Shimo Suntila: Editor Goes Cereal
(Cosmos Pen 2/2003)
Muro my readers!This has been one hell of a ride. It's been killing people left and right leaving only drained husks behind. But such is the wild world of fanzine publishing.
Even tho I know it doesn't help anything to explain one's faults, I'll do it anyway.
I took it upon myself to make six zines for the Finncon. I assumed I could handle them all and meanwhile organize huge chunks of the con itself. I was dead wrong. Now I'm dead and wrong, but I'll get back to that. I had to prioritize and complete first all the projects that depended on the print that had a vacation coming up. The rest could be done later. Two zines (Con booklet, 76 pages and Spin, 80 pages) were out.
I should perhaps mention that I only edit the zines, I've got more talented people doing the layouts. So I don't actually do that much. Anyway. Cosmos Pen 1/03 was starting to take shape and meanwhile I had to get pictures for our Filkbook. Star Wars zine was pretty much edited, I just needed to give feedback to the layoutist. After SW zine got completed and sent to the printers and I had edited the whole Filkbook to be up to date, Cosmic Pen 1/03 was about edited. We still needed to get Cosmos Pen 2/03 done, and all the texts needed to be in English in the first place, or translated. If this had been done months ago, there never would have been any hurry, but then we were less than two weeks away from the con. The race began.
As I write this, it's early Thursday morning. The Filkbook is being printed, SW zine is out already, CP 1/03 has just been completed, CP 2/03 lack only this editorial and the insanely conceived notorious Seventh Zine should be done by this morning. All is well in the sense that I actually did edit seven zines for the con. But the price is high.
Along the way I managed to kill two layoutists. They've really busted their asses off on my behalf following mad timetables only because I couldn't keep all the balls in the air at once. The person who has written most of this issue has been doing non stop work to complete all the late assignments for a while now. And our translator has been burning the midnight–early morning oil to get everything into English while checking the grammar of other articles. So some serious thanks are in order.
Thanks to Pasi Karppanen for writing so much, and keeping this English Special alive. Thanks to Liisa Rantalaiho for translating pretty much all of it. Thanks to Annakaisa Kultima for doing the layouts to to issues in about as many days. And thanks to my very good friend Janne Järvinen, who was caught right in the middle of this all and had to do the layouts for four zines, three of them being 60 pages or more.
And of course thanks to all the writers and artists who've contributed to this mad dash before the first ever Finnish Eurocon, especially Tuuli Hypén and my wife Petra, who've made a huge contribution my drawing even more pictures by the minute. You've all done a great deal of work and your efforts won't be forgotten!
As for the rest of you, please read the zines and enjoy. They've been made with genuine feelings, even if rush was amongst them most of the time. As I said, it's been a hell of a ride.Shimo Suntila
Originally published in Cosmos Pen 2/2003. All rights reserved.