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It May Not Be Pretty, But It's Sturdy.

by

Michael Gallant

There’s something to be said for persistence.

QM is just over eleven years old. In internet years, that’s like Methusala’s older brother. I recently went through our old links to other zines, and the majority have folded. I understand why most zine strike the tent after a few years. There’s not much money in it, it’s a lot of work, and most of the feedback you get is negative.

So why did we survive? I’d like to say talent, but that’s far too subjective, and I’m not dishonest enough to say work ethic, especially as this editorial is being written the day after it should have been posted.

I think it’s just that we have survived on simple inertia. We’ve plodded along, posted an issue more or less every month, and every time somebody has sat down on the side of the Information Superhighway, dropped his pack and said "screw it!" somebody else has stepped in to shoulder the burden.

It may not be much, but it’s been enough. We’re survived.

More than simple survival, our stubborn refusal to go away has nabbed us interviews with many prominent figures in the field. I never imagined for a heartbeat that Michael Moorcock, Steven Brust or Glen Cook would talk to us. These guys were some of my biggest influences and they were happy to give us an interview basically for free, although we did buy Glen Cook dinner.

There’s a lesson in this for all of us. The biggest advantage a writer can have is to be persistent. Talent is nice and all, but everyone has a few thousand pages of bad writing to get out before you see anything good. It’s just persistence to forge onward through bad drafts, less than enthusiastic reviews, and piles and piles of rejections to get anywhere in this business.

So, we at QM may not be all that talented. We may not be very good at running a site, we may not be very punctual.

But by God, we’ve got us some inertia.

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