I’m sitting here feeling like a kid on Christmas Eve. Or maybe a newly-pregnant daughter who can’t wait to tell her mom about the little one on the way. The latter is probably the better analogy for as the creator/Editor-in-Chief of GAY e-magazine I am, in a way, preparing to give birth on Thursday when we officially re-launch.
As of late yesterday, the April issue is finalized - all 57, full-color pages in their Adobe .pdf glory just waiting to be shared with the world. I couldn’t be more proud or more anxious. I’ve seen first-hand the exhilaration and enthusiasm of the talented women who have contributed their time and creativity to the project and I’m excited to be able to share each of their unique voices and artistic gifts with the world. Trust me, they’ll all be in the delivery room with me sucking on ice chips and doing breathing exercises to relax when our April 1st due date finally arrives.
Of course, just as the expectant mother’s anticipation is tempered with worries of improbable birth defects, my eagerness is balanced by the question, “What if you build an e-magazine and nobody reads it?” I do my best to assuage these doubts by making myself believe that “If you build it, they will come,” a conviction that ultimately resulted in a tear-inducing, happy ending in “A Field of Dreams.” But then the baseball reference just conjures thoughts of additional failure-related terms – strike out, error, passed ball.
As a former little league coach, I know that the only real failure, though, is in not trying your best, and so it is that I wait restlessly for my turn at the plate, at which time I’ll be swinging for the fences. I might not knock it out of the park, but I’ll keep working hard until I do. If nothing else, I owe it to the team.
I dedicate this blog entry and the April 1st issue to all the contributors to GAY e-magazine, the e-zine BY lesbians with a sense of humor and FOR everyone. Be sure to visit http://www.gay-e-magazine.com/ on Thursday, April 1st to “ooooh” and “aaaaah” over our newborn. They always come out a little bit wrinkled and splotchy, but they grow into the cutest darn things!
Candy Parker
One of the great things about creating GAY e-magazine has been that it has afforded me the opportunity to meet a lot of great lesbian women. Among those is comedian Maggie Faris who, along with her friends and co-hosts Barb and Kate, who just launched a new humor/comedy podcast at www.thedickvans.com.
