It's very hard to create something. Characters, properties, ideas that you can sell on to the highest bidder... it's very difficult. So when wanting to create a magazine, a sort of catchment for all the brilliance that you experience from your friends on a daily basis, that should be the hardest thing of them all. It's not yours, not completely. You're at the mercy of people. Deadlines. Busy schedules. Writer's Block (not that it truly exists).
People make promises that they don't deliver on. Some people deliver on their promises beyond what you were originally expecting, and that's a wonderful experience, I've discovered. It happens around the beginning of the scouring period for content:
"I'll try and get something to you, but I don't know what." "Awesome, whatever you do, I look forward to it." An hour before the deadline: "Check your inbox." After checking said inbox and opening an elaborately titled file: "Wow."
That's the moment I live for now, when I'm in my Zenith! headspace. Sure, I'd like that moment to come regularly, and I'd love for it to come maybe, I don't know, a month before the deadline, but it's that punch-the-air-in-gratitude moment that is currently the connective membrane of what I'm living.
I want this to succeed. Truly. Issues might be late. That's the way of the world. Heck, I live a life too, and it doesn't always revolve around Zenith!. I want to create characters, properties, ideas that can sustain me. I want to finish my novel. I want to be able to show off about things. But Zenith!... Right now, Zenith! is what I want to show off about. I want to see it made real. I want to hold it in my hands. I want you all to be able to hold it in your hands. So, of course, when it's ready for ordering you'll know it. I won't shut up about it. This is off our own backs. Other people have sponsorship. Advertisements fill their pages. I can't help but feel that things like that might compromise their content. That it can't help, even if it's not the case, feel as if all the stuff inside is mandated. I've collected free, ad-driven magazines (heck, I've paid for some of them) from across the country. Wherever I've gone and whenever I find them, I pick them up and I read them. And I'm always left wanting more from it. Not that it inspires wanting through content, but because it's so lacking.
So, right, Zenith!. Zenith! is full of stuff. Zenith! isn't a niche magazine because, right now, we're finding out legs, building our foundation. We're looking for anything to fill its pages. And #1 is being built. Constructed. Developed. And soon, we'll have something to show for it. Something that's made from sweat and tears and blood and wanting. That's what this is all about.
The end game. The end product. Are you as excited as me?
On a different note, Warren Ellis said this on Writer's Block. And I can't help but feel it's true, even if I do sometimes say I'm struggling. But that's the thing, I struggle, and I write, and I write shit sometimes but I don't suddenly find myself without abiltiy to put word onto paper or finger to key. Anyway, I'll let him do the talking. It's easier that way: "Writer’s block? I’ve heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write? Then that person isn’t a writer anymore. The job is getting up in the morning and fucking writing. If you get up in the morning and you cannot write, you’re something else, aren’t you?"
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