Blog post: Zines, and my 30 years of self-publishing
A zine is a small, self-published booklet. They can contain thoughts, interviews, rants, photos, collage, artwork, poetry, and anything else you can put on a blank piece of paper. They're usually made by a single person, but occasionally by a small group. The Asian pop culture magazine Giant Robot started as a Xerox zine, for example. Often there's theft involved, if only "borrowing" the office copy machine and paper, or maybe stealing staples or copy paper form work. Sometimes they were called fanzines or chapbooks. Thomas Paine's Common Sense, which helped inspire the American Revolution, was a basically a zine of its time period. Zines are often horrible and wonderful at the same time. You can say whatever the fuck you want in a zine, there are no editors or censors. For much of the 20th century, from sci-fi in the 1930's to poetry in the 1960's, and exploding with punk rock in the 1970's and 1980's, zines have been a counter culture media staple for decades. Despite the amazing internet publishing technology of the 21st century, zine culture remains strong.
It's kind of depressing that the short documentary, "$100 & a T-Shirt," is the best thing on YouTube about zines. Thousands upon thousands of different zines were published over the last few decades, but no one got around to doing a full on film about the many zine scenes. In any case, that documentary sums up the zine publisher's motives pretty well. (That video was embedded in the original version of this blog post, published in September 2015).
The other day I was cooking pancakes for breakfast, and my mind was wandering as I cooked. For some reason, it suddenly occurred to me that this month, September 2015, marks my thirty year anniversary in self-publishing. Like many self-publishers from Generation X, it all started with a zine. Just over thirty years ago, in late August of 1985, I finished my summer job at the Boise Fun Spot, a small amusement park in Boise, Idaho. I packed up my 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, which was approximately the size of an aircraft carrier, and drove to my parents' new home in San Jose, California.
My first couple of weeks in San Jose were spent unpacking, getting to know my new city, and looking for a job. I soon found a job at a Pizza Hut, and began a routine of working nights at the restaurant, coming home and doing balance tricks in my room for an hour or two, caffeine buzzed on Pepsi and Mountain Dew I drank at work, and then going to sleep. I'd wake up in the late morning, eat some breakfast, do the chores that needed done, and hop on my bike and street ride around San Jose. I knew there were lots of good riders in the San Francisco Bay area, but I had no idea where they were or how to meet them. Things were like that in the pre-internet days.
I had been toying with the idea of publishing a zine in Idaho, but I never got around to actually doing it. I'd first heard of bike and skate zines in FREESTYLIN' magazine, and the idea of making a zine was appealing to me. I'm not sure why. I didn't think of myself as a writer then, I kind of thought of myself as a photographer, even though I only had a Kodak 110 camera. Remember those little things? After thinking about it for a couple of weeks, I decided to make my first zine, using photos from Idaho, and my trip to the 1985 AFA contest in Venice Beach, California.
Like most zine publishers, I had a couple of problems when I started. First, I'd never actually seen a real zine, I'd only read about them. Second, I didn't have a typewriter. Yeah... a typewriter. Sure, the first Apple Macintosh computers had come out a year earlier, but only rich people bought those things then. So I went to the huge San Jose swap meet, and bought a manual Royal typewriter for $15. By "manual," I mean that it wasn't even electric. It came in a big case, and looked like it was from the 1920's or something. With that piece of crap typewriter, I began my writing and self-publishing career.
My sole purpose in making my first zine was to meet other freestylers in the San Jose area, and eventually, the other Bay Area riders. Much to my surprise, it actually worked. My first zine was three sheets of paper, with stories and photos on both sides, stapled in the corner. I didn't even know that you were supposed to fold the pages in half like a little book. I dropped off copies of my zine to a few local bike shops, and (snail) mailed copies to the editors and writers of the main BMX magazines. I don't know why, it just seemed like the right thing to do. My zine was called San Jose Stylin', and it was horrifically ugly. But, in those pre-internet days, I started publishing news of the BMX freestyle world a month after it happened, at a time when the major magazines printed the news three months after it happened. I became the de facto source for up-to-date freestyle news in the U.S.. That was totally by accident, the whole thing blossomed and evolved as it went. I also interviewed the top riders in the Bay Area, who included pros Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson, Oleg Konings, Hugo Gonzales, and Rick Allison, as well as lots of incredible amateurs.
Very much to my surprise, my zine was chosen as the top BMX zine in the country, by the guys at FREESTYLIN' magazine the next time they did an article about zines. That led to writing a contest article for them as a freelancer, then ultimately a full time job at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines. I had no idea when I started, but publishing that first zine led to a totally different direction in my life. FREESTYLIN' magazine editor Andy Jenkins changed the course of my life with one phone call. He asked if I wanted to interview for a job at Wizard Publications, because of my self-published zine. Andy himself really understood this, because his life changed when Wizard publisher Bob Osborn offered Andy his job, because of a post card Andy had written to him, after winning a bike in a contest. Andy knew the randomness of serendipity, and the huge ways it could change someone's direction in life.
I only lasted five months at Wizard, mostly because I wasn't punk rock enough, and didn't like the band Skinny Puppy. And because I was a kind of bossy, uptight dork back then. I didn't meld well with that crew, and they laid me off. They permanently replaced me with some East Coast biker/skater kid named Spike Jonze. He was a cool kid, I wonder whatever happened to him? Heh, heh, heh. (By the way, I stole "heh, heh, heh" from Andy J.)
After Wizard, I wrote and edited the American Freestyle Association newsletter for all of 1987. From proofreading two magazines, and being a gofer at Wizard, I was suddenly writing, shooting photos, and laying out an 8 to 16 page newsletter every month. And in my spare time I was putting heat transfers on T-shirts, and helping put on the AFA's local and national contests. Less money, but I learned a lot more, and it was more fulfilling, and frustrating, at the same time.
While at the AFA, I started producing BMX freestyle videos, and really bad TV commercials for AFA contests. I also put out a single issue of an audio cassette zine that year. Yeah, an audio cassette zine. I made a kind of mix tape, with contest play by plays, interviews straight to tape, and random thoughts about freestyle, and some music. Basically, I made a podcast 20 years before podcasts were invented, and 30+ years before podcasts became cool. It wasn't the greatest idea, but it was fun to try in 1987. You don't know how ideas will fly unless you try.
From the AFA, I got hired at Unreel Productions, the video production company owned by Vision Skate Boards/Vision Street Wear. My main job there was duplicating tapes for anyone in their companies who needed them. During that time, I started publishing Periscope zine. The idea that sparked that zine was that we all only see a little piece of the world through our own "periscopes." Each of us focuses on certain things, a small part of the total reality, much like a submarine captain looking through a periscope. So I wrote to the world about what I saw through my periscope. That zine had a lot of BMX freestyle in it, but also other random thoughts and ideas about other things I was interested in.
The punk rock inspired, D.I.Y. idea of self-publishing morphed into video self-production, led by rider/producer Eddie Roman in the late 1980's freestyle world. I produced or edited 7 BMX freestyle videos in the late 80's, six for the AFA and one for Ron Wilkerson at 2-Hip. Much of that time I was a production assistant working with the crew making Vision skateboard, snowboard, and BMX videos and TV shows.
Then in 1990, I self-produced my own video, with some late financial help from riding buddy, Mike Sarrail. The video was called, The Ultimate Weekend. I lost some money, but made a video I was pretty stoked on. That led to producing and editing the first two videos for Chris Moeller's garage BMX company, S&M Bikes. Ultimately, I produced, and/or edited 14 low budget BMX, skateboard, and snowboard videos. Due to my video production background, I also wound up working in the TV industry in the early 1990's. I worked on the crew of over 300 episodes of a dozen different TV shows, including four seasons on the hit show American Gladiators.
A couple years later, while sleeping on the floor of the tiny apartment where Chris Moeller ran S&M Bikes, Chris showed me a book of Henry Rollins' poetry. At that time, I had been writing poetry for several years, hiding it, and not telling anyone about it. After reading Rollins' poems, I decided to do a zine of my best poems. It took months to edit, type (this time on an electric typewriter), and publish that zine. It had 80 or 90 poems, and had so many pages that I had to duct tape the zine together, staples wouldn't go through all those pages. The first poem in that zine was called "Journey of the White Bear," written after getting dumped by a girlfriend in 1988. From that came my nickname, The White Bear, which became my pen name for years. Chris Moeller kept calling that, making fun of me, and the name stuck. I did two more poetry zines in 1996 and 1997. I published several other zines in the 1990's and 2000's, a few of them 48 pages or more, which is huge by zine standards.
Many years later, in 2001, I walked into the Van's Skatepark in Orange, CA, and freestyle legend Dennis McCoy was standing at the counter. When he saw me, he told the guy he was talking to, "This guy makes the best zines!" He couldn't even remember my name at the time, but he remembered my zines. As many concussions as Dennis has had, I'm surprised he even remembers his own name anymore, but I was really stoked at his compliment, especially because I hadn't seen him in over a year.* Another time, at the Huntington Beach U.S.Open of Surfing contest, I ran into former freestyle skater, long time friend, and Etnies vice president, Don Brown. The same thing happened, he pointed at me and told his friend, "This guy does the best zines." On that particular day, I had some of my newest zines with me, and gave them each a copy.
All told, I've published about 40 separate zines over the years. Then, in 2007, working as a taxi driver, I first heard of blogs. Blogs are easier than zines on many levels, and you can, potentially, reach a much bigger audience, thousands, even millions of people. But they don't have the same feel that an actual physical zine does. My taxi blog sucked, but it opened me up to a new form of self-publishing.
In late 2008, after several tough years working as a taxi driver, which led to a year of homelessness, I went to stay with my family in North Carolina for a little while. Unable to find a job there as the economy collapsed into the Great Recession, I wound up getting stuck there for a decade. But when I stayed in my parents' apartment, I finally had a computer to start learning about the internet, and everything I'd missed in years working 80+ hours a week as a taxi driver. I was such a Luddite, I barely ever used a computer at all before 2008. I actually went to the library and rented a computer for an hour to check email and Google a few things, up until that point.
I started my first Old School BMX freestyle memoir blog, FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales, in North Carolina, just to vent. I soon started connecting with people from the early days of freestyle, both people I knew in the flesh, and ones I didn't. I had no idea there was an old school BMX community online, but I tapped into it with my blog. I also completely pissed off a couple of the people I once worked with at Wizard Publications, although that definitely wasn't my intention. I was still figuring out the line between my personal stories, and other people's personal boundaries, at the time.
After the FREESTYLIN' blog had run its course, I started a new, old school BMX freestyle blog called Freestyle BMX Tales. That let me write about the rest of my time in the BMX freestyle world. Later, as a joke, I started a blog about panhandling and homelessness called Make Money Panhandling. I actually started that blog just to learn the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I wanted to start a blog with the stupidest name possible that had "make money" in the title. Then I wanted to move that blog to the top of the Google rankings, using SEO techniques. Once I got going on it, I found I had a lot to say about homelessness and panhandling, since I'd struggled with it for a few years at that point.
Those three main blogs garnered over 210,000 page views in their lifetimes. Now in 2021, the third version of Freestyle BMX Tales (still up now, version 2 was on Wordpress), has over 38,000 page views. The personal blog I retired a few months ago, Steve Emig: The White Bear, now has over 120,000 page views in about 3 1/2 years. My newest personal blog, Steve Emig Adventuring, is creeping up on 2,000 page views, a few months into it's run. That's over 370,000 page views across a few niche blogs, mostly about Old School BMX freestyle, Sharpie art, and economics. (Stats updated in 1/2021 for this ebook).
All told, I've written well over 2,500 blog posts across 30+ blogs. Most of those blogs sucked. Sometimes I would get an idea for a blog, try it a while, and then realize it was a dumb idea, and give up. But through publishing them, I have learned a lot about how "new media" works, and how to use it effectively. By "new media" I mean, blogs, the various social media platforms, YouTube, Vimeo, Medium, the late Squidoo site, and all the apps people use daily now. I studied the work of people like Seth Godin, Mitch Joel, Gary Vaynerchuk, Amanda Palmer, and others who use these new platforms well. More importantly, I've spent 12 years online writing about things I find interesting. Hundreds of thousands of page views show that some other people find these things interesting as well.
At a really dark time in my life, shortly after my dad's death in 2012, I took all the blogs I did up until then down. I deleted close to 2,000 posts in one evening. I immediately regretted doing that. But I needed to keep writing and to keep blogging. So I started blogging again, not long after, and I'm still blogging regularly, even after threats to severely beat me, buy a lynch mob-type group, because of my blog, in North Carolina. Hoka hey, it's a good day to write.
Now (2015), 30 years to the month after publishing my first zine, I have two blogs. The new version of Freestyle BMX Tales, which you're reading right now, and Become Your Own Hero, which is about two things. (2020 note: Become Your Own Hero turned out to be one of the dumb idea blogs). One, it's my journey to start all over in life as a middle aged guy reinventing himself. Second, it's about making the most out of our lives.
I've done a really wide range of things over the last 30 years. Most of the best things I've done can be traced back to my love of BMX freestyle, and my decision to publish that first crappy BMX freestyle zine in September of 1985. More than anything, that first zine took me from being a daydreamer who never acted on my ideas, to a person who acts on some of my ideas, and then follows through to finish projects. That's huge. That's what publishing the first couple of zines did for me. Everyone has good ideas. Most people rarely, or never, act on them, and even fewer follow through and complete their own projects. In today's new media world, completing your own projects is half of the game.
I never became the financial success that many of my friends have up to this point, but my crazy adventures in life have left me with a wealth of stories. And stories are what this particular blog is made of. I have no idea where these current blogs will lead me, but I'm excited to keep writing them, and I'm stoked that all of you read them. Thanks everyone for reading my stuff. Who knows, maybe I'll still be at this in another 30 years.
(Note: December 2020: Five years later, and I updated this post a bit, and it is making it into my first ebook. Still self-publishing, now for 35 years, and no end in sight).
*Dennis McCoy actually has a really good memory, check out his BMX Hall of Fame speech on YouTube.
This original post was written five months after I made serious suicide attempt in April 2015. After my dad's death in 2012, but not specifically because of it, I started having serious mental health issues. It was primarily serious depression, but I had other symptom for a while, as well. I was on several medications at different times after that, and went to therapy consistently as well. For over a year in 2013-15, I was on horrible medication that made me feel like a zombie, I had an asshole for a psychiatrist, and the meds killed my creativity and sapped all my energy. I was living with my crazy mom, couldn't work, and was absolutely miserable.
I stopped taking my meds for a month, my symptoms came back, and I took a massive overdose one morning. I should have died, I took enough lithium to kill a rhinoceros, and another medicine as well. I should have had massive brain damage. Somehow I survived, which is pretty much a miracle. I got a really cool psychiatrist afterwards, got on reasonable meds, continued with my group therapy, and focused heavily on my creativity from that point on. After nearly dying then, I realized that for me creativity is what matters.
Two months after writing this original blog post, I decided to try and sell my Sharpie scribble style artwork in a serious way. I had no other way to make any money at the time. I wasn't known as an artist at all. I've sold over 90 originals since, a bunch of prints, and am now known mostly as an artist and blogger. I weaned myself off psych meds in late 2017, with the help of a friend from my group therapy, who kept an eye on me during that time. My life is much more fulfilling now, and it's finally starting to improve at the financial level, as I write this in part in December 2020.
Suicide is not all it's cracked up to be. If you're in or near that place, get to a hospital or call a hotline, and get some help.
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