Friday, October 26, 2007

Why Am I Starting A Blog?

I'm not entirely sure. I have a couple other places where I can post pieces as well as a Live Journal Account. But I'm starting this one up too. Perhaps I'll come up with a good use for it. Perhaps I'll lose interest. We'll see.

My title, "Cold Steel and India Ink", was one I used for an APA way back in the 1980s. APA's (Amateur Publishing Associations) were sort of the dead tree precursors to blogs. How they worked, (or at least the ones I belonged to) was something like this. The APA was like a magazine with so many contributors. Each contributor would send his or her material, (called the "minac", or "minimum activity") to the Central Mailer, who would make copies of the material and collate and bind them so that each member would get copies of everybody's stuff. I belonged to a couple of "good girl art" APA's back in the antediluvian '80s and a long-running furry APA in the '90s called HUZZAH!

At the time I joined my first APA, I was drawing a homemade swords 'n' sorcery comic called "Brisbane the Barbarian". I'd print it at the local copy shop, (this was the paleolithic precursor to webcomics) and sell it out of my backpack. My favored drawing tool was (and still is) a crow-quill pen and ink. Hence the title: "Cold Steel and India Ink".

More thrilling autobiographical stuff to com.