The return of the Gillespie... two years later

I haven't been here for two years, mainly because of a lack of time to go blogging. However, recently I've retasted blogging on my LiveJournal site, but again feel the need to post long articles from the glorious past. I don't have the knowledge of HTML to set up a regular Web site, but would like to be able to point people to a series of articles that I've written over the years. Some of them can be found in issues of Scratch Pad at http://efanzines.com/ in PDF format. For some reason, however, people don't often discover this material when it's in PDF format, although my fanzines are a lot better looking than my blogs.

Thoughts of this kind were prompted by the kind folks of the Australian SF Foundation, who at ConVergence 2, the national Australian SF convention held in Melbourne 8-11 June, gave me the A. Bertram Chandler Award for Lifetime Achievement in Australian SF. The Foundation kept this a complete surprise from me, luring me into town by asking me to present the Ditmar Award for Best Fanzine during the awards ceremony. Probably a lot of people in the audience were also surprised, having not heard of me or heard mere whispers of my existence. The citation for the award mentions publishing SF Commentary since 1969, and The Metaphysical Review in 1984, and with Carey Handfield and Rob Gerrand, being part of Norstrilia Press, one of the two major Australian small presses of the 1970s. What I've mainly done is write stuff in fanzines -- probably about a million words, and many of the best of those words were written from 1968 to 1977. It's about time I placed some of those articles somewhere, despite the enormous amount of time it takes to OCR articles that first appeared in fanzines.

My other motive in returning to blogging is try to do more to publicise the life and work of George Turner. When George died in 1997, almost exactly ten years ago, he made me his literary executor and heir. Which means that, for the rest of my life, I have to be George Turner. Unfortunately, all his books have fallen out of print, excepta few I still have in boxes and am willing to sell to anybody interested (including his literary biography In the Heart or in the Head, his short story collection Pursuit of Miracles, and his book about the 1979 Monash Writers Workshop, The View from the Edge). There must be a way to post his early, non-SF novels, for instance, but again it's a long job OCRing old books. For the moment, I'm trying to get George's best novel, The Sea and Summer (Drowning Towers in the US edition) back into print, and I have a lot of OCRing to go.

Not much has happened during the last two years, except a general lack of income (as prices have really started to go up, my income from freelance editing and indexing has steadily declined), the death of my mother in March this year, and turning sixty. I feel as if I am running out of time. I want to publish lots of issues of SF Commentary, Steam Engine Time and The Metaphysical Review, but don't have the money for printing and postage. Hence I will probably cut everybody from the mailing list except those who have actually paid for printed copies, and point everybody else towards efanzines.com, hosted by the genial and brilliant Bill Burns.

As John Bangsund used to say, that's a lot of hope going on. Obviously I would prefer to keep publishing real fanzines on real paper, but one needs lots of money to do that. Still, issues that are mainly Web-based are among good company if they appear on efanzines.com.