Serial No. 2

I should be going to bed so I can get up in 5½ hours and have a bit of morning before leaving for Vegas. Here I am instead. Oh well, it's not like I could actually go to sleep now.

I definitely provided too much information last night, but it felt right while it was coming out of me. I hit a storytelling flow, and didn't feel inclined to shut it off until it was finished. There isn't nearly as much to say tonight about the second half my history with serial fiction, but it does need a little bit of a set-up:

In the 70's and 80's there was a flourishing APA culture that you never knew about. APA's started much earlier than the 70's, but by the time the 70's rolled around, they were springing up all over the place. APA's— Amateur Press Alliances— were groups of people writing about specific subcultures. They published their work generally monthly or bi-monthly and distributed copies of their work to all members of the group. For the most part, membership in any given APA was small because printing costs were still high at this time. (This was well before everyone had access to a home computer and printer.) Do you remember the days of getting copies of your work done at the local copying store or at Kinko's? If you wanted to print on both sides of the paper, it cost more. If you wanted to print on color paper, it cost more. If you wanted thicker paper... it cost more. So, let's say you've had a productive writing period and you've fitted your words to six pages. (Typically, your monthly or bi-monthly contribution was called a 'zine.') Now suppose there are 50 members of your APA. When mailing time comes around, you need to provide 50 copies of your zine, which you mail into the central mailer. Three pages, double-sided, could easily cost you $50 - $75 for 50 copies. Although I've never heard this expressed, I'm sure costs were the reason most APA's kept their membership small. (The central mailer, on receiving copies of everyone's zines, would then shuffle them all together and bind— staple!— them and redistribute one full copy of that 'issue' to each member.)

So what were all these people writing about? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but APA's were an early outgrowth of geek culture. Think about, who else is going to sit and write passionately month after month about a specific topic. So, many APA's were themed around science fiction, TV programs, comic books, erotic fiction, etc. In fact, those themes are too broad for 80% of the APA's back in the day. They were mostly themed around specific TV programs or comic books or science fiction subgenres. If you think about it, they filled the function that we now commonly associate with fan websites. So, there were APA's themed around Star Trek, Superman, and anything else quantifiable and capable of producing at least a couple dozen fans willing to write about it. They were small communities of people finding each other and communicating there love for one or more topics before the internet made that sort of thing common.

In the mid-80's I used to go to San Diego Comic-Con with my group of friends every summer. We were all big into comics, and the San Diego Con was much smaller and much more manageable than it is today. The Con was still largely about comic books at the time, whereas today it is about movies and TV and video games and comics. Like I said, we used to go every year and have a blast down in San Diego for four days. (I could spend many blog entries reliving old San Diego Comic-Con stories!)

I was the first person in our group to stop going regularly. I had a weekend and night jobs that didn't always afford me the time to go. I wanted to hear everything from the guys though when they returned! I very vividly remember my friends returning from the Con during the Summer of 1991. (It could have been 1990, but I believe it was '91.) I was working nights at the gas station then. Pat returned from the Con on fire about an APA named Interlac. I knew nothing about APA's at the time, but I was a big Legion of Super-Heroes fan, as was Pat. Somehow he had found out about Interlac and he returned from the Con with a copy of one of the mailings. It was like a phone book of multi-colored pages, filled with writing about the Legion of Super-Heroes! It was easy to get caught up in Pat's eagerness about the APA. After reading the mailing, he shared it with me (and Dale, my roommate at the time), and Pat and I were instantly ready to join. (Dale contributed a little bit, but I don't believe he ever put himself on the list to join— which was a shame since he was the most physically creative of all of us, making ship models you could fold out of paper and also making 'action figures' out of modeling clay.)

Pat and I could not be restrained though, and immediately signed on as Wait-Listers. Interlac had a capped membership of 50, so anyone who wanted to join when the membership was at level cap had to sit on the wait-list. Some people sat on the wait-list for three or four years before becoming members. On the wait-list all you could do was hope that less active members would drop out, thus making spaces in the membership rolls.

Wait-listers could also contribute to each mailing. Members were required to provide 50 copies of their zines each time around— enough to make 50 full copies of the current mailing, one to be sent back to each member. Many people, however, made extra copies, and the central mailer would bind these extra copies together to make nearly complete mailings. These extra mailings would go to the wait-listers by their order on the list. When Pat and I joined, we were about 15 spaces down the wait-list so we generally got fairly complete copies of the mailings, as most 'Laccers (Interlac members) were generous with the extra copies.)

The wait-list was also time to get yourself known amongst the membership. Literally, some people had been members since issue 1 of the mailing, some 15 - 20 years before. So, the members knew each other pretty well. (Many of the zines were just long letters the members were writing to each other.) It took some time for wait-listers to get noticed, and contributing to the mailing while on the wait-list was the best way to get noticed. As I said, Pat and I were so anxious to join that we started out wait-lister zines immediately. To our credit, we both got a lot of attention from the membership pretty quickly.

I could go on and on talking about Interlac, but that's not really why I brought up the subject. My favorite character in the Legion of Super-Heroes has always been Brainiac 5. Since I didn't have Pat's talents for cartooning, I had to stick to writing, and it wasn't long before I started writing— you guessed it!— a serialized story centered around Brainiac 5. It was a lot of fun to write, and I daresay it got positive reviews from the membership. At the time, I was still working nights at the gas station, so I had hours to read and write every night. It was a great time... that came to an end when the gas station got rid of all us employees. I found work a few months later, but it was a full-time, no slacking off job. As much as I enjoyed Interlac and maintaining my zine, I dropped out about a year after starting that job— and that was after many issues to which I did not contribute.

So, everything I've written about last night and tonight leads me to believe that writing a new serial will be fun and productive. Doubtlessly, it will also end abruptly after some as-yet-unseen change in my life. I can only hope we all enjoy ourselves before then though!

Until next time.

"Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go."— E L Doctorow