New Year, New Project

Last summer, having lurked a bit online and without too much overthinking I applied to enter the LDC’s* first on-line zine sale in July 2025. I was a bit shocked when I was accepted – I have never written a zine but the extended time frame lulled me into thinking I had long enough to develop a whole new skill set, (hopelessly naive)…..anyhow, I have bashed an idea into some sort of shape and I now have 5 months to pull it together. No surprise: I uncovered in myself a chasm of skill-shortages in unimagined new areas, so this has given the start of the year some clear goals and much panic-y research.

I started with an idea that was somewhat autobiographical, (write what you know), and scribbled in a sketchbook in a somewhat chronological fashion. I was stuck on the ending for ages, and I still feel it is the weakest part. Then even more roughly I tried to fit it into a booklet format to see how many pages I had managed to fill – the minimum is 8 I have managed 12, but there will be many changes I am sure. At this point I paused- I can see there is an issue with pacing, not every image should be the same size and there should be big full-page pictures at key points, but I haven’t got those images quite sorted. I have signed up to do an on-line, ‘getting your zine ready for publishing’ session next week which is a little daunting as I am no-where near that point and I feel sure its going to throw up a lot more knowledge gaps.

*LDC is a women-led comics forum that I follow on Instagram – really friendly and informative with lots of opportunities to join in and learn stuff.

Work in progress, pages from my sketch book