I am writing today to let you know that, after an eternity of faffing about, I have finally printed up the first issues of two new paper fanzines - the current plan being that they will replace / supersede this blog going forward.
There are several reasons for making the move back to paper at this point.
Firstly, I need to face the fact that I’ve reached a point in life where I no longer have sufficient free time to produce regular, quality writing, as demanded by the weblog format.
As such, the zines I have put together contain about a 50/50 mixture of new writing, and stuff which I have previously published here (all substantially revised, or entirely re-written in some cases).
This is a balance I intend to maintain going forward, allowing me to draw upon the huge volume of stuff I’ve published here over the years, revisiting some highlights and hopefully presenting them to a new audience along the way. Combined with the possibility of publishing work from other contributors (submissions/ideas are very welcome), I hope that this will help me to put new issues together at a slightly quicker speed than would otherwise be the case - assuming that there are future issues that is (let’s see how these first ones go).
Secondly - let’s face it, the internet in the 2020s sucks. As anyone who has ploughed through the various warning screens and cookie pop-ups necessary to access these words will be aware, the blogger platform in particular has become increasingly obstructive and dysfunctional, and after trawling through the various aggressively monetized / homogenous sites which may have offered an alternative home for BITR… well, long story short, making stuff online is just no fun anymore, at least for a social media-eschewing refusenik like myself.
And, thirdly, from the POV of where I live at least, the world of DIY paper publications is actually thriving, counter-intuitive as that may seem. Zine fairs and such-like are regular occurrences, and whilst the personal & art-based zines which dominate them are generally not my thing, there have still been a number of great music / film / culture-based efforts popping up here in the UK in recent years, providing me with a blueprint for how this kind of thing can still be made to work, on a creative level at least.
So, to finally get the point -
The Beast with Two Paperbacks is a new zine about reading second-hand books.
The first issue features writing on Simon Raven, Martin Cruz Smith’s ‘Inquisitor’ books (both re-dos of BITR blog-posts), along with a Pulp Non-Fiction piece on the Pelican punk rock classic ‘Knuckle Sandwich: Growing Up in a Working-Class City’ (new) and a compare/contrast between two novels by Ramsey Campbell and Doris Lessing (also new).
It also contains some badly structured sentences and a couple of glaring typos. I really should have done a final proof-read of the text before sending to print. But if you’ve persisted with this blog over the years, you’ll be familiar with all that I suspect.
Skull Time Movie Journal is a new zine covering fringe movies, genre movies, WEIRD movies - you know the score.
The first issue contains a re-do of my post on the Indonesian erotic horror ‘Cinta Terlarang’ (1995), a brand new review of the Johnny Cash scum-noir disasterpiece ‘Five Minutes To Live’ aka ‘Door-To-Door Maniac’ (1961/66), a round-up of ’50s/‘60s Japanese horror films with contemporary settings (largely re-written, although I’ve reviewed all of the films here in the past), and a lengthy chat with my partner about the career of Cynthia Rothrock (also brand new).
This one also has - I believe - fewer typos and better sentence construction, because I sent it to print after the other one, and hey, you live and learn.
Paper copies of both of these zines can be purchased here.
Or alternatively, PDF copies can be read or downloaded for free via Archive.org. (Which is totally cool with me btw - please don’t feel obliged to buy the paper versions just to show support or whatever.)
Also, I’ve put together a new Linktree to unite my various online projects / pages, so please do give that a look too.
If you hit the ‘FOLLOW’ button on the Ko-fi site linked above, I will send you occasional updates on activities related to these zines, but I will also hopefully continue to plug any new issues etc here too.
And finally, I’m also planning to start doing another mailing list, mainly just to keep in touch with friends and chat about music and stuff - very much TBC at this stage, but you’d be welcome to sign up if you’re interested, link on the Linktree page above.
And… that’s about it for now I think! Hope you’re all doing well, and as ever, thoughts and feedback are welcome.
