Name It

I was stewing over Rock Stew when it finally occurred to me why I was so bothered by it: Stone Soup is the title of a children's mag! I guess Rock Stew is the grown-up version? Heh.

Methinks a good brainstorming session is in order.

I've invited a couple of friends to have a look at our blog-about-it blog here; one has had a peek and thinks we should definitely go for it. Thanks, Liz! Your opinion means a lot to me! I don't know if the second invitee has been here or not, nor -- if she has been -- whether or not she's rolled her eyes at our flight of fancy. (A decided flight of fancy considering my reduced circumstances!)

I put in some time with MSPublisher over the weekend to see just how workable it is. I'm happy to report that the program includes CMYK and Pantone functionality. I'm investigating the difference between "Black" and "Process Black" in the Pantone system, because of problems I am aware of on the printing end: one of these is probably what is known as "rich black" that uses all 4 printing colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, black -- the CMYK of CMYK, with black being K) to create black, while the other should be 100% K. My thinking is that "Process Black" is the one we want (100% K) but I won't know until I run a test .pdf and use the full Acrobat to see the color separations. That is, however, an easy step.

I will have to learn where all the buttons are for everything, but after an initial foray into it, I'd say that Publisher will be just fine for our purposes.

Rock Stew

What to put in such a zine?  I suppose a little bit of everything, within reason.  A cartoon or two, a story or two, a poem or two*, and some opinions.  Really, what does any other magazine have that's not here?  Besides reporters, talent, photographers, MBAs, PANTONE specialists, graphic designers, a marketing department, advertisers, submissions, a fleet of Adobe products, huge machines stamping our content upon unwary pages and handlers to attend to their care and feeding, and readers.

But I suppose most of these things are ultimately necessarily.  So, let's shout into the wind put in what we can.  IF we all contribute what little we are able, it might turn out pretty good.

It's like that story about the guy who threw a stone in a pot and asked the others in the village to add just one thing, and at the end they had a pretty good concoction going for everyone.  What was it called again?  "Rock Stew?"

* In computer terms, I could have written that as "a (cartoon|story|poem) or two" and saved a few words.