Wha-a-at? Issue number 3?
THREE??? Just shows you that ANYthing is possible!
Now,
we're still stumbling about, finding our way, searching for Our
Look, I guess you could say. Last ish, we ran a novel
-- and, that is the last one! I learned a lot in doing it, but
the formatting was murder! (Actually, I think I could
do it again with much less trouble, having Learned
Something from doing it. But, on the other hand, I don't want to
test my luck! Might have other novels, but they will be
run as serials!)
BUT --
I NEED FEEDBACK!
Got lots of letters on Issue Number One, but few on Number
Two. How else am I going to tell which direction to go?
With this issue, it is MORE important, as thish is an
experimental one; I'm trying a more fannish slant,
including not only fan fiction where the author uses a parody of
sf to make his point (as in Fine Print) but also
fa-a-an fiction, where fannishness itself os the
driving force (as in The Mighty Mimeo.) And a piece that is more
from the old Doc Savage pulps than sf, in Wilfred of
London.
SO --
Let us know what you think.
Should Planetary Stories continue in this direction? Should we
have more fan fiction? Fa-a-an fiction? Pulp
fiction?
It's amazing how little I know about
putting this stuff together. I mean, I have been using a
computer for a long, l-o-n-g time. Way back when
MetLife first put computers in our offices, I found out
how to fiddle with their computer presentations to make them show
what I wanted propspects to see. Also, I wrote and
wrote and wrote, learned to play games, got online, did
email, even, recently, learned to do online publishing (with a
minimal understanding of html!) and prepare PDFs to
attach to email.
BUT--
I know next to nothing
about computers! Kinda like what they say about our brain, that
we only use 10% of it; I might (if you stretch things a
bit) have a vague knowledge of 10% of my computer's
capability! Like, I made a big effort getting together the first
fanzine PDF -- and it wasn't hard at all! That is, once
I found out what I was doing. . . . And it often happens that
someone will be trying to tell me how to do something,
and they start with: "All you have to do is. . .
." and that's as far as I can follow!
YOU CAN WIN A
SPECIAL PRIZE!
(I'll think of something!) Look at the box
over the story, "Spectre of Space". That is the end
result of over four hours of work! First thing I did
was make the box in WordPerfect. The box was the key to
the whole thing; I wanted a heavy box around it and couldn't do
it in Front Page Express. (Now watch -- half of you
know an easy way to do it in FPX that I wasn't aware of! Like
I said above. . . .) ANYway, after doing that I scanned
it and, in Photoshop, put color to it to blend with the
pulp background I use.That's when the fun began! The way
Photoshop works, you touch a wand to the area you want
to color, then use the paint bucket to dump in the selected
color. Great for big areas, but then there was the
text! Enclosed letters (o, p, q, d, even m and n and
don't forget a, and there's the enclosed portion of e, and on and
on) showed up nice and white! I started using the wand
on the enclosed letters (zoomed in close, so I was only working
on a short portion of two lines) and then the paint
bucket. . .but that was taking too long, with all the
repetition. So I started Painting the colors in. (Again, there
are probably lots of you saying, "But why didn't
you--?" Pass them tips in!)
Then, after way more
than an hour (could have been over three hours; I wasn't keeping
score) I came up with the approach I should have taken
first! In much under an hour, I was thru. The prize is
for whoever can tell me how I did it! The clues are all there.
(For that matter, most of you probably have already
figgered it out!)}