My tiny garden patch is now producing cherry tomatoes at industrial pace, shooting the little red missiles at me like a Kronenbergian vegetable machine gun. Plucking them off the vines a couple of days ago, I found myself eyeing the neighborhood kids as potential tomato-thieves, and felt the need to protect my bounty from them. They were totally occupied with playing on a nearby piece of semi-abandoned heavy machinery, and couldn't care less about the petty garden larceny options available to them. Washington DC's ubiquitous street-digging, as new high-speed data lines go underground, has at last come to our neighborhood. Monstrous yellow hydraulic insectile digging equipment is scattered around waiting for the human masters to return. It is an amusing plot twist that the individuals responsible for installing the information superhighway beneath our feet are the same guys who lay water and sewer lines, men who bring their lunches every day in Coleman coolers on the back of a pickup truck. Geekmoids like me will take their work and build shining palaces of audiovisual stimulation on top of their roughhewn basement foundations. We'll hail ourselves as the settlers of the electronic frontier, when in fact the route westward has been paved smooth ahead of us.

I've been spending some of my time recently promoting Omline, "the 'zine about dying, for the living," and advertising for contributions at writers' web sites and on listservs. One recent appeal on a 500-member mailing list of Washington-area writers touched off a small conflagration. I made the error of admitting that publishing and writing the 'zine is an "unpaid labor of love."

From: Lisa Bellamy
Reply-To: Washington Independent Writers List
To: WIW-L@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU
Subject: Omline's request for help finding contributors
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 16:24:59 -0400
I'm a list reader who was appalled by the Omline editor's audacious request that professional writers help him solicit "contributors for what is (unfortunately) an unpaid labor of love." Unfortunate, indeed. Most "sharp" writers value their work too much to give it away!

I read that and thought: I'm "audacious!" Woo! We haven't even released the first issue, and already we're controversial! Hits on the current splash page jumped markedly -- nothing terribly impressive, but a decent baseline. Later, other writers posted messages on the mailing list in support of my right to solicit feedback, since not every worthy cause can pay, and you can't always be expected to get paid for doing what you care about. When the hits from this first salvo died down, I sent another message to the list describing the zine and my own nonpaying role in it, saying that it was my own labor of love as well as one for its potential writers, and that I never meant to imply that members of the list should undermine their own profession by helping me scavenge cheap labor. This generated another small spike in hits to the zine.

I felt this was a pretty respectable first attempt at publicity. I had successfully grabbed the attention of list members, creating a little conflict (if inadvertently) and then milking it for that extra measure of attention. When I roll out the site in September, I imagine the writers will be more likely to take notice of the zine because of their familiarity with it. Can you tell that this is essentially my first marketing campaign? I spent tortuous elementary years riding the bus to school with boys who thought any attention was good attention, and here I am deploying their stupid strategy for my own webzine.

However, I began receiving some emails from prospective writers. This created a new issue: rejection. Having received some little "sorry!" slips myself when I first sent my adolescent prose out to the elite literary magazines of the nation, I have no great love of the rejection slip. But already a potential contributor has emailed me to offer the text of an interview they did with an editor at a romance book publisher. Um...okay, not so very death-related. Clearly this person has to be told something, and it is not "we're so excited about your piece that I'm hyperventilating even as I type this." I'm dragging my feet on replying to him because I'm struggling for a better way to say Thanks, But No Thanks.

More frightening yet, there are other writers who pitched ideas that I said I'd like to see developed. What happens when some of these, inevitably, suck? Having asked a writer to spend some time fleshing out a possible article, I have little idea how to tell them humanely that I don't think we can use it after all.

And what about those writers who produce a good article that I just want to edit a little? How do I tell them that? And what about when someone submits an article that's so great that I feel really jealous of their talents? How do I go about killing them and devouring their brain so their powers will become my own?

All these questions will work themselves out, but the flapdoodle that my zine-promotion precipitated on the listserv only seemed to illustrate my inexperience in running a venture like this. I'm having to feel my way through a lot of tasks that someone who had a clue about running a magazine would negotiate effortlessly.