Mar 16, 2008
Cruising Speed

PIGS, it's St. Patrick's Day in my part of the world. Well, to be exact it was St. Patrick's Day about two weeks ago in my small just-off-Manhattan burg. Every year Hoboken holds it's St. Patty's parade a week or two before New York's, and the city is turned into one huge brothel for a 24-hour period. This year our mayor even went on national news to announce new tough zero-tolerance policies on parade day for such things as public drunkenness, public urination, and cow-tipping, all of which mysteriously become common on that one magical day every year.

Oh, yes, the Irish ancestors would be proud.

Of course, most of the people who take part in Hoboken's annual bacchanalia are not even remotely Irish, or they're like me and have a single molecule of Irish blood in them which they take out once a year, brush off and shine up, and then don ridiculously large green hats and march from pub to pub, singing. And, apparently, urinating in public and tipping cows. Cows which are apparently shipped in to Hoboken every year for that purpose alone.

I suspect I have digressed.

My actual point of writing today, believe it or not, is to discuss the distinct lack of activity on The Inner Swine's Sinister Web Presence. I mean, there just haven't been many updates, or many web columns, or anything going on here for some time. And I have received over one email asking for an explanation, so clearly the Intarweb rumor mills are grinding away.

First off, although the March issue is severely delayed due to incompetence and drunkenness, the print zine is alive and well and will be for some time. The March issue is coming out—it's written and proofread and ready to go, and I have vague, unorganized hopes of getting it out in March, though I make no guarantees. This is a zine after all, and if you wanted guarantees you should have subscribed to something with more of a budget. I suspect this slippage of the mailing schedule is terminal, and eventually we'll be publishing the March issue in September every year. I don't have any big distributors any more, so there's little reason to worry overmuch about the schedule aside from my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder—although even that seems to be mellowing with age, probably to my artistic and creative detriment. But the issues will still come, I assure you.

As far as this web site goes, well, there's a number of reasons it's been getting a little stagnant. One, it's now one of three web sites I maintain. Two, I now have an honest-to-goodness Blog where I post my rambling thoughts, and there's little point in duplicating those random thoughts. Unless y'all want to read about my latest fever dreams twice, in which case maybe I ought to think about charging you for this stuff.

Finally, there just isn't that much going on with The Inner Swine, you know? We've reach cruising speed. The March issue will be our 50th issue, for god's sake, and it's been years, really, since anything very exciting has happened on the zine front. Part of this is the contraction of the zine universe—Tower Mags is gone, Desert Moon is gone, and while zining and DIY publishing is going strong it's about as underground today as it was 20 years ago, from what I can tell. Part of this is because I haven't thought too hard about expanding the Swine Universe for a while. I'm cruising at a comfortable size, with a manageable mailing list and a manageable level of correspondence, making small amounts of money here and there. I don't really want to make it any bigger at this point, so I don't put much energy into schemes to make it bigger, like I did years ago by increasing my Tower draw or putting out the Freaks book or even when I started this web site in the first place and then added these columns. To be honest if the Great Gazoo appeared in front of me in a flash of green smoke and offered me worldwide exposure and distro for TIS, I'd probably turn him down and ask for a lifetime supply of whisky instead.

And, of course, there's the books. I'm getting paid to write novels these days, and while that may not last forever, natch, for now it's my priority as I'm, you know, getting paid for them. This situation has been in effect since 2004, you know. I should be finished with book #3 in the Avery Cates opus by June or thereabouts, and then what? Well, rewrites and revisions, of course, and then checking the copyediting and then checking the galleys, and then, if there's any justice in this cold world, a new contract for about sixteen more books. And so it goes.

So, while I understand that there's little reason for people to browse over here on a weekly basis any more (hell, when I first started writing these web columns I announced a bi-monthly posting schedule, which was just hubris, I see now), I assure you The Inner Swine persists at pretty much the same low level of quality you're all used to. If any subscribers want to receive the new issue as a PDF file via email in order to cut down their wait, go on and email me and let me know. As long as you're a subscriber or on the comp list I'll be happy to do so, and you'll still get your print issue as usual unless you specify you don't want it, you bastards.

Assuming I survive St. Patrick's Day, which I usually do, I'll be here, tapping away, making lame pantsless jokes and posting stolen photos from the internets. Whether you want me to or not.