E-DITTO 13 E-DITTORIAL E-DITTO Continues to Evolve

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E-DITTO 13 E-DITTORIAL E-DITTO continues to evolve. This issue features a cover by Mae Strelkov, a landscape of the northern Argentine mountains where she lived. She was a true hecto artist. While I scratched out my faux hecto pictures using ditto masters, Mae somehow managed to actually paint with unforgiving hecto inks. Maybe she made a deal with the devil! She was certainly deep into arcane studies, trying to find similarities between the languages of the world and to deduce therefrom universal truths. Or so I interpret it. You owe it to yourself to download from eFanzines, issue 15, at the very least, of Robert Mapson's Forbidden Worlds which features, amongst other things, many more hecto paintings by Mae as well as letters from her describing her studies, her painting techniques and her life in mountains. There's also some interesting writing from Robert and scads of locs he received back in the eighties, scanned in all their typewritten and handwritten glory.

http://efanzines.com/Forbidden/index.htm

______E-DITTO #13 August, 2011. From Eric Mayer [email protected] Cover: Mae Strelkov Logo & stamp: Dave Burton. Illos: Brad Foster p. 1 Alicia Souza p. 4, 9, 12, 13 Taral p. 10 Eric p. 5, 6, 7, 14

1 READING OUT LOUD A lot of reading goes on here in the evenings. Mary and I can both get very enthusiastic about what we're reading. When a book's really good you just have to share it. That can get confusing.

Yesterday Mary was immersed in a Wilkie Collins novel while I was chuckling, rather bleakly, over a collection of Kurt Vonnegut essays.

"Oh no," says Mary. "Apparently any will a man makes while single is invalidated when he marries. Or at least it was at the time. I thought one of the daughters might be cut off, but not both."

"Hmmphh," I reply, before quoting from my book. "'Do you realize that all great literature -- Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, The Bible, and The Charge of the Light Brigade -- are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being?'"

"The younger daughter is planning to get the money back but what it might be who knows."

"'The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.'" quoth I. "How about some ice cream?"

"Ah. Coffee flavored."

"Yeah. Funny how I like coffee ice cream but hate iced coffee."

"Now the younger daughter is pursuing her plan to get the money back by going about London in disguise, a highly unlikely tale."

"'Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.' See, that's why I never use semicolons."

"The scene has moved to Suffolk and he refers to the German Ocean. That's the old name for the North Sea."

"Ha! Vonnegut says, 'If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go

2 into the arts.'"

"That's unkind. Oh look, is it 11:30 already."

"He keeps mentioning Mark Twain. Maybe I'll read Huckleberry Finn next."

"Let me just finish this chapter before we go to bed."

*************************************************************************** THEY COULD HAVE PLAYED EUPHONIUMS by Mary Reed *************************************************************************** Occasionally I find myself wondering if those eternal motion machines that are the young ever pause long enough to contemplate the enjoyable sight of the lengthy vista of days -- nay, weeks -- stretching out before them when the summer holidays finally begin.

Why, the time rolling out ahead seemed endless to us when school was at last out, with those menacing back-to-school sales so far away at the other end of the summer as to be easily ignored -- and just as well since once they arrived we would have to get the number 4 bus into town to buy school supplies and new tennis shoes, which in turn meant that the new term was not far off and thus soon it would be time to drag ourselves off to the grey Victorian building in which we laboured, to again wrestle with French verbs, toil over geometry exercises and try to recall the names of all the Hanoverian rulers in the correct order -- all these tasks being carried in that strange chalk-and-old- books atmosphere that seemed to permeate every school in which I ever set foot.

Thinking on it now reminds me that my last school holiday was largely spent sprawled on my bed devouring cookers (cooking apples) so tart my teeth almost shrank from them as I chewed away while reading as many books as I could borrow from the library. It was a particularly hot summer that year and our fashionable frou-frou sponge-skirted petticoats ensured that those of us who considered ourselves trendy suffered mightily for the privilege. But the unaccustomed heat -- for when it's above 72

3 degrees in England, it's inevitably described in the media as A Scorcher -- made my shady room, the pile of green, shiny-skinned cookers and the even larger stack of books with covers of all colours even more attractive to one who was already a bookworm and fruit-lover. The noise of the neighbours' children playing all over the roadway -- despite living in houses with hanky-sized gardens that were nonetheless large enough to allow games of Traffic Lights or Statues or Tag without any risk of getting run over by the mobile fish and chip shop or a passing coal lorry -- was easily ignored, even though our windows were wide open to whatever breeze might meander in, bringing with it the scent of the two small lilac trees growing by the corner of the house.

Because even if those kids had spent their entire summer practicing playing euphoniums outside our front door, I should have taken no notice at all -- I had flown off on the magic carpet of books and would not be back until teatime. And so those long, golden afternoons unwound to the gentle rustle of pages turning and the piling up of apple gowks (cores) until it was time for tea. And when the washing up was done, the tea-towel hung up to dry and the plates and cups and cutlery put away again, there would still be time for a chapter or two or more to be read as shadows started to advance, shrouding the raspberry canes in the back garden and fingering the windows. Soon there would come that strange hush that creeps in between the time when workers arrive home for their evening meals and when they go out for the evening. Every night that quiet calm fell around the house like a kindly mantle and while it was true that, to the despair of my parents, I would probably be found in the kitchen at midnight frying up bacon and eggs, still I knew that tomorrow would proceed at the same slow pace, and the next day, and the day after that as well.

But it was recalling that this would be my last long summer holiday before I joined the work world that really added to its strange enchantment and, I think, to the sense that time was flying, bearing us all along willy-nilly faster and faster towards adulthood. It all seems dreamlike and far away now.

4 SELF_ PUBLISHING

Fans have been doing it for years, but now do-it-yourself is all the rage in the publishing industry. Authors and would-be authors swear that self-publishing for Kindle and its electronic kin is the only way to go.

Me, I'm not so sure. After all, I have self-published!

At the start of the month Mary and I sent off the corrected galleys of NINE FOR THE DEVIL to Poisoned Pen Press. We heaved a huge sigh of relief and intoned, in unison, "our work here is done." (Well, okay, I admit that my work was done before Mary mercifully proofread the galleys by herself!) All the rest -- the formatting, the printing, the distribution -- is up to the press. Thank goodness!

Sure, I've read how Thriller writer Barry Eisler turned down a big contract with a major publisher to do it himself. Amanda Hocking is a self publishing millionaire. Mystery author Joe Konrath says he sells billions and billions of ebooks all by his lonesome.

But so far as I can see, the evidence that self-publishing is the best route for authors to take is based on isolated success stories. You could make just as good a case that playing the lottery is a reasonable career choice. In fact, I have actually met one big lottery winner and the parent of another, and I can't say that of any self-publishing millionaires.

So Mary and I are not eager to self-publish, unless it is a fanzine. Personally, aside from clicking on "save as pdf" and sending the file to Bill Burns, I am thrilled to see the back of all the self- publishing I did for so many years. While it wasn't exactly hell it wasn't any picnic either. Maybe a picnic just outside the gates of hell.

Let's compare the two methods of publication. Mary and I aren't

5 bestselling authors but Poisoned Pen Press has found thousands of readers for us. By contrast, at the start of my self publishing career, in grade school, my audience consisted of my two buddies who sat on either side of me in the back of the room during arithmetic class. When the teacher spotted us giggling over the cartoons I'd drawn, she'd confiscate my tablet. There went my whole inventory.

We also make more money than I ever made doing my own comics. Back in those days, a full color "Elmo the Talking Fish" went for a dime on the playground. Which wasn't bad. You could buy a whole bag of jaw breakers, licorice whips and Bazooka bubblegum for a dime. Unfortunately, there's a limit to the money to be made, even at 100% royalties, when your print run is one. I tried renting out my "King Cotton vs. Boll Weevil Giant Annual" but it got tedious having to keep erasing the crossword puzzle answers. Luckily my parents paid for the big box of 128 Crayola colors -- with gold, silver and copper -- or I would have been operating at a loss.

Twenty-five years later I did a bit better selling mini-comics. Uh...yeah...I admit, I was still turning out comics in my thirties. A "mini-comic" is made by photo-copying the pages you've drawn onto both sides of a sheet or paper, cutting the sheet down the middle, folding the two halves together, and stapling the spine. I did manage to sell maybe 75 copies of titles like "Bad Cat" and "The Remarkable Rutabaga" at a quarter each, which almost defrayed the cost of postage and supplies. (And advertising those comics and mailing them was a lot more difficult than approaching a friend on the playground and embarrassing him into handing me a dime for a comic.) Can you imagine having to cut and fold and staple and mail every mystery book? No thanks.

And that wasn't the worst of my self-publishing nightmares either. I once printed several issues of a magazine on a pan of gelatin. For the benefit of those of you who aren't old geezers, I am not making this up. I used a hectograph because I couldn't afford a mimeograph or a spirit duplicator. My first hectograph was a kit from Sears but it was the last one in stock, I guess, having probably gathered dust in the warehouse since 1939. It was probably the same model used by H.P. Lovecraft. No wonder he saw lurking horrors around corners that did not quite seem to fit into any dimension known to the human mind.

6 The original kit was horrifying enough to print with but when the hecto gel ran out I had to cook up my own by heating glycerin and plain gelatin over a low flame. Then I poured the viscous concoction it into a shallow pan and let it harden. If you take one of the ditto masters that you might recall from your school days and place it face down on the hectograph, the gel absorbs the ink. Press a sheet of paper down on the gel and you get an impression like that produced by a spirit duplicator. And one that doesn't have the terrifying odor of pop quizzes and arithmetic tests.

"Hecto" refers to the hundred prints you're supposed to be able to get but I was lucky to get fifty. The surface of the gel deteriorates quickly as you pull sheets off. It begins to bubble and tear. Sometimes the whole mass would come slurping out of the pan, clinging to the paper I pulled off, like some boneless alien parasite. Well, I was publishing a science fiction fanzine.

By the way, have you ever tired to get purple hectograph stains off? Every time I see those faint smudges on my fingers, all these years later, I swear I will never again self-publish.

Well, okay, I guess formatting a book for Kindle won't leave purple stains. And Mary and I are not ruling out self-publishing a book. We have so many utterly non-commercial ideas that some of our work may be destined for self-publishing, provided we ever find time to write them. However, our first choice is a quality publisher.

7 SPACESHIP

Issue 20 January 1953

By my calculation Bob Silverberg's SPACESHIP #20 came out the same month Bob turned 18 and it was already in its fourth year. Amazing. His first published novel, REVOLT ON ALPHA C would appear only two years later. More amazing still.

As might be expected from a budding science fiction author, the fanzine is basically sercon but I enjoyed it nevertheless. Rita Adams' cover is a sort of "alien menaced" --an interesting concept rather crudely executed. The very few interior illos didn't strike me as particularly notable. The contents are mostly neat, justified text.

The bulk of the issue is made up of various reviews of 1952 in science fiction and fandom. It's a fascinating historical snapshot. The genre was exploding. Thirty magazines published 160 issues. The brand new FANTASTIC sold over 200,000 copies. Silverberg shrewdly cites Walt Miller as a promising new writer. He estimates there were 100 new sf hardcovers and a dozen or so movies.

Cited as top fanzines are SCIENCE FICTION NEWSLETTER, OPERATION FANTAST, RHODOMAGNETIC DIGEST, FANTASY ADVERTISER, and PEON. Silverberg reckons that OOPSLA was the outstanding new mimeo mag and lists HYPHEN among quite a few other new titles likely to go places.

Elsewhere in the issue, Bert Hirschorn voices the opinion that science fiction does not depend on fandom but that fandom depends on science fiction and will follow sf where ever it leads. The latter conclusion being questionable considering that some of the best fanzines over the years have had tenuous connections to sf.

Roger Dard's report from Australia details the legal complications surrounding the publication of a book of weird art by Rosaleen Norton, a self-styled witch, and a personality of some notoriety during the fifties and sixties. Opponents claimed her book was

8 packed with sex, carnality, and perversion" not to mention "shockingly depraved." At the time of the writing indictments had been filed and research reveals that two pictures were declared obscene and ordered removed. It is good to known that Ms. Norton objected to the publishers' original plan to bind the book in bat skin.

A highlight is Robert Bloch's "Who Played the Harp?", a short, funny article about how he figured out that the Walt Willis brought to America in 1952 was an imposter, part of a scheme to allow Shelby Vick to pocket the fund's proceeds.

There is one piece of fiction, "Surprise", by Charles Wells. The contents page excuses it as being only 90 words long but, no surprise, it is too long even at that.

Silverberg packed a lot into 24 pages, including ads selling his old fanzines, books and printing supplies.

The loccol makes me regret that the previous issue is not available on Fanac.org. I would love to read a poem -- yes a poem -- that readers considered the best material in that issue!

Issue #20 of Spaceship is available at Fanac.org.

http://fanac.org/fanzines/Spaceship/Spaceship20-00.html

NEWS FROM THE FICTION FRONT May I engage in a little BSP? Writing fiction is a big part of life here at Casa Maywrite. (If only it would pay all the bills it would be bigger!) Recently our novella, Eyes of the Icon, appeared in The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction edited by Mike Ashley. Ours is one of twelve novellas in the collection and we're excited to find ourselves included amongst the likes of Steven Saylor, Ann Perry, Dick Lupoff, Charles Todd, and Peter Tremayne. The story is a bit of a departure for us. It is set during the Byzantine period, but 200 years later than our novels and rather than a whodunnit it is more a crime noir. Okay, back to our regularly scheduled fanzine.

9 …There is always the strange story of Mike Blake’s nightmare nosh to spoil your appetite.

Not everyone can be expected to know just what Mike Blake was doing in Bonnie Dalzell’s three-story, slat-sided, hydrophilic New England home in the first place, much less why he was looking for a midnight snack. But the explanation is simple. Besides being the artist and sole productive asset of Sleepy Lion Graphics, Bonnie runs what could loosely be called a kennel. Between the net gain of Sleepy Lion and the dead loss of her beloved Borzois breeding, Bonnie has managed to frustrate the Internal Revenue Service of its due every fiscal year since going into business. From time to time, business took her and her husband, Jim, out of town. Which

10 business it was on this occasion is a matter for trivia hounds to pursue. It’s enough to know that Bonnie, Jim, Genghis, Danna, Aurora and Lola were all out of the house and needed a sitter to mind the place until she, husband and dogs got back.

It also helps if you know that the home Jim and Bonnie kept was far from a normal one. Jim is a doctor, and you might expect him to live a respectable, tidy life. But he is more the image of a Bohemian artist. He gets no arguments about lifestyle from Bonnie, who actually is a Bohemian artist when not coursing Borzois. Not every decorator would round out the furnishings of a home with fossil Smilodon skulls, stacked paper of every grade, texture and cut, human shinbones, armadillo shells, cartons of t-shirt iron-ons, flash attachments, three (or is it four?) separate spray gun setups, bronze castings waiting to be filed and a fully articulated and pickled Borzoi in a plastic garbage bin in the bathtub. It was sealed, so you needn’t even remove the bin while taking a shower. I’m of the school that believes your surroundings offer clues to your personality. This particular home-sweet-home revealed a chaotic and inquisitive inhabitant unlike any I’d seen.

The Dalzell-Saklad Traveling Borzoi Pandemonium Picture Show had hardly left the driveway before Mike the House Sitter turned his thoughts from farewell to food. Instinct took over. Gravitating to the fridge, the feeding of Mike Blake entered the Research and Development stage. Manpower and Resources schedules formed in his mind as the freezer door swung open. Waiting for Mike’s assessment was a tightly packed chamber full of foil-wrapped bundles of different sizes and shapes. It was obvious that, to take full measure of his provender, Mike would have to unwrap the entire stock of aluminum foil packages, one at a time, select one for immediate consumption, and carefully restore everything in the freezer in re-wrapped condition. First, he set a large pot to boiling water on the gas stove. Why waste time when his dinner could go right in the moment he made his choice? He decided to unwrap a large package first. A large pot would boil a large piece of meat as easily as a small one.

Mike had taste. I’ll give him that, thinking back on how he told me the story. He went right for the roast-beef-shaped bundle in the back of the freezer. He had almost dumped it into the boiling water, too, when Mike noticed that it wasn’t a roast at all, but a perfect, intact and quite solidly frozen but very dead Borzoi puppy!

The cadaver was carefully rewrapped and returned where it belonged in its corner of the freezer before Mike could even think

11 about dinner again. And he preferred to not think about dinner again for a considerable time. He settled for having breakfast in the morning…

Of course, Mike was familiar with Bonnie’s odd lifestyle, and was almost prepared for her explanation when she got home. “You didn’t find the puppies in the back of the freezer, did you? I think I forgot to tell you when I said help to yourself to anything you find. They’re for anatomical study, but I never got around to dissecting them.”

“Oh?” he replied, poker-faced. “I found them alright, but gave them a pass. I was on a low-fat diet.”

*************************************************************************** FROGS

***************************************************************************

In the northeast we are nearing the outskirts of summer. The sunlight pressing down on me as I brushed waterproofing onto the deck was heavy with August heat, but when I moved around the corner of the house into shadow the breeze turning up the leaves to show their white undersides felt almost chilly.

It was this time of year, back in the fifties, that my parents left the cottage at the lake and I would have to say farewell to the frogs I'd played hide and seek with all summer. I had frog hunting down to an art. I'd sit quietly on the bank, scanning the reeds and lily pads and algae until a green turret of a head popped into view. Then my hand would dart out, not quite as quick as a frog's tongue but quick enough. I had learned not to close my hand too fast, to let the frog fully extend its legs before clamping my fist around them. I never did anything with the frogs except throw them back.

Years later my brother lived in the country and I would walk down to the small retention pond by his house. Frogs, grown large, leapt into the scummy water at my approach. As often as not one or two big, prehistoric-looking snapping turtles would be lying on

12 the mud bank, taking advantage of the last strong sunlight of the season.

The pond was no more than thirty feet across so the snappers always had their dinner close by, and the frogs were never more than a few feet from the jaws of doom. Did it worry them? I suppose frogs do not worry, even if they sense the presence of their enemies. They probably don’t agonize over it. Aside from the snappers the living must have been easy in that pond. At least in the summer time.

I don't suppose frogs fret about the coming of the cold. Surely they must feel the change approaching. It won’t be long before they are forced to burrow down into the freezing muck to wait. Perhaps to wake to a new spring, or perhaps to freeze, or be eaten instead. I imagine they don't worry about it, in the way I worry about propane bills and being snowed in and water pipes freezing.

For a frog, the first cold days are a long way off anyway. In truth, the future may not exist for frogs. For all I know they live only in the present, react only to what is happening at the moment.

There’s something to be said for that. For not worrying about what you can’t change. For not speculating about things you know nothing about. Like what frogs think.

z HUGOS Congratulations to E-DITTO contributors Brad Foster and Chris Garcia who kept the barbarians away from the gates this year by winning Hugos for best fan artist and best fanzine (Drink Tank) respectively. Brad has long illustrated my columns for Dave Burton's Pixel and then Dave Locke's Time & Again, lending a faanish sensibility to my mundane ramblings. And it was Chris' wild enthusiasm on display in Drink Tank that was in large part responsible for sticking around when I had only intended to briefly sample what was on eFanzines. Thanks guys!

13 CHRIS GARCIA OK, maybe calling this brief note a LoC is over-selling it. Pretend I never called it a LoC. Here's a WAHF from me. Yeah, that'll do.

Naw...I don't do WAHF's for an ezine, unless someone sends me something entirely DNQ. I had to chop all the locs to GROGGY down to almost nothing to fit them into the number of pages I could afford to print. That's no fun. And today locs are too rare to waste.

I just wanted to say another excellent issue of eDitto and I'm really enjoying it and that Taral article should explain why him not being on the Hugo ballot is a crime and that zines from the 1970s make up about 20% os all my zine holdings and have an almost universal charm to them that you don't see much and I'm also on the look-out for old issues of Outworld and Double:Bill and that issue of Quandry looks like good stuff and doesn't that brief description of Quandry sound almost as if it could be applied to all the sins of The Drink Tank, especially the lack of response and why the hell is there not another issue of Chunga out for WorldCon!

Sorry, that last one just kinda slipped out...

Yeah, Quandry 2 was basically lacking in lots of ways but it had a lot of LIFE and ENTHUSIASM. If I want spelling I can look at something commercial. Brian Earl Brown's spelling sucked and I loved his zines.

I feel for Taral who should have got a Hugo win by now being so

14 good for so long.

GREG BENFORD I always read editto and this time it brought back strong memories.

NOTES FROM THE CHEMISTRY DEPARTMENT was a fave zine. I didn't know Denis Quane had died--how/when? Where was he a chemist? I liked his comments on hard sf and even wrote some myself.

June Moffatt's comments on JDM BIBLIOPHILE--yes, I donated my file to the Univ Calif library, and wonder if all that commentary should now be turned into an ebook for those of us who regularly reread JDM. Indeed, I wrote a novella that's in JDM style: DARK HEAVEN, which was in Dozois Best Of several years back. Considering expanding it into a novel. His sf was very good and the mysteries even better.

A few years ago, when I had started reading fanzines after a long gafiation, I was shocked to discover Denis had died. I think it was Mike Glyer who directed me to his obituary in The New York Times. A real shame, but then we have too many opportunities to say that anymore.

Denis J. Quane, Professor, 54

Denis J. Quane, a professor of chemistry at East Texas State University for 25 years, died Friday at R. H. Dedman Hospital in Dallas. He was 54 years old and lived in Commerce, Tex.

Mr. Quane's brother Michael, of Hempstead, L.I., said he had died of kidney failure.

In addition to teaching, Mr. Quane, a graduate of Georgetown University with a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry, was also involved in basic research on the element germanium.

In addition to his brother Michael, he is survived by another brother, Richard, of Chesterfield, N.J. and a sister, Anna Desharnais of Baldwin, L.I.

15 LLOYD PENNEY I am still loccing as many fanzines as I can before we head off to Worldcon, so E-Ditto 12 is next. We’ve had some pretty warm temperatures, and we’ve hit 100F+ at least once, so staying inside with the AC and several fans is a near-necessity.

We have fans but no AC. Most summers the AC isn't necessary, but this was not one of those summers.

I discovered fandom in late 1977, so next year marks 35 years for me. It took a number of years before finding out about fanzines; I admit my entry into fandom was through a Star Trek club. We all find our way in, in different ways. And, because it was my first real group of friends, I hope those memories fondly.

Well, Star Trek is sf! The first fanzine I ever saw was George Scithers' Amra which, I guess, was a kind of semipro zine. I loved Robert E. Howard's stories. But soon after I saw Outworlds.

I think the Rev. Camping is on Planet Fred, blissfully unaware of the fact the whole world thinks he’s a complete idiot. It does make me wonder if a high level of religious devotion breeds insanity. Many of us have some level of faith, but I have no idea what level of faith would convince someone like Rev. Camping that the world is about to end. I won’t say stupidity, but I think Camping has taken leave of his senses in order to say the things he’s said.

It certainly seems like it to me. Throughout history there have been plenty of religious people who were obviously intelligent and thought deeply and critically about their faith. The crackpots and evangelicals we hear about today don't seem to give any thought whatsoever to their beliefs. They'd probably say if you believe you don't have to think about it. But, I don't know? Would, say, St. Augustine agree?

The locol…I am thinking that as soon as we’re done at the Reno Worldcon, we have to consider taking our computer in for some service. It’s slow to boot up, and it might need a software cleaning and a proper registry clean, too. Nope, no gun lover am I. Growing up in Canada, guns were not part of my everyday life.

My dad convinced me to fire a .22 once. Since I outgrew cap guns I've had no interest in firearms. But of course in this country they are ubiquitous.

16 We leave a week today for Reno, and tomorrow afternoon, I have an interview with a design studio in Toronto. Looks like I will be getting this job, at least I hope so. Could my luck be turning good? I hope so. I could use a break, and I really need the job.

Let's hope Fortuna smiles this time.

Quandry 2 might get the withering criticism some zines get today… modern zines get little criticism, mostly because they are actually pretty good. Some critics online are stretching to be critical, and when they are, they’re pretty nasty. Some recent faneds have produced a zine or two, and not come back. I wonder if the nasty criticism is the reason. With the fanzine reviews I do for John Purcell and Askance, I try to be positive. We need more zines these days, and tearing a strip off the newer faneds wouldn’t help.

I agree. I always found those KTF reviews despicable. Basically nothing more than an excuse for the reviewers to act like nasty adolescents. Coincidentally I just came across this quote, in a letter Harry Warner wrote to Robert Mapson's Forbidden Worlds back in 1987. Harry said:

."...I have never felt it was remarkable to be kind in locs and to say nice things about most of the things in fanzines. Rather it strikes me as the inevitable outcome of the fact that I like fanzines and the bulk of their contents. Why would I spend so many hours every year for so many years reading and loccing fanzines if I found them mainly unsatisfactory? For that matter, why do the critics who are rough on fanzines in their locs or reviews continue to read them? There are so many other things one can do in the world if one finds fanzines poorly written or badly edited or otherwise deserving of damning with faint praise."

************************************************************************** ENDITTO The wood asters are starting to bloom around the margins of the yard, under the surrounding trees and bushes, drifts of white, a sign that autumn is on the way. There aren't as many as a couple years ago. The vegetation around us has its own rhythms which I have never been able to interpret. There were hardly any blackberries this year whereas last year there was a bumper crop. Nor did our Kousa dogwood have berries, even though it blossomed more than usual.

Well, I have no real schedule for E-DITTO either. This issue is appearing earlier than I expected. My method is to plug material

17 into my template as it shows up and when there seems to be enough, publish. I prefer fanzines in small chunks anyway. When zines get too big I never seem to get through them or can't ever bring myself to try to write a loc that does them justice. A fanzine, to me, should be an ongoing process rather than a static work of art.

Plus, I'm doing E-DITTO to please myself! Mary and I just finished doing detailed outlines for new novels we plan on writing, if we ever have time, so I need a break and putting the final touches on a fanzine is relaxing.

See you next issue, whenever that might be.

Eric Mayer [email protected]