A Rather Sudden End...

I think my recollection is foggier than everyone else's. College sent us to all different places (well except for me, I stayed in New York City those 4 years), and once we were done we were newly minted official adults and apparently expected to function as such...I managed to put that off a bit but still, there just didn't seem to be enough space in my life for the zine any longer.

The last issue was fun, but looking at it my artwork was pretty rushed. I did lots better than that before. I guess that was a sign I'd lost interest. I started writing non-fiction, and draw and paint plants and flowers.

Where were you when the Intergalactic Etcetera closed its doors?

As I recall I was a contractor working at Edwards AFB when we made the decision. At that point, all of us were out of college and starting our careers. It seemed the work involved in continuing a semi-regular publication would not have been feasible, as the four of us were spread across three states. (Again, I have to wonder if the Internet had been around we might have decided otherwise.) A sad time, but it was the right decision for us.

What we would have done differently with today's technology

We've certainly talked about this amongst ourselves before. How different our publishing experience would have been with desktop publishing programs, and personal printers. I could have done without looking around for an offset printer (and thank you again to the individual who printed our first issues for us).

Tonight I was thinking how we would have leveraged podcasting to complement our publishing efforts. We certainly knew many people in the 'zine and fan area, and went to our share of Star Trek conventions. I think we would have had interviews, read our latest issue's table of contents, and maybe even shared tidbits of SSG's "Glommer Gossip" column.

It goes without saying that we would have had a blog to connect to our readers and authors, too.