Exile

We have a lot of thing coming your way on our WordPressvery soon! And we actually mean it this time! :)

There's going to be posts all over the place, the first coming tomorrow! This is very exciting for us, since we finally have our writing and updating groove back! And we located the exclamation mark key! See?!

With the first North American tour in 10 years starting tomorrow, it seemed like a good time to make an update about our own first.

We have been working hard for weeks now (extra hard in the last week because the panic of needing to finish hit us hard) and the finished product is going to the printer tomorrow. After they are folded and stapled, we'll be able to send them out to the wonderful distributors we recruited for various gigs throughout the tour, and hopefully they'll find you.

Making a complete and cohesive zine is a lot harder than we expected, but no less fun. With our original plan, we were going to start ourxo quarterly publication in January 2010. (We will still follow through with that plan with our premiere issue.) But within a week, rumors of tour dates began cropping up on foreverdelayed, confirmation coming slowly but surely. With exciting news of a tour on our own continent, there was no question we were going - but what about getting our zine out there too? American fans are not few, but they are far between. We knew that waiting in line, waiting for doors, would be the only way we could ever see and meet more Manics fans in person, in one place, than we'd ever met in our whole lives.

And through a fast-forward montage of typing, reading, writing, searching, crafting, drawing, creating, and patience, we arrive at today. Because of the rush, some of our web-only content (which will only be available on our WordPress) will take a couple days to make it up here. It will complement what is already in the zine, but be longer and more detailed. We'll also post extended versions of certain articles online.

But that will all come later. Check back so you don't miss it!

It's time for an entry. There are no readers, there are no followers, and there is nothing in print yet, but it's time to talk about progress.

Since this pipe dream of a project became reality one sunny morning, things have been taking shape around here. You're probably reading this on one of the zine's various blog outlets. You can follow the more pressing updates on Twitter. Our flickr photostream will have in-progress graphics and photos from gigs to come. It's all very exciting. And very overwhelming.

There's a lot to be done before the Manic's first North American tour in 10 years. We are readying a mini/preview issue to be handed out at the shows to celebrate. It'll be half the size we're planning for the regular, quarterly issues due out January 2010.

Currently, articles and features are still being written, the art still being created. Below is a screenshot of Alyssa's desktop while she works on the first digital art she's ever tackled.



Lookin' good. She's got a LOT of work still to do, but for the first project she's ever worked on, especially in color (something she can't use well in traditional media, haha), it's going pretty damn well.

Enough of that, though.

So, to anyone who stumbles upon this entry that actually like the Manic Street Preachers and has patience for a couple of American fans too excited and sarcastic for their own good, please keep in touch and keep reading. We promise not to disappoint.