title. Yesterday I just had to make myself sit down and put in the last two hours of work until it was finished. But it's done! And it looks amazing!

My task for today is to do page layout for the last few poems. A couple of people sent me PDF or JPEG files of text with creative formatting that I was too stressed out to handle last year. Do I try to preserve the author's formatting, or just ignore it? I'm leaning toward "ignore," but I'll see what I can do. It's fantastic work, but the quality of the image files is such that I can't just paste them into the zine without it looking like garbage, which isn't fair to the authors.

Since October, I've been applying and submitting to a number of zines and other publications, and I now have a much better sense of what works, how it works, and why it works. I think that, if I ever do anything like this in the future, I should have people send in their work via a Google form (which is actually what I've started doing with my undergrads), as doing so allows you to put the instructions right there on the application form and organize everyone's submissions as text boxes and image libraries.