Acrux 2.1 September, 2018

In common with most, my parents instilled in my subconscious an abhorrence of waste. Wasting things made or acquired and wasting time and effort.

You can imagine then my dissatisfaction with the way that all the material I have written over the years, from articles to whole newsletters and fanzines created for various people and groups, are now odd scraps, lying in unmarked graves dotted around the internet, some of them ghosts, a digital memory that now only exists on my hard drive because the website they were lodged on, no longer exists. Perhaps even more galling are the things written that never even made it off my hard drive, some now out of date news articles but some, well, I wouldn’t have written them if I didn’t think they had potential!

I've recently decided the time has come to expand from fan-based work into 'indie' work, original fiction, but does that mean that I abandon fan production? What place should my fan production hold in my creative life? I certainly have no creative cringe away from fannish work, a lot of it had a lot more raw honesty than some of the pedestrian commercial clichés I’m seeing regurgitated on screen and in print. I feel the need to write, to publish, to put my work out there and risk the slings and arrows of honest critique.

For the moment, I believe that a perzine – a ‘personal fanzine’ get it? - can resolve a number of the issues that I have identified in my creative life since retirement. I want to tie up the loose ends of projects started and not completed, to actively push fandom and ‘Everyman Creativity’ towards new limits and into Indie production. To get some closure on ideas I have on just exactly how far I can go with the concept of a fanzine.

At least that’s the theory.

I hope you like my little perzine, my best wishes to all who read it and the very best of luck to you for your own endeavours.