April 14, 2002
You're Tearing Me Apart!

WELL, it had to happen some time, based on my theory of Success Through Persistence (which states, simply, that you can succeed by being the last man standing - by simply doing something until all the really talented people have gotten bored and moved on, leaving you the sole competitor): The Inner Swine has had an article picked for The Zine Yearbook. Bully for me. The ZY is a great publication which tries to collect the best in zines every year, defining zines as a publication with fewer than 5,000 issues produced per issue. Well, heck, I've got plenty of room to spare! People nominate articles and then someone in the ZY compound chooses from the nominees.

The article they picked comes from issue 7(4): "Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium (We Don't Have Much Time: Stop Wasting it at Work)" and is not my favorite piece from volume 7. This isn't surprising, as usually whatever I think is great in an issue is completely ignored, and what I think is weak is generally praised. It's a weird experience I think most writers in general are familiar with: the complete inability to judge how a piece will be received. The rule of thumb is opposite: if I think I just wrote something great, people will ignore it or think it sucks. Throw-away pieces I dashed off to fill two pages will generate emails and frank discussion. I can only conclude that you're all mad.

I conclude this not only because you all dress so strangely, make no sense when you speak, and watch reality-TV, but also because there's no goddamn consensus. I grew up in a Catholic, monotheistic world where for twenty years of hardcore schooling I was taught that certain things were good, and certain things were bad. And any time I confused the two I was beaten to within an inch of my life by Jesuit priests who took off their collars prior to the carnage like cops taking off their badges...but I digress. The point is, every time I release an issue of The Inner Swine, I get contradictory feedback from you loons concerning what's good and what's bad. This lack of coordination has forced me to simply ignore all of you with cool disdain, so quit telling me what you liked or didn't like, because all I hear is a Charlie Brown teacher's bwa-ing.

I can divide TIS readers into three main camps. I can do this because I have almost 8 years experience now boiling even the most complex philosophical tasks down to three or four basic bullet points in order to bring the complexity down to my level of education and mental ability. Never forget, children, that the world is a very clear and organized place for idiots. It's only you smart bastards who think things are complicated.

Once again, though, I digress. As an Inner Swine reader, you fall into one of these camps:

HATE THE FICTION: You think my short stories are about as interesting as ingredients lists, and complain loudly when I dig up one of my 26-page monstrosities to fill up huge chunks of space in an issue.

HATE THE NONFICTION: You think the fiction is pretty entertaining, but you find the commentaries and editorial confusing, badly reasoned, and somewhat disturbing. You wish I'd print an extra story in each issue and lay off the Forums, which you think are just silly.

HATE MR. MUTE: A surprisingly large faction have no strong feelings about the rest of the issues, but hate Mr. Mute's centerfold more than anything else in the universe[1].

As a result of this kind of factious reaction, I have equal numbers of people telling me to get rid of different sections of the zine. I can only conclude that your opinions are insane and ignore them. Yeah baby!

Where does this lead me? Nowhere, of course. I do the zine for me, not for you, really, so I put in whatever I feel like and ignore your bleats of protest. I just think it's interesting how I have equal weight of opinion on what the worst part of the zine is. Jesus, I must be doing something right, to get this much hatred on a daily basis. It underscores the main rule of self-publishing: don't try to pander. Just because you get an email praising a certain type of article doesn't mean you should churn out an imitation of that article in every subsequent issue, and it doesn't mean there isn't an opposite and equal number of people who hate that type of article, and who simply haven't bothered to write to tell you about it.

Ah, what're you gonna do? If you're me, fix a drink, find a baseball game on TV, and sigh despondently until someone feels pity for you and buys you some dinner. Until next time, I remain

Jeff

[1] Some of you might be wondering, "What about the poetry? Man, I hate the poetry." Hating the poetry in TIS is a meta-category: everyone hates the poetry. It's the unifying factor that keeps the different factions from destroying each other, because if they did TIS would become pretty much a Poetry Zine, and no one wants that.