Day 29: Looking forward Today, I finally completed my mixed media stream of consciousness zine! It’s messy and funny and dark and unclear and confusing and brilliant. I’m very happy about the end result! It’s made with cardboard, paper, strings, clippings from a magazine, acrylic paint, Washi tape, pen, markers, charcoal pencils, a couple of dry petals, and this colorful fabric paper thingy. I’m not exactly sure what it is. But I used as many materials as I could come up with and I like the way it looks. The text is all over the place, means nothing and everything as a good stream of consciousness should be. More to today’s prompt, as I said before, I can’t really think so far ahead regarding zine plans and stuff. I only have two months of the year that I devote especially for zine-making (July and November). But I do have some plans for December, zine-related or not: 1. Post office day: I set an appointment at the post office for Thursday, December 1. I hope to send out zines to my zine friends for trades, as well as a batch to Quimby’s that I was supposed to send a couple months ago but never got around to it. 2. Hanukkah bakes: This year, I really want to try making American-style doughnuts. I have a recipe I’ve been dying to try and I really hope I can find the right time. If my daughter has a few days off on Hanukkah, it would make for a perfect activity to do together. 3. Chag Habanot: The Holiday of Girls. This is a holiday within a holiday. It takes place on the 1st of Tevet which is like the 6th or 7th candle of Hanukkah. We never celebrated it in my family, and my in-laws never heard about it either, but I’m really trying to make it a part of our Hanukkah tradition. Last year was the first time we celebrated it and it was terrific! I really hope we get to do it again this year. 4. Further house plans: I want to get a work desk for my daughter’s room so she can have a place to do her homework. I also want to reorganize the room we currently use as a storage room and see if I can make enough space to set it up as my dream zine-making studio. That requires some maneuvering and creativity, and of course time, but I really hope it will get done in December. Maybe if I have my zine-making room, it will inspire me to make more than two zines a year!
Day 30: ZineWriMo Wrap-Up: I’m a little swamped today seeing as it’s the end of the month and there’s accounting stuff to take care of and all those dull and tedious thingies. But I still want to write this wrap-up, and here it is! I love love love ZineWriMo! I had such a good time with working the prompts, working on my zine, getting in touch with zinesters (though not many, but still), doing a bunch of new things (like writing a newsletter or making a mixed-media zine), and just spreading a bunch of zine-joy to counteract the rolling mountains of shit that the universe likes to sling at us sometimes. Here’s what I accomplished this month: 1. On the first week: – Shared photos of my zine-world, zine-making space, my typewriter and my zine ideas notebook – Made a small post-its zine about ZineWriMo 2. On the second week: – Researched the topic of women and misogyny in the metal scene for the main article of my zine. The discovery of all these facts and bands and issues was profound and enlightening for me. When the mere fact of writing a zine teaches me so much about the topic, it makes the writing experience that much more exciting! – Designed a badass cover for the zine – Organized my zine material and my whole bookshelf at home – Bought a new pair of scissors – Bought some more zine material for my daughter and made a zine-making kit for her 3. On the third week: – Completed the writing part of my zine, including the Twigz segment, a collage and a bunch of graphics – Visited ZineWiki again – Started working on the layout of my zine 4. On the fourth week: – Completed my zine earlier than planned – Made a perzine-style life newsletter, and loved it so much I’m seriously considering making that a regular thing. Long live The Daily H! – Completed my daughter’s photobook for the year and sent it to print – Unveiled the cover of my new zine – Raise Your Horns! issue 2 5. The last two days: – Completed my mixed-media stream of consciousness zine – Made a list of future plans for my zinester life, as well as holiday plans for December (Hanukkah and Chag Habanot) – Wrote a final wrap-up of the month, which you’re reading right now!
Today, I’m also making a list of people and addresses I need to send zines to. I’m making a list for each one of them of what zines I need to send. They’re not all the same as interests vary.
If you want to share some of your ZinWriMo creations with me, I would be more than willing to trade! And if you just want to read some of my zines and have nothing to trade for them except for money, you can download them from my Ko-Fi website for no more than 1 or 2 bucks. My Ko-Fi shop now also includes the brand spanking new issue of Raise Your Horns! Enjoy!
Peace, love and hit me up people, don’t be shy, I want ALL of your zines!
Day 22 – Trades: Today is my kid’s official Gregorian birthday. I’m not doing anything special for the occasion because it’s the middle of the week and Tuesday is my stress day as it is. When I just finished my drawing course at around 20:30 and left the classroom, I bumped into my daughter’s Karate teacher. “Are you in the community center every day?” He asked. “Well, I was just here for my drawing class. And I’m here for my daughter’s courses, and I sometimes come here to swim…” I said, and after a pause added: “So yes, I am here every day!” I didn’t contact anyone for trades, but my friend and fellow zinester from Brazil, Henry, contacted me to ask me which ones of his zines I don’t have yet. So he’ll send me a few. I have some people that I need to mail, including a restocking of my zines at Quimby’s, so I’ll need to set a post office date at some point before the end of this month.
Day 23 – Work-in-Progress Wednesday: There was a terror attack in Jerusalem today, so the feels are dark as hell. Luckily, I finished most of my layout yesterday, so all I had left to do was number the pages and write out the table of contents. Not an activity requiring much inspiration anyway so I got that done, plus a couple of extra tweaks of the cover page, which looks even more amazing right now. I exported the cover with the bleed and sent it to my husband to print just one copy so I can get an idea of what it looks like in hard copy. And you’ll get a chance to see samples of it next Monday when I “set my zines free”! I’m actually pleased I finished the zine earlier than planned. This gives me the rest of the days to focus on the respective prompts, as well as completing those that I didn’t get a chance to in previous days (i.e. the stream of consciousness mixed-media mini-zine, and the personal life newsletter).
Day 24 – 24-Minute-Zine Thing: This morning, I made a batch of cupcakes for my kid’s birthday at school tomorrow. I have the frosting left to do but I decided to save that for tomorrow morning so that it’ll be fresh. I need to wake up super early for that, and I loath waking up early on Friday. But that’s that. At the office, making a zine in 24 minutes didn’t really bring forth any inspiration. But I really felt like making a perzine-style newsletter and cover the Day 20 prompt I failed to do. I called it The Daily H because this was a newsletter I already wrote back in my late teens. It was never intended to be a daily newsletter and it still isn’t, but I’ve grown attached to the name. And if you’ve noticed the fine print in some of my zines, I print my zines under my fictitious copyright publishing company – Daily H Publications. So The Daily H it is. Here is what the first page looks like.
When I came back home, I couldn’t stop smiling. Working on this newsletter brought back so many good memories and it made me so happy to write it again. Maybe I’ll make it a regular thing and send it out with my zine trades!
Day 25 – Friday Bake Day: This morning started at the ungodly hour of 4:45. I had to get up earlier to get started on the frosting for the cupcakes, so it will be ready when my kid needs to go to school. I finished most of the work and when my daughter got up, she added the sprinkles. It came out marvelous and the kids at her class really liked it. Then, I started working on the birthday cake for the party at my in-laws. I wanted to have it that same afternoon, right after lunch, so that we could go back downstairs and finally give our kid her major present: A bigass LOL dollhouse, worth over 1300 NIS. My husband started building it this evening and didn’t even finish yet. He’ll have to continue tomorrow morning. While my kid was in school, and I was working on the cake, my husband – with the help of his brother-in-law – took apart the spare bed in my kid’s room and took it out. I’m so thrilled we finally got rid of this enormous bed! We’re looking at a complete overhaul of the house thanks to this extra space. This is the cake I made for my daughter this weekend (minus the black strip over my kid’s eyes, of course). And the colorful cupcakes.
Day 26 – Self-Care Sabbath: Wow! This Sabbath was the virtual opposite of self-care. I barely got any sleep because the order bug that attacked us yesterday, attacked us again today. My husband finished building the LOL dollhouse. We changed everything in the house except for the kitchen and the bathroom. We reorganized my kid’s room to accommodate all her toys, including the dollhouse (it’s bigger than my kid!). We moved the computer and the desk from the guitar room to the living room, and we revamped our linen closet. I did at least three loads of laundry and the dryer was working pretty much all day. About the guitar room, I’m starting to think about turning it into my dream zinestering room that I always talk about. For now, it’s a storage room until we can find space for all the junk in there. But since we moved the computer desk out of there, my room is becoming more of a possibility than a dream. That will be so cool!
Day 27 – Celebrating My Kid, Complete Photobook: I’ve been celebrating my kid this entire fucking month. And today, I finally completed the Picabook photo album for the year after adding all the pictures from her various birthday parties. I’ll wait for my husband to approve it and then I’ll send it for printing. I also continued and completed my newsletter and sent it to my husband for printing. I’m so totally psyched about all my accomplishments this month. On my next recap post, I will list all of them so I can feel fulfilled and ready to attack the next month (Hannukah and Chag Habanot).
Day 28 – Set My Zines Free: I promised and I shall deliver. I give you the cover page of Raise Your Horns! Issue 2. A collaboration ZineWriMo and MoZiPro zine. The original prompt for MoZiPro for November was BLM. But since I had nothing to write about Black Lives Matter, I decided to change the acronym to stand for Brutal Ladies of Metal. This issue is all about women in extreme metal, focusing on growling vocalists only. It discusses the issue of misogyny in brutal death metal and the way some bands are trying to change that. I talk about my favorite all-female and female-fronted metal bands. There is also a piece about my daughter and how my husband and I are trying to get her into metal as well. There’s a poem, a collage and a comics segment as always. And of course, I’m always up for trades! So drop me a line and share some awesomeness.
Day 15 – My Day, My Way: I successfully created a Twigz segment! It’s a simple one, but then, all of them are, so that’s cool. I also finished writing another piece for my zine. So I think I’m pretty much done with the writing part. I hope my husband will have printed out everything that I sent him yesterday so that I can get started on the collage tomorrow, and then have everything ready to begin the layout! My favorite part of zinestering EVER!
Day 16 – WIP Wednesday: Today, I made the collage I planned. It’s pretty fucking brutal and fitting the zine’s theme perfectly. I also printed out all the written material and set up the papers the way they should appear in the zine. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to use my typewriter too much for this zine. November is such a packed month and I had no free Thursday mornings to use my typewriter at home. So most of the written stuff is computer-typed. I think it could still look nice though. At least, it won’t strain the reader’s eyes! So now I’m all set to start the layout! Yay!
Day 17 – ZineWiki Day: I spent my morning baking a cake for my daughter’s birthday party at my parents’ this weekend. At the office, I browsed around ZineWiki a little. I love that website and all my pages are still up and running. Here is my zinester page listing all the zines that I wrote and made pages for.
After that, I continued my work-in-progress. I planned out the layout of the zine, incorporating pictures and trying out different sizes to see how it will all fit. There were a couple of pictures I was missing, and when I searched Google, I came yet across more things I wanted to add or change in my main article. I swear, I should seriously stop researching this topic because that article is slowly becoming a term paper. But there were a few things that I needed to revise or add for the sake of factual accuracy. As it stands, I am estimating this zine to be 56-pages long. Not bad for a zine about a topic I apparently know nothing about. Goddamn Google… I should have all my visual material ready by Sunday so that’s when I hope to start the “paste” part of “cut n’ paste”.
Day 18 – Friday Bake Day: Showing off my creative space already happened on Day 3. So instead, I’ll show you the cake that I made today for my daughter’s birthday party at my parents’ house. My daughter did a great job decorating it up and down with LOL candy!
Day 19 – Schlafen Shabbos: Schlafen, my ass. Looking at the above cake now actually makes me sad as hell. The entire Shabbat, the kid was being a spoiled baby and had a meltdown every time something didn’t go exactly the way she wanted it to go. I’m usually a patient parent. The other day, a group of mothers were talking about the stress in their lives and then looked at me and said, “you’re probably the most relaxed parent I know.” They haven’t seen me when my patience runs thin, and it happened today. After several consecutive weekends where my daughter wouldn’t stop screaming, I finally lost my shit and screamed right back at her. Not my proudest moment, definitely, and I fucking hate myself right now. The exhaustion I felt after that was most likely psychological because as tired as I felt, I couldn’t fall asleep for the life of me. A depressing weekend to say the least.
Day 20 – Perzine-style life newsletter: I’m still depressed from yesterday, and I feel near-comatose with exhaustion, both physical and psychological. I have to find something supremely mind-numbing and a perzine-style life newsletter won’t cut it. My life sucks such a humungous dick right now, the last thing I wanna do is write about it. So fuck that. Leave it for when I feel like myself again and don’t need to focus whatever miserable amount of energy I have left to hold back my tears.
Day 21 – Teach someone about zines: I feel better today. I spent the day at the office laying out my zine and lost track of time… again! It’s coming together nicely and I’m super happy about that. Get ready because this is going to be a photo-packed zine with lots of awesome metal women kicking extreme metal ass.
Looking over the prompts for the second week of ZineWriMo, I’m afraid some of these activities will need to be switched or postponed or skipped altogether. Let’s see how it goes.
Day 8 – Organize my zine collection Unfortunately, Tuesday is my most stressful day. I have my drawing class at 19:00 so I need to hustle like crazy if I want to get everything done before then. I know that once I get home from my class, I want to do a bunch of nothing. So yeah, my order bug cannot attack me today. At the office today, I looked up pictures to add to the zine and read up about some other female vocalists and bands. I added a bit more text to my main article because I discovered things that were worth mentioning. I love how writing a zine about a topic I know pretty well serves to teach me even more about the very same topic. It’s especially true with this issue. I’m having such a blast!
Day 9 – Work-in-progress Wednesday I realized that my main article is a veritable work-in-progress. My ongoing research leads me to more and more discoveries about the topic of women in metal and it totally blows my mind. The article is taking shape nicely as a result. I just hope I don’t come across any factual errors (I did come across one today and thanks to all the metal goddesses that be that I found out about it before it was too late). Aside from that, I designed a totally fucking badass cover for the zine. I used Photoshop this time instead of cut n’ paste, but oh my god was it ever worth it. I’m so psyched about this zine!
Day 10 – Creative rituals I usually love Thursday mornings because this means I can stay at home and work on my zine with my typewriter. But this morning I had a doctor’s appointment at the other end of Jerusalem so that sort of ruined it for me… but not entirely because after the appointment, instead of trying to get home to see just how much time I have left before going to work, I just took a 10 minute bus ride to the center of town and got a bunch of shopping done. I got Day 14’s prompt covered because I bought a bunch of office tools and a small multiple-compartments pouch for my daughter’s make-a-zine kit! I bought her a glue stick, a pair of scissors, a set of double-sided color crayons, a set of markers, a small stapler with extra box of pins, four rolls of Washi tape, and a mini pad of paper. I organized it all in the little pouch (pictured below). I hope she likes it. And if she doesn’t, I’ll be happy to take it for myself! LOL! Aside form that, I also bought her a few cloth napkins for her lunch (with unicorn graphics on them, duh!) and a pair of winter slippers (with LOL graphics on them, double-duh!). That, for sure, she’s gonna love. She loves getting surprises either way. What kid doesn’t? More in relation to today’s prompt, I don’t know if I have any specific creative rituals for zine making. Since most of the zine work I do is at the office, there isn’t much I can do for inspiration. But if I had my own work room at home, you know I’d have it bursting with things that inspire me, and create some sort of ritual for zine making in that room. I already described exactly what such a room would look like in one of my previous posts (right here). But the way things are right now, it probably won’t happen for a long, long time. At the office today, I continued working on my cover page, then I made an InDesign spread of all four cover pages (inner, outer, front and back). Working on InDesign is just as addictive as I remember it, but I really ought to stop because I do want at least part of this zine to be cut n’ paste. But I really did have a blast and I think it looks bitchin! I also googled some background art and found the most godawful designs known to humankind. Melting corpses and shit. Fuck yeah!
Day 11 – Zinemakers’ Day Today was not Friday Bake-Day, so I decided to catch up on prompts I didn’t do this week. I decided to get the prompt for Day 8 done first, and as it turned out, it was the only prompt I did because the order bug attacked and hard, and I spent the entire day reorganizing not just my zine tools box but the entire cupboard it was in. That was a long-time coming and a very necessary thing indeed. I found things I forgot I had or didn’t know I had and some gems I was so glad I found. Like, for the zine I am writing now, I was trying to remember the name of an Israeli female-fronted metal band I knew before. I couldn’t for the life of me remember their name. I searched on Google and tried every combination of the words “metal”, “woman” and “Israel” I could think of, in both Hebrew and English, and nothing. I searched around in Spotify, and still nothing. But today, as I was going through my zine box, I came across an envelope. In it were some things I wrote to be used in some zines I was planning but never finished and sort of lost interest in. One of them was the metal zine I tried to write in 2017. I remember writing some stuff but I wasn’t feeling it so I dropped it, and wrote a completely new metal zine in 2018 which I did publish (the first issue of Raise Your Horns). I still saved the stuff I did write previously and put it in the envelope that I forgot about for years until today. Looking through the discarded papers, lo and behold, I found the name of the elusive fucking band! SCORE!! I slammed my hand on the sofa, stood up fast enough to get my vertigo going and screamed “Chugun! Fuck yeah!” Organizing shit is the SHIT!!
Day 12 – Sabbath Instead of a stream of consciousness, I’ve explored my stream of unconsciousness and slept my Sabbath away. When Shabbat came out, I packed up some material to be used tomorrow for the mixed media zine. I hope I can get it done and still have time to continue my work-in-progress article. I still have some things to include there and update it accordingly.
Day 13 – Mixed media stream zine I finally decided to not make the mixed-media zine at the office, but instead continue working on my main zine, and make the mixed-media zine at home before I picked up my kid from school. I figured if I don’t finish it, I can continue it tomorrow either at work or at home because I already did the Day 14 prompt on Thursday. So actually, I didn’t finish my mixed-media zine and I’m having a bit of a hard time with it because there’s too much art involved and I’m more of a written-word zinester. But I still got some of it done and I hope to get to finish it tomorrow after I get home from work.
Day 14 – Make a zine kit for a friend Already done last Thursday. My kid loved her zine kit and already made a zine with the tools she has. She’s adorable! I love how excited she gets about zine-making. I finally didn’t complete my mixed-media zine. I’ll leave it for some other time. Today at the office, I wrote another piece for my zine, plus a poem called “The Bleeder”. I also collected a few pictures of the bands I mention, and some graphics, and sent it to my husband to print. I hope I can start the layout by Wednesday. I tried to make my Twigz segment, but I’m not feeling it. I might dedicate my whole day tomorrow for that. There’s no way I won’t have a Twigz segment in this issue. All in all, I’m happy about the way this zine is coming along. I’m excited to see the final product. Stay tuned if you’re excited about it too!
And we’re off! Here is what I’ve been up to this past week on ZineWriMo.
Day 1: Brainstorm Today was election day and we had the day off work. But at the same time, my kid had the day off school. I neglected to consider that. I spent the day entertaining my kid, which was a lot of fun, but that meant I had no time to brainstorm for my zine. Instead, we tried out some of the new games she received for her birthday. Then, we cleared out the storage compartment of the guest bed in her room. We want to get rid of this bed to make space for a new desk where she can do her homework. Anyway, we found my suitcase of collections packed with a bunch of memorabilia from my life in Canada. In it, I found my ancient student ID and my driver’s permit. I found my collection of keys, keychains, toothbrushes, soaps, perfume bottles, rocks, ancient coins and bills and foreign currency that no longer exists, erasers of all shapes and colors, oldass photobooth pics of me with my friends, a bunch of medals I got every year during Montreal’s March to Jerusalem, as well as an original newspaper clipping announcing the 30-days of my uncle’s passing and the unveiling of his tombstone, dated 1987! The clipping was all but falling apart in my hands. I put it in a plastic jacket and stored it in a safe place. So no. No brainstorm whatsoever, but a storm of emotions brought on by this monumental nostalgia trip, indeed!
Day 2: Planning Since no brainstorm took place yesterday, I decided to get to it today. I was still unsure of what to write about. I really want to make another issue of Raise Your Horns, but I felt like I wrote everything I have to write about metal in that one issue. I’m thinking of elaborating on gender issues in metal, focusing on female metal bands, or ones fronted by women. Does gender matter? Does it not? And with that, I managed to form a rough idea of what to write about. Aside from that, when I went to the office this morning, I realized I forgot my Zine Ideas notebook at home. My kid had a Karate class after school today. So at least I remembered to take my notebook with me to the community center and came up with a more concrete and decent outline of my zine. After the brainstorm, the thought garden blooms! I’m super excited to start writing.
Day 3: Zine Tools and Space This morning was slow and I didn’t have much inspiration for writing, but I did manage to write a short intro to my zine. I was hoping to have enough time to write something else, but I made the mistake of taking a snack break. Snack break for me always means reading a book while eating, so I spent whatever was left of my morning wandering around the make-believe worlds of the Master. And if you don’t know who I consider as the Master by now, you truly have no idea who I am. I took a picture of my favorite creative tool – my typewriter – and I also took a picture of my zinestering space – the dining room table. As you can see in the picture below, my current drug-book is right next to me, which is yet another tragic mistake. I went right on reading it – at home, at the office, on the bus, and back home again. So that’s all I’ll say for today. I hope next week will be more productive.
Day 4: Friday Bake-Day I made some chocolate-chip cookies and they came out as yummy as I remember them. As a plus, my parents ate a whole cookie each one! That’s impressive considering they usually take one cookie and divide it between them. “Wow! You finished the whole cookie!” I told my mom. “Of course I did. It’s so good I can’t stop!” She replied. So that was my Friday.
Day 5: Shabbat Since I finished devouring Stephen King’s Fairy Tale on Thursday, I started reading Joe Hill’s NOS4A2. That made up most of my weekend.
Day 6: ZineWriMo Zine and Notebook I decided to cover Day 5’s prompt today. The zine ideas notebook I have is the one I bought and decorated last year. To be perfectly honest, I don’t use it much anymore because my head is so full of other things that I have no space for coming up with zine ideas or bake ideas. I try to keep track of my daughter’s extra-curricular activities while getting her evening routine chores done on time – homework, dinner, bath, brushing teeth, being in bed by 20:00 – and at the same time, try to keep on top of my own activities – my drawing class, my swim/workout days, dinner and laundry… It’s exhausting. Having International Zine Month (in July) and ZineWriMo (in November) as an incentive to keep creating zine-related stuff is great, but these are the only months I get to use my notebook. So here are pictures of my notebook again. I bet next year it will be the same one yet again.
More to today’s prompt, I did manage to make a zine about ZineWriMo. I used my personalized Post-Its that my sister-in-law made for me about a year ago. She made me a stack of post-it notes with a graphic of a pen and the text “From Hadass’s Desk” written in Hebrew on the top left corner of every page. I think it’s pretty fitting because I did indeed make this zine on my desk at work. So yes, here it is! Hadass’s Desk presents… a ZineWriMo Production… starring a pen and some post-its… ZineWriMo Zine! Coming to a Ko-Fi shop near you. PS – yes, I totally stapled it like a newbie zinester. LOL!
Day 7: Connecting with Zine-Makers Aside from posting a short status on Facebook requesting trades, I didn’t connect much with any zinesters. Instead, I spent the rest of the day researching a bit about female-fronted Israeli metal bands and completed the main article for my work-in-progress zine. I’m very happy about how it came out. I honestly think I write much better when I type on computer. I’ve talked about this before but my thoughts run faster than I can write by hand or by typewriter, so the computer is much better for my purposes. I had such a good time writing my article, so what do you think happened? The thing that usually happens when I really get into my zinestering? That’s right, I lost track of time. Again! And I left work later than I wanted to. But I did have enough time left to go to the pool, where I did a couple dozen laps before going to the library to exchange my daughter’s books, and then pick up my kid from school and going home. All in all, a very productive day!
Stay tuned for next week’s round-up of my ZineWriMo activities.
I’ve managed to complete my Monthly Zine Project October prompt zine. The prompt was “Things I’ve Read”. At first I thought I would write about zines I’ve read in addition to my drug of choice. But of course, my drug of choice took over and I just bragged on and on about how amazing Stephen King is and how I can never get enough of his books. I also took a picture of me with my SK collection and used it as the cover pic for the zine. So here it is!
Keeping with the topic of zines, the prompts for ZineWriMo 2022 have finally been posted (thanks again to Silver from Sea Green Zines!)
I’m so glad that November 1st is election day in Israel! This means I have the whole day (minus the time I go to the polls) to brainstorm for my work-in-progress zine for this month. Again, I’m planning on making this a collaboration zine with MoZiPro, except that the topic will be different from the proposed prompt for November (BLM).
So here are the prompts for ZineWriMo and below that, my own plans for that month.
Day 1 – Brainstorm: Yay! Another opportunity for me to use my zine/bake ideas notebook!
Day 2 – Planning: Well, that’s what I’m doing right now. Maybe since it’s a Wednesday, I’ll make it a Work in Progress Wednesday and use it to write the intro to my zine.
Day 3 – Creative tools: Thursday morning is my free morning, so maybe another picture of Rose Madder is in order (for those of you just joining us, yes, I’ve named my typewriter after one of King’s books). I’ll also take a picture of my creative space to cover the prompt of Day 18.
Day 4 – Friday Bake Day: I don’t even remember the last time I made chocolate-chip cookies. I’ll make it on this day right before we go to Be’er Sheva for Shabbat.
Day 5 – Badass Sabbath: I’ll be too busy sleeping and reading my current SK novel, so I’ll move that day’s prompt to Sunday and show off my zine ideas notebook which is the same one I used last year.
Day 6 – ZineWriMo zine: What a wonderful idea for a zine! I think I’ll make a mini zine about this challenge. Should be sweet.
Day 7 – Connect with Zine makers: Maybe I’ll use this day to offer some more trades. I’m still on the hunt for awesome zines to trade.
Day 8 – Order Bug day: I’ve actually had one recently, but I could definitely use one again. Since my kid also started making zines, all my zine stuff is messed the fuck up. I need to organize my tools as well as hers.
Day 9 – Work-in-Progress Wednesday: Haul ass, write like hell.
Day 10 – Creative rituals: Free Thursday morning again. I will continue my WIP and maybe actually keep my creative rituals. Scented oil is always a good option.
Day 11 – Another Zinemakers day: Maybe annoy some more people for trades. Although this is a Friday, I don’t know if I’d wanna bake anything seeing as I’ll be baking my ass off later on this month. See below.
Day 12 – Sleepy Sabbath: I’ve always loved Stream of Consciousness writing, so I’ll move this activity to Sunday and sleep my Sabbath away.
Day 13 – Mixed Media Zine: Yet another wonderful idea! I’ll combine this zine with the stream of consciousness I’ll write. I need to remember to bring all my mixed media tools to work on that day.
Day 14 – ‘Make a zine’ kit for a friend: I’m thinking of making one for my kid so that she stops using my zine tools already. LOL!
Day 15 – My day, my way: In that case, go on with WIP, hopefully finish the writing part so I can begin the layout.
Day 16 – WIP Wednesday: Hauling of the ass, again.
Day 17 – ZineWiki Day: I’ll continue my WIP work at home in the morning. Once I’m at the office, I’ll check ZineWiki again. I love that website!
Day 18 – Friday Bake Day: This weekend we will have my daughter’s birthday party – Be’er Sheva edition. For the event, my kid wants me to make a Little Mermaid cake. Today’s prompt will have already been done on Day 3.
Day 19 – Schlafen Shabbat: Much sleeping and eating birthday cake. And instead of reading zines, I’ll go on reading my SK novel if I haven’t finished it by then. And if I have, I’ll read Joe Hill’s NOS4A2.
Day 20 – Perzine-style life newsletter: I’ve made something like that a couple of times back in the day! It was so much fun! I called it The Daily H. I think I’ll keep that name and make another issue of it.
Day 21 – Teach someone about zines: How about refining my kid’s zine-making skills? We’ll see if this works out on this day.
Day 22 – Trades: Should I go on pitching trades? Maybe. Besides that, November 22 is my kid’s actual birthday. We might do something, though the middle of the week is a bit tricky.
Day 23 – Work in Progress Wednesday: My zine is horny. It shall get laid (out).
Day 24 – 24HZT: Yeah, I wish! I think I’ll try to make a mini-zine in 24 minutes instead.
Day 25 – Friday Bake Day: This weekend we will have my daughter’s birthday party – Jerusalem edition. For the event, my kid also wants a Smurfette cake. Also, my kid may have a birthday party at school so I’ll need to make a chocolate cake for that. As for that day’s prompt, I rather not show much or anything of my WIP, and leave that and the unveiling of the cover for the last day.
Day 26 – Self-care Sabbath: Is there any better self care than sleeping? And reading a awesome book? And eating a birthday cake?
Day 27 – Celebrating someone: This is the day I will complete my kid’s Picabook photo album for the year. All birthday pics will be added to the layout. Then I’ll send it to my husband for confirmation before putting in the order for print. So, not exactly a zine, but the next best thing.
Day 28 – Set Zines Free: OK, so if I complete my WIP zine on that day, I’ll unveil the cover then.
Day 29 – Looking forward: Hmm, I’m not so sure about this prompt since the only time I make zines are in July (International Zine Month) and November (ZineWriMo). I don’t know if I’ll join MoZiPro again. Still thinking about that.
Day 30 – ZineWriMo Wrap-Up: I’ll be blogging about my ZineWriMo progress on a weekely basis as usual. On Day 30, I’ll post a final blog post to compile everything I accomplished, hopefully.
I survived my kid’s birthday party…barely. We only have one kid (and sometimes I say THANK GOD for that!), and it was the first time we ever had a full-on production for a birthday party. So it was definitely a learning experience for an unexperienced parent such as myself. Here are the lessons learned.
Lesson 1: Never try to predict the weather My kid’s official birthday is on November 22. Since we planned this animal production for some time, we planned on having it outdoors. Obviously, November 22 is never a good date for doing anything outdoors, especially when a bunch of kids as well as reptiles are involved. So we set it for October 23, assuming the weather will be more manageable. Dude, it was a fucking monsoon in Jerusalem yesterday. But even before that, we finally decided to have the party indoors because it was getting quite chilly in the evenings, and I was in no mood to send some sick kids back to their parents. Fuck that. Not having that on my conscience. Although moving the party indoors was a good call, I keep thinking if I would have known in advance that we would do it indoors, I would have set it for my kid’s ACTUAL birthday. Not a whole month ahead of time.
Lesson 2: When ordering a pizza, have it delivered at least half an hour before the kids need to eat it We ordered the load of pizzas a day in advance, and set to have it delivered at 18:00. I think if my husband was next to my while he was placing the order, I would have told him to have it delivered at 17:30 because this is Israel. In Israel, people are never, and I mean NEVER, on time. The pizzas showed up at 18:30, when the kids were famished even after they hoovered every snack we had on the table.
Lesson 3: Eat a good meal beforehand I ate nothing during the party. I didn’t so much as throw a quick cheesy poof in my mouth, or anything. I barely had time to drink half a glass of water to keep myself from passing the fuck out. I was too busy, too stressed, too overwhelmed with a wave of conflicting emotions, and too pissed about the late pizza to be able to stomach anything. It reminded me a bit of my wedding. The owner of the venue served us our dinner before all the guests showed up because he said we won’t eat anything once the whole thing starts. He was right, and having our dinner early on was super smart.
Lesson 4: Seven-hundred Sheks worth of snacks is not enough We tried our best to not have any candy on the table and stick to salty stuff. We only had chips, nachos, those mini bagles, cheesy poofs, bugles, Bissli (no Bamba because we didn’t know if anyone was allergic to peanuts), a few kinds of cookies, and some other stuff. We bought a shitton of everything, and assumed it would be more than enough and then we would get stuck with a bunch of leftovers we have no interest in eating. But then, shortly before the pizza finally arrived, there was nothing left. Luckily, we made up for it with the pizza and the cake. But yeah, running out of snacks is not a good thing to happen during a party.
Lesson 5: Take the day off I worked that morning, like an idiot, thinking I’d have enough time to get home and get ready, set up the table with the snacks, including the platters of fruits and veggies (yes, we are those parents), put up the decorations, blow up the balloons, set up the chairs, finish up the cake, and get my daughter ready without freaking out and rushing her: “Into the shower, right now! Move it!” and “Hurry up and get dressed, the kids will be here soon!” I was done with everything five minutes before the guests were set to show up, and I was already out of breath.
Lesson 6: There are better gifts than books Every birthday party my daughter goes to, I buy the birthday kid a book as a present. I figured the parents will like it better if it’s a book instead of a toy. And besides, I don’t know what toy to buy some kid I don’t even know. But when the party ended and my daughter opened her presents (all million of them), I was amazed at the variety and the originality of them. “Where do they find all this stuff?” I said. And my daughter was over the moon. She loved all of her gifts and we didn’t need to save any return receipt. I need to do better when I shop for gifts for other kids.
Lesson 7: (related to Lesson 6) Make sure we have enough space for all the presents Something I definitely considered, but perhaps didn’t consider seriously enough to actually do something about it, was that we were going to get a shitton of gifts and we should probably clear up space for them. But it was the furthest thing from my mind yesterday as I was running around like crazy trying to get everything done on time. Now we have all of the presents stacked up in a big tower on the guest bed in my daughter’s room until we find a suitable place for them. And of course, this is aside from the space we’ll have to make for my daughter’s LOL dollhouse. We bought it, and it was delivered, but it’s still in a box in our storage room. We want to wait until her actual birthday to give it to her (and no, she doesn’t know it’s there, otherwise she’ll whine the hell out of us to let her have it NOW). But the fucking thing is huge. Our own house is not much bigger than that, and we don’t have an elevator and a slide and all the fancy stuff those damn dolls get. Being professional hoarders, I don’t know how we’ll manage to get rid of enough things and actually make space for all of this.
Peace, love and maybe another lesson is that my next pet should be a reptile!
It’s been one long holiday. Too long. And I say so, and everyone says so, every year. Nearing the end of the holidays, we always say “Oof! Will it ever end already?!”
But then it does end, and we need to get back to our regular hours and get used to the routine all over again. It’s super hard for the kids who got used to sleeping in and not having any homework. It’s hard for me, too, because when it comes to my sleeping habits, I may as well be a kid. I want to stay up late so I can watch my shows, but once I do go to sleep, I never want to get up.
Right. Sure, I know there are parents who say their kids wake up by themselves at 5:30 a.m. and go into their parents room and make a bunch of noise until their parents get up. But my kid is not like that. Even though she goes to sleep more or less on time (8 p.m.) she doesn’t fall asleep for a good hour or so. Unless it’s the holidays. Then she doesn’t fall asleep until 10 p.m. And you can’t wake her up in the morning, AT ALL. The kid sleeps like a rock.
So that’s me. I stay up late and never wake up.
It’s not like we slacked off during the holiday. We kept trying to find ways to keep my daughter busy so that maybe it’ll make her tired enough and she might fall asleep on time for a change (but it didn’t work, too bad).
We spent the first holiday of Succot in Meitar, as planned. I stared at the full moon for as long as I could, also as planned, and it was fucking beautiful. I was glad that my daughter was having fun. She played nice with the kids until it was time to go home.
On Wednesday, we went to the Rally for fallen soldiers, where my daughter played in the jungle gym, got temporary tattoos and face paint. My kid also ate like a champ. As for me, the food there made me sick. The ride back home was a literal pain in my ass.
We took my kid to the mall on Thursday and bought her a dress for her birthday party next week, and two pairs of jeans. Then we spent the weekend with my in-laws and took my daughter to the Biblical zoo in Jerusalem on Saturday morning.
The second holiday of Succot (Sunday and Monday) we booked a hotel in Ashdod. As per tradition, I got my period again, so I couldn’t go swimming. I’m not even kidding. Every time we plan on going to a hotel or to the beach, I get my period. This happened also in August when we went to Tiberias, but at that time I decided to completely ignore my body.
“This is the first time in 11 years that I’m going to the Kinneret,” I said. “So I’m gonna swim there, for fuck’s sake, even if I bleed out.” So I wore my underwear, with a cloth pad, wore my bathing suit on top of that, and a pair of tight shorts on top of everything and went swimming to my heart’s content.
But this time, in Ashdod, it was the Mediterranean. The water was rather cold and the waves were pretty crazy. So it didn’t really matter that I couldn’t swim. I also didn’t go to the hotel pool. While my daughter was having a blast in the kiddie pool, I was having a blast lounging on the easy chair in the shade, reading my Stephen King novel.
Before heading back to Jerusalem, we stopped by a restaurant for lunch. The place is called Texas, so you can imagine the menu, as well as the size of the meals. We ordered a kid’s meal for my daughter, and they brought her a huge burger with a mountain side of fries.
“If this is a kid’s meal,” I said, “I’m afraid to think of what a regular meal is.”
I ordered dairy fettuccini, and although it was delicious, it once again made me sick. It’s becoming too predictable, and I feel stupid every time I eat before a long drive because I know it will just make me sick. I just need to get it into my head – fast my ass off before a long trip. That’s the solution to all my digestive problems. Starve myself. Brilliant.
So yes, I am happy it’s finally over. I can finally get back to my sedentary life. No long drives in the near future (except for Be’er Sheva, but I already got used to starving myself on these drives). My stomach took a beating with all the holiday food, so I’m thrilled to get back to boring food consumption. No fancy dairy dishes or meats. Just the usual omelets, grilled cheese, soup, spaghetti, fried fish, rice or pasta flakes, and the occasional Passover-style dish of mashed potatoes, hard boiled eggs, tuna and green salad. Boring and easy on the old digestive tract. Just the way I like it.
But I will miss sleeping in. The hotel bed in Ashdod was so comfy! I barely managed to get up for breakfast. It was probably the best part about our trip to Ashdod.
Now, I have to wake up at 5:30 as per my routine. Then I have to find new and innovative ways of waking up that slab of wood I call my daughter. If I’m not original enough in my wake-up method, I may incur the endless wrath of a cranky almost-6-year-old who is still in holiday mode. Even the dark lord Cthulhu has nightmares about said wrath. I should get a medal every freaking morning, goddamnit.
What I do love about my routine is the time I spend at the community center. Going to the pool, going to my drawing class, taking my daughter to her courses… These are the times where we have the most fun, even more than the holidays. I can’t wait to get back to it this week!
I’ve been slacking off and procrastinating on writing this mandatory holidays/birthday post. I don’t know why, and usually when I don’t know why something is not working out for me, I look at my cycle. And when that provides no answer, I look at the stars.
Looking at my cycle, I wasn’t PMS’ing, I wasn’t late, I wasn’t early, I wasn’t pregnant… So no help there.
Looking at the stars, lo and behold, Mercury was in retrograde. Sure, I’m skeptical that that was the real reason. But like I already said on my Facebook status, when stars fuck around, my mood and my state of mind tends to deteriorate. It might be a coincidence, but blaming it on a planet seemed to make me feel better.
Since, retrograde ended earlier this week, procrastination is ending too. So here is the update.
Rosh Hashanah
It happened on the eve of Rosh Hashana, two days after retrograde started. My mother-in-law was hosting the dinner, and because the house was pretty packed and stuffy, some people thought it would be wise to leave the door open. Eventually some hostile flying creatures came in and decided to feast on my daughter’s legs. She was the only one who was bit, and she was bit so badly, both her legs became red and swollen from the bites. I was like, “Please God, let these bites not turn into boils like the bites she had last year.” The next day, I woke up to find out that my prayers fell on deaf ears, and that’s exactly what happened. My kid started crying with pain as her bites became swollen and infected, dripping pus whenever they exploded. It’s nothing that a steroid cream prescribed by her dermatologist couldn’t fix, but until it started to take effect, my kid was screaming bloody murder. She even got so angry, she started cursing.
“To hell with this,” she fumed. “I hate these shitty mosquitos. I’m going to kill them!”
The screams kept going whenever she went to the bathroom and had to pull down her pants, and whenever I gave her a bath. She wasn’t pretending. This shit is agonizing. And being helpless to do anything about her pain was atrocious. I felt so bad for her.
My Gregorian Birthday
On October 1, I turned 40. That’s right, a big round 40. Whenever I said that to anyone, they would say “Wow! So you’re going to do something special!”
Well, no. We ain’t doing nothing special. The next “special” thing we plan on doing might only be in June 2023. But it’s a longass time from now so who knows what might happen until then to make this “special” thing not happen. Like Mercury might be in retrograde again because Mercury procrastinates worse that I ever could, right. But yes, we have our tickets for Rammstein’s show in Madrid, and we have our hotel reservation. Now we just need to survive until June and hope that the world doesn’t implode (a very plausible possibility, wouldn’t you say?) and hope that Till Lindemann and all other members of the band don’t drop dead until then (I mean, seriously they’re like in their 60s, or pretty damn close to it, and something tells me they do a lot of drugs).
So surviving until June and seeing Rammstein live – yep, that’s the special thing right there.
But aside from that, I was still in my retrograded mind and my 40th birthday felt bad. I tried to rationalize it. When I was about to turn 30, I couldn’t have been more excited about it if I tried. I felt so at peace with myself, my body, my life, my sense of balance, my health, everything was top-notch. When I thought about 40, the only thing that came to my mind is how angry I would get at people calling me “giveret” and I would yell back at them “I’m not 40, stop calling me that!” But now I am. So is that the only thing I achieved? The only thing I have to be proud of? Being called a “giveret” and having to be ok with it?
That was the first thing that went through my mind and made me feel like shit. I don’t want to celebrate my 40th birthday, because there’s nothing there for me.
Another thing was that on the morning of October 1, we went to the Arena to ride our bikes. My daughter was whining the entire time and complained that she can’t ride uphill even though the track was 100% straight. There was no uphill and no downhill. At some point, I got angry at her and said “OK, fine, if you’re going to be this way, let’s go back.” On our way back, she still complained that it was uphill, and at this point I just lost it.
“How can it be uphill?? When we went that way, you said it was uphill, and now we’re going the other way, the only thing it can be is downhill! And besides, it’s neither of those because it’s perfectly straight. And you had no problem riding this entire track the last time we were here!”
My kid has this habit of calling me and my husband liars when we say anything that contradicts her. The first few times she called me that, it was pretty bad because I have never lied to her in my life, even when she was a baby. Not even white lies. Not even telling her I have no idea where her lollipop is when in fact I just tossed it in the garbage. Not even when she asked me if there is such a thing as a tooth fairy. I said no. Nurturing her innocence does not mean I have to lie to her. There is no tooth fairy, there is no Santa (we’re Jewish anyway, so who the fuck cares?), unicorns do not exist and they have never existed, this is reality. I’ll never lie to my kid.
But this time, at the Arena, when she called me a liar, I was on the verge of tears. How do you convince a stubborn Scorpio of a kid that you have never lied to them and never will? That you are unable to lie, and that you are honest sometimes to a fault, sometimes brutally so, even if the truth hurts. “I tossed your lollipop to the garbage because it’s bad for you. And this track is perfectly straight.”
Being called a liar for me is like having my head soaked with liquid nitrogen. It’s the most painful four-letter word that anyone can ever call me. I have been called that before, by many other people, for absolutely no other reason than spite. And I have felt my heart twisting in agony for days thereafter. But being called a liar by my own child? I’ve never felt that kind of pain before.
The next day I woke up with a crushing feeling of sadness and depression. My husband picked up on it and asked me what happened. After a short pause, considering it, I told him “I’m not sure I want to talk about it.” Mainly it was because I wasn’t sure if my turning 40 and my kid calling me a liar was the full story. I felt there was something more but didn’t know what it was.
That day at the office, I read about Mercury being in retrograde, and that felt right. So on our birthday date that evening, I told my husband about it, and as expected, he scoffed. I laughed it off too because like I said, I don’t really believe in it, except for the series of “coincidences” where an imbalance in the cosmos does fuck me over.
Yom Kippur
The thing I worried about the most for Yom Kippur was how to keep my kid busy, while my head is spinning and being super weak and tired, and not being allowed (Halachically-speaking) to just stick her in front of a screen and be done with it. My daughter is addicted to screen time. We try to limit it but sometimes we just let it go if she really has nothing else to do. But on Yom Kippur, we prepared her in advance: “There is no TV, no tablet and no phone on Yom Kippur. Understand?” She whined for a bit, but during the holiday, she was perfectly happy playing with her toys, her dolls, her magnets, coloring books (technically, that’s also not allowed, but there’s only so many things you can tell a kid not to do, and not letting her color was pushing it). On the last couple of hours of the fast, I like going to the synagogue for the ne’ila and hearing the shofar. My daughter joined me half an hour before the shofar, and it was so nice to have her there with me. I wish she would have come in just five minutes before for the Birkat Hakohanim, but it was still nice she was there for the shofar.
The fast was easier than I expected. My daughter behaved herself wonderfully. It was peaceful and quiet, and I can’t imagine a better 25-hour fast than that. After the fast, I had my customary mug of hot milk, with the egg-yolk-and-sugar mixture (that my husband finds disgusting) as a sweetener, and the jelly cookies my daughter and I baked before the fast started.
I planned to have some of the chicken soup my mother-in-law made just the day before, but my husband told me that my MIL’s fridge broke down and the soup went bad. But I was still adament about my soup. So I MADE one! I usually need a whole day to make a soup, but this time, I just tossed some slices of potato into a pot, along with whatever was left of the peas-and-carrots mix I had in my freezer, and the last bit of groats I had in the cupboard, boiled it, seasoned it, and presto soup is done! I didn’t even need to add any onions or greens. It tasted wonderful just as it was. Even my husband, who had a pretty bad time recovering from the fast (he had nausea, throwing up nothing but water, and crashing on the couch unable to move) had a serving of the soup and loved it.
I’m so proud of myself, not only for having made a soup in less than an hour, but for having made it after a fucking 25-hour-long fast! That’s muscles-emoji right there!!
Succot and my Jewish Birthday
The eve of Succot is coming up on Sunday. This year, we decided to not build a succa because we might not even use it. We’re planning on a shitload of back-and-forth rides out of Jerusalem and spend most of the holiday with my family. On the eve and the following day, we’ll be in my family’s succa in Meitar, where they might mention my birthday. I kinda hope there won’t be too many people… There are some of them I haven’t seen since the onset of Covid. Many of them had babies I never met. If there are too many people there, I won’t know who is who, but mostly, I won’t have anybody to talk to. I’ll feel like I do when I’m around mothers of the other kids from my kid’s class. They always talk about their kids (plural) and their babies (newborns), and I loath these conversations because I feel totally left out. I have only one kid, she’s going on 6, and I can’t have any more kids (not by choice) and when other mothers talk about their babies, sometimes it feels like they’re shoving it in my face. Of course they’re not. Their current lives revolve around their babies, and it’s only natural that this is all they’ll talk about. But it doesn’t hurt any less.
Anyway, I’ll try to not give a shit. I hope I’ll be too busy staring at the full moon to give an iota of a shit as I always do on my Jewish birthday. It’s the first full moon of the Jewish year – the Moon of the Robust – and it’s important for me to look at it and draw something (anything – power, inspiration, gratitude, awe…) from it.
Sidenote: OK, so maybe I am somewhat of a cosmos girl. Maybe I do believe there is some truth to the theory that celestial events have the power to influence events on earth. I know the full moon does that for me.
Then, during chol hamoed, we’ll be joining my extended family at the rally for fallen soldiers that takes place every year for bereaved families. This year, it will be at the Ronit Farm. I have no idea where that is but I remember that they had the rally there once before. They have lots of activities for kids. We have nothing special planned for chol hamoed so this will be a nice way to keep our kid busy.
For the second chag, we’ll go to my parents in Be’er Sheva, and that will be the end of that. Finally. Going back to our routine will be a blessing.
November will present me with a new set of challenges – my daughter’s birthday, the annual Picabook album, AND *drumroll* ZineWriMo! Mercury better stay on course, for real!
Peace, love and at least I have my birthday gifts – Stephen King’s new novel Fairy Tale and Joe Hill’s NOS4A2 – to keep me nice and detached from all the baby talk that is bound to fall on my head.
So I never got around to posting my progress with That Monthly Zine Project since May. But better late than never.
And I didn’t get around to making the August zine yet, but I hope to make it later. I just ran a little low on inspiration lately and after International Zine Month, I felt drained.
So here are my zines for June, July and September.
June Prompt – Celebration Since my husband’s grandmother passed away on that month at the holiday of Shavuot, I decided to discuss how often our celebrations are mixed with some amount of sadness or time of mourning. It happens a lot on Jewish holidays, and I elaborated on that, as well as my experience with it.
July Prompt – Clothes OK, so that one I actually did post about because it was my IZM-MoZiPro combo zine. To read more about it, go here.
September Prompt – Dreams In this one, I wrote about some dreams I had, the ones I liked, the ones I didn’t, and the ones that were straight-up nightmares. I didn’t write about what I think the meaning of these dreams are, as I don’t really believe in it. But it was fun to recount just how active my brain is even at night.
♀ Riot Grrrl ♀ בישראל 