K54

[First page not found on disk.]

COMMENTS ON MAY MAILING

ADMIN PAGE – Ros Calverley Congrats on the brave face. Re. the US Directory of world-wide APAs, with the current rates of postage I can't see many fans taking advantage of this. Tho' if you can make arrangements for reproduction elsewhere I suppose Internet might come in useful.

THE STRUTHIAN PERSPECTIVE – Theo Ross Interesting account when read once, but don't intend to go through it as a literary critic as suggested....too well done to detect fiction, tho' if pressed I'd guess it would be "My great-great-great-grandfather......" on-wards. No idea of literary antecedents – WAR & PEACE? Not my sort of reading at all, I'm afraid. No idea of my own ancestors at all before about 1880....Paternal grandfather was a good old English craftsman – there's a sideboard in this very room made by him – and maternal grandfather had a somewhat murky past, possibly involving inn-keeping, but he ended as a tax inspector. Aside from the lineage, the major influence the latter gent. had on my life was that he gave me a typewriter when I was about 12 years old, and my handwriting never recovered.


K53 – self Bit of a show-off on Steinbeck – in actual fact the only book I've kept of his is GRAPES OF WRATH, and I feel that is destined for some charity-shop shelf soon. Which reminds me, the local borough council is pretty good on recycling materials – there are local bottle banks for all colours of glass, (providing they're white, brown or green), paper banks, cans, textiles, and now there's a bin for taking bags of saleable books for distribution by Oxfam shops. When I first saw the announcement I was pretty excited – at last a chance to get rid of a clutter of popular astronomy and other science books, SF books that visitors have sniffed at for the last couple of years, and lots of hardware catalogues (don't ask). But saleable? Lapses into thought.


A30 or BUST – Brian Stovold A brave effort – last time I saw something similar was a fanzine by a guy called Peter Pinto in the early '80s, who had, apparently, the facility of a top-class copier (colour 'n' all) and no typewriter. So FEETNOTES would have an elaborately coloured cover – and handwritten interior. Good fanzine tho'.Your capitals quite readable, except that the 'H' gives one to pause. I haven't been on holiday to many places, but Cornwall is one of them. Interesting – still has elements of wind-swept and lonely landscape even tho' so many people pick it as a holiday spot. What draws you back to it so often?RYCT Pauline on historical novels. Surely the major element in these is what you leave out rather than what goes in? As she says, you can research and research – and still be baffled as to how they hung doors, or words to that effect. I would imagine that the main task after the first plot outline would be how much you could afford to skip and still sound authentic. Reminds me in a twisted way of Randall Garret and Lin Carter's short story "Masters of the Metropolis" (orig. in Mag. of Fantasy SF, 1957. This was a lovely parody of early Gernsback. The two took a more-or-less standard adventure story set in modern times and treated it as if everything was from the imagination of a (pretty hack) writer of some old-time SF magazine. He paused to board a bus which stopped at regularly-spaced intervals to take on new passengers. The bus, or Omnibus, was a stramlined, self-propelled public vehicle, powered by the exploding gases of distilled petroleum, ignited in a sealed cylinder by means of an electric spark. The energy thus obtained was applied as torque....etc etc.This marvellous over-egging stands as a warning to those authors who want to include every speck of detail. Unless your fancy takes you, it ain't really necessary.

ROPE OF SAND No.18 – Brian Jordan Meant to write direct but completely forgot – is it OK to copy to Chuch (UPDATE) the first two pages with all the Internet references ?RYCT Ros: Yep, paper has gone up again – no longer possible to get reams for less than £2. And (although it doesn't have much reference to anyone in the APA), I found that electro-stencils had gone up about 12% last time I checked. Hektography is beginning to look quite attractive. RYCT Mike: Changing jobs is one of the Done Things these days – even my son-in-law has gone voluntarily redundant after about 15 years with the same Borough Council. With part of his golden handshake he bought a PC486 with assorted extras (colour printer) and is now happily immersed in same. Seems that every job vacancy you come across these days wants someone who is computer literate, and son-in-law, who is only a humble Chartered Surveyor, didn't have much in the way of computer knowledge. And of course, 4-year old grand-daughter must be computer-literate by the time she can get her hand properly around a Mouse. RYCT Theo: Yes, accents are sometimes so difficult to pick up, and not only when you're 'getting on in years' (tho' I admit that I miss out on a lot of broader stuff, whether it's Brooklyn or Highland Scots). I remember when, at the tender age of 22 and in the RAF, an intake of raw volunteers from Southern Ireland had everyone thoughtfully cleaning out their ears at intervals. RYCT me: Ta for clearing up question re. tax on lottery wins – might now even go in for it one day. But not yet. Re. ANSIBLE, I don't think that there's much you can LoC to ANSIBLE and, unlike my conscience on dozens of other fanzines, it doesn't trouble me to send a batch of envelopes to Dave now and again. Of course, it's only fair that he gets a crack at newsworthy items when they occur to the reader, but they're few and far between. I mean, a local Star Trek fan has dressed his dogs in Star Trek costumes and is apparently keeping them at his mother's house in the next-road-but-one, but that's not the sort of thing Dave is looking for, I feel. No snow was no joke – we got through the winter without any. Perhaps it's being in the vicinity of London, looming up in the North West and being a few degrees warmer than other parts, which somehow alters the local temperature. (The local cocoanut crop is doing well).


HOUSE STYLE Although it may not be immediately evident, I've been trying to sort out a house-style to handle all the odd references to books, magazine stories, films, etc. I've scrawled on an odd sheet the following:

Quotes – in italics.

Fanzine Titles – All caps. Films & TV Shows – Single inverted commas & italics.

Book Titles – UnderlineMagazine Titles (including mundane): Underline and italic

Convention titles: Caps and italics.

Magazine stories: double inverted commas. Anyone out there any ideas? Or am I being unnecessarily pedantic?

PreviousNext

Vince Clarke's APAzines
Contents

PreviousNext

Notes and Queries
K1
K2
K3
K4
K5
K6
K7
K8
K9
K10
K11
K12
K13
K14
K15
K16
K17
K18
K19
K20
K21
K22
K23
K24
K25
K26
K27
K28
K29
K30
K31
K32
K33
K34
K35
K36
K37
K38
K39
K40
K41
K42
K43
K44
K45
K46
K47
K48
K49
K50
K51
K52
K53
K54
K55
K56
K57
K58 to K69
K70
Books About SF Continued
From K??
Vincentian 1
Vincentian 2
Vincentian 3