Sometimes I can’t believe how captivated I’ve become with making zines. Kid you not—I spent the past seven years bouncing between “Am I more of a writer or more of an artist?” I’d done both, but always separately. The only time I ever thought about combining them was when I toyed with the idea of children’s books. It never really occurred to me that illustrating my own stories could be a thing.
And then along came Realmscapes.
Realmscapes is officially a year old now. I’ve had websites before, but none that felt quite this alive. This one works because it’s built like a satchel, not a box—big enough to hold all my creative endeavors without crushing them into rigid categories. A blog, yes. A place for art, yes. A place for storytelling, definitely. At the time I started it, I was writing and performing in a live storytelling radio show, and I wanted to capture some of that spark. I also needed space for short stories—thirty years’ worth, sitting on my hard drive collecting electron dust.
At first, Aliki’s World took the spotlight. Posting chapters of my draft-in-progress gave me joy every time. But somewhere along the way, I stumbled into zines—tiny booklets where art and writing finally got to mingle.
The Free Fictional Frontier, which I originally imagined as an archive of short stories, morphed into my Zine Dispatch center. And somehow, I just finished my fifteenth in a row. Fifteen! Some were better than others, but each one followed the same rhythm: brainstorm, draft, illustrate, lay out, package, publish, promote. Do that fifteen times in a row and you end up with something bigger than an experiment—you end up with a body of work.
When I scroll the Frontier page and see the grid filling up, it blows me away. Making zines has become my favorite project, even though it started as an afterthought.
But now I’ve got a new problem: space. The Dispatch can’t hold another many more zines in the same format. Do I delete the weaker ones? Make an index? Spin them off into their own realm? Give them a new name? Are they zines, or illustrated essays, or something else entirely?
I don’t know yet. And that’s okay. Realmscapes has always been a work in progress—a place where I can look back and say, “Yeah, I did that.”
