third coming
Fri. 15 October 2010
Dear Reader,
Five years ago this month, at the height of the mess in New Orleans, Dispatch Literary Journal (a modest attempt at a magazine which had opened for submissions that June under the direction of myself and original co-pilot Jamie (Jia) Lin), launched an early, arguably premature, "0.5" issue, to be had in print only, as a beneft fundraiser-type-thing for the Red Cross. It was subtitled BUSH MUST GO! It was self-serious. The staff at that time included myself, M. Blair Spiva, and Dan Nucci. Poorly designed in Quark Xpress on my old desktop, it sold maybe twenty copies at over ten bucks a pop. No big, but we donated those funds and it was overall a good effort. I'm not sure that I actually to this day have a copy of that issue--nor a PDF--but the print copies are floating around the universe, and I'm comfortable with that.
The second (One) issue wasn't much of an improvement, but I had a much better excuse for it--I designed it on a beat-up 133MHz IBM ThinkPad from the late nineties which I had bought for $20 from a girl I was casually seeing. So the thing was done in a rushed, handcoded HTML and fell short of my expectations for myself, but the next issue more than made up for it. And I'm speaking mostly of the design here, I should clarify–the writers and poets we published were at least superb, at most divine, and I stand by that statement.
The second issue, the actual second issue, was the first and only one I was able to accomplish on my desktop computer–in Adobe InDesign. It was magnificent and the design received praise from people with many years in the business. Jodi Angel even contributed a story. Or was that not until the third issue? I forget. Either way, it was evolutionary.
There were fallings-out. There always are. It can sometimes seem like people are not meant to work together. In fact, eventually everyone jumps ship, even the captain when you are the captain, and no one tells you that. Circumstances are always changing, though.
The third issue was done in Baltimore on a stolen Dell laptop after they (literally) ran me out of Athens, Georgia. It bore and evolved some of the design concepts present in the previous issue. On the cover, a ghostly shadow of a Chinese soldier has a bullet hole in his head. It was something.
Eventually that laptop needed a complete basic re-install. Thus it was that I ended up designing the fourth issue in OpenOffice. It didn't look great and some of the contents were crazy, but it got the job done.
Then, of course, my life changed and I decided not to do anything with the magazine for two years--the domain was lost, the space was lost, the files were lost. I have recovered some of the files, true, Four and Three to be specific.
The second rendition, which launched with a Mike Young story in March 2009, was what I would consider a success. Each issue was read between 350 and 500 times during its time in the spotlight, and some issues reached superstardom. Amelia Gray's three micro fictions, for instance, are the most popular thing I've ever published. I believe it's time to close that era of the magazine, having published some 25 authors total. I want to enter the third era, and in this era I want things to be more important and dispatchy. I've left the old site alive, of course, and why not? I'll simply build the new site around it. Too easy. And eventually I'll go back and update the old site, finish filling out the other versions of stories.
My intent in the third era is to publish medium-sized issues every three weeks, developing a wider readership than ever before, and to do so in a respectable way.
phm
