Yea, three exclamation points. I went there.

AND twenty-four was given a really great write-up in the Publishers Weekly news blog! Wow! Thank you!

Contributors to issue one of twenty-four magazine
presented in no particular order
almost last and possibly best with Rich Watts

Rich’s “official” bio:

Rich Watts
richwatts.com
@wattsei

Rich is a code-wrangling graphic designer and fabricator, currently in the midst of building a distillery from scratch. Rich has held jobs as a bookseller,waiter, carpenter, computer nerd, web developer, and designer. He’s a graduate of the Cooper Union School of Art and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Maybe you noticed up there that the word “official” is in quotation marks. That’s because, tell you a secret, I wrote Rich’s bio for this project. Because Rich is incredibly generous with his time, spaces and talent, and sometimes when one encounters incredibly generous people, one must support them in whatever way possible, even in little things like taking the time to write their bios for them when they are too busy.

 Twenty-four will happen tomorrow, and our space is Rich’s studio, which he offered instantly and without reservation, only specifying that he would need to make sure his fellow studio-mates were respected in their space. So to tell you about Rich I could tell you about that space, how full it is of beautiful prints, strange books, small and interesting objects, tools and wood dust. He has a neon sign and desks from a Catholic school, and a complete and working wood shop.

Rich works with Zac at The City Foundry, so my first real introduction to him was as a participant in a branding workshop I ran for them a few months ago. So I could tell you about getting to know him in those sessions, how he speaks his mind cleanly, smiles easily, and listens well. How he was the only one of their entire staff who did the homework I gave them.

Or I could talk to you about his fantastic design work, the best example of which that I have on hand is the Industry City Distillery website. I really need you to scroll all the way to the bottom on that one. I really need you to get to the flow chart at the bottom. Since meeting him I have also wandered many a time through his online portfolio, because the things he makes are beautiful, clever, and hilarious.

Or I could tell you about Trade School and OurGoods, organizations he has had a hand in founding, both of which are born from the idea that there is more to the world than money, and that collaboration and exchanges based upon mutual respect can make amazing things happen.

But I think what I’d like to do is simply post the description he wrote for himself to me, late one night at the very beginning of this project, when I asked him for a bio and he responded that he was so caught up on the distillery that his brain had liquefied:

Rich is a neutral spirit with a bright nose and rigorous pallet. Overall decent body and a lingering finish that develops slight undertones of kerosene and burning pine.  Best served neat or with an equal measure of bitters. A staff favorite.

Thank you for joining twenty-four, Rich! See you very, very soon!

Contributors to issue one of twenty-four magazine
presented in no particular order
even more with Kevin Clark

Kevin’s official bio:

Kevin Clark
kevinclarkcomposer.com
@kevinefclark

Kevin is a composer, a producer of creative projects for film, theater and web, and Communications Manager at New Music USA. He writes music that tells stories using literature, theater, marimbas, cellos and plenty of jokes. He also blogs about the future of the arts. And cocktails.

Recent projects include a new music variety night, Ruckus Amongstus, which splits the difference between the Muppet Show and avant-garde music, with cocktails. Videos from the show are being posted to YouTube. He’s also produced films of his pieces. Cucumbers & Gin, a film of a solo violin piece, was funded on Kickstarter, and a case study of project was awarded by TechDirt. The Seafarer, a film of a piece for solo acting cello, setting an Old English poem translated by Burton Raffel, is screening at theSuper 8 Film Festival.

On March 17, Rhymes With Opera is hosting a salon that will include a new piece from Kevin for two actors, lute, saxophone and small ensemble. Not a note of it exists yet.

I didn’t know Kevin very well when I asked him to join twenty-four. A friend of a friend, a composer with an interesting blog, a lot of answers at trivia, and many, many thoughts about the art industry. We connected first over my post about my ideal office, which it turned out was his too. So when I asked him, I wasn’t sure what I was getting into, exactly, but I knew he’d bring energy to the idea.

That, it turns out, was something of an understatement.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen someone get so excited about an idea so fast, and I have never seen someone commit so much of their own time and energy so generously. Kevin is the reason this project has a Kickstarter. Kevin is the reason this project has a promotion schedule. Kevin is the reason this project has survived my illness and outside work and occasional swings into self-doubt. Kevin also scolds me when he thinks I’m being unreasonable, which is gutsy and hilarious and something I genuinely appreciate.

And it turns out I’m not the only person who’s seen Kevin do this to a project; apparently he brings this kind of energy to everything that he does. It’s remarkable. Kevin knows everyone. Kevin gets things done. Kevin has more hours in his day than the rest of us. (This incidentally makes him highly useful for a 24 hour magazine project.)

But speaking of reasons, Kevin is also the reason our Kickstarter page has a video. I wasn’t going to make one; to be honest I’ve never made a video in my life. But he insisted. And it seems that working with Kevin inspires one to stretch toward ridiculous things.

So in that spirit, here is another video, tentatively titled “The making of a Kickstarter video, Also, Kevin is Awesome.” It contains bad camera work, fuzzy shots, alcohol consumption and some soft swearing. It is very silly. I thought it would be fun. Turns out, it was.

Thank you for joining twenty-four, Kevin!

Contributors to issue one of twenty-four magazine
presented in no particular order
onward with Garnet Burke

Garnet’s official bio:

Garnet Burke
garnetsnaps.com
@BleakWorld

By day, Garnet keeps companies up and running. By night, Garnet takes photographs.

I asked Garnet to join twenty-four because he told me once that he takes photographs, but refused to give me his URL so I could see them. That was a year ago.

Garnet and I work together at our day jobs, and it’s taken two and a half years for us to go from me asking him to connect me to the new printer to working together on a creative project. Many, many cups of coffee and half-finished kitchen conversations later, I finally found out his site and tracked down his blog, at which point I promptly freaked out at him in a perhaps overly excited manner.

Garnet is the only issue one contributor who is still in the very early stages of launching an outside creative venture as a supplement to his current work. That is such a common experience for people trying to find their way into creative fields. I asked him to join because he’s a great photographer, but secretly I’m also hoping he’ll write about that decision and the subsequent work he’s done. In particular, he has gone from a website with basic content to a consistent, gorgeous photo blog that posts on an almost daily basis. I know how hard that is, and I love seeing his updates, every single time.

His work, it turns out, is gorgeous.  And since I asked him because he’s a photographer, I’m going to let the photographs finish this for me. I pulled this small selection by going back three weeks in his blog. You should go back further. (All photos are copyright © by Garnet Burke and posted with permission.)

Thank you so much for joining twenty-four, Garnet!

Contributors to issue one of twenty-four magazine
presented in no particular order
putting it on with Jack Stratton

Jack’s official bio:

Jack Stratton
Art Director
writingdirty.com
@writingdirty

Jack Stratton is a graphic designer, writer, and eBook publisher. He has been writing in one form or another for about two decades, from the strange and heady days of BBS’s to Usenet groups, to blogs and now eBooks. He has always been curious about how and why people write online and how anonymity and community affect literature. He is also fascinated by media of all kinds and how mediums affect messages. As well, he’s pretty keen on all things postmodern, fan fiction, meta, kink and sexuality, ties, men’s fashion, fancy things, fancy gadgets, shiny objects, pretty people.

Jack was sitting at the table with me in our writing group when I first articulated the idea for twenty-four. And he, more than anyone else, gets the credit for making me believe the idea to be viable. I have a huge gap in my own personal experience of publications: design. I simply didn’t (don’t) always have the language to understand exactly what goes in to laying out and visualizing a magazine.

But then, this is Jack’s full time job. Jack is a designer working on weekly magazines. A more perfect thing I could never have imagined.

Of course, on a professional level I am incredibly glad that Jack’s agreed to join us. But it’s not simply that I needed an art director; it’s that I wanted him. I am hoping Jack takes twenty-four as an invitation to bring his personal aesthetic into the field of magazines. I believe Jack to be deeply enamored of beautiful things. Not of beautiful things in general, but of a specific and detailed class of beautiful things, curated carefully from his surprisingly broad range of knowledge. My impression of Jack’s aesthetic is that he thinks a great deal about nuance.

Jack takes the quality of his life very seriously. It shows in his careful clothing choices, his colorful silk ties, and his open adoration of great food. It shows in the near reverent way he handles tiny, beautiful objects, drinks shockingly strong coffee, and flirts playfully online.

And it shows in every line of his writing, which ranges from deliciously, erotically purple to beautifully simple and sad. Last summer he set himself a challenge of writing thirty stories in thirty different literary styles, as a way to stretch himself as a writer. What a fantastic idea.

So much of the reason to produce a printed magazine, these days, is the opportunity to create a beautiful thing. With Jack’s direction, that’s precisely what we’ll get. Because he does great work, because he has an eye for beauty, but mostly because that’s just the way he is.

Meanwhile, Kickstarter continues to rise (seriously, thank you), and I am plotting the ways in which I will pile futons and pillows into the studio space and make all of my contributors little nests to work in.

Contributors to issue one of twenty-four magazine
presented in no particular order
singing its heart our with Rose Ginsberg

Rose’s official bio:

Rose Ginsberg
@MsEnScene

Rose Ginsberg is an NYC-based stage director who enjoys political theatre, experimental music theatre, classic plays, and everything in between. Favorite directing credits include Ethan’s People (Midtown International Theatre Festival, nominated for 4 awards; Manhattan Theatre Source); Hourglass (Planet Connections Theatre Festivity, Winner, Best Playwriting Short Form; Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, MA; Variations Theatre Group Harvest One-Act Play Festival, Finalist, Best Play); Jean Anouilh’s Antigone (Manhattan Repertory Theatre), and numerous new one-act plays for ESPA’s Detention series (Jimmy’s No. 43). Rose is an artistic associate at the Looking Glass Theatre, where she has helmed more than 10 productions, including Ready, Set, Story!: How Katie Saved the Sneaky Spider’s Tales, The Taming of the Shrew, and benefit productions of The Vagina Monologues (2007, 2011) and A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant, and a Prayer (2010, upcoming 2012) for Eve Ensler’s V-Day Campaign. Her work has also been seen at the Flea Theatre, ArtHouse, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Dixon Place, the Brooklyn Heights Public Library, Central Park, and the High Line. Rose is a graduate of Barnard College and a student at Primary Stages’ Einhorn School of Performing Arts.

Rose and I haven’t seen one another regularly since college, and I think that is a shame. Once, for a show of hers when we were both undergrads, I failed to find a black suit with yellow pinstripes. Instead, we decided to paint pinstripes onto a plain black suit, consequently covering me in yellow paint and sending Rose into fits of delighted giggling. To this day I wonder what happened to that suit.

Similar to Elissa’s work on the Skryker, that production was so clearly the result of a talented director delving deep into their library of works to try and find something new. The show was The Coronation Voyage. And similar to Elissa, Rose is a stunningly talented director who is wonderful to work with. She is opinionated, gleeful, wise and feisty. Not feisty in the way of small children who want their way; feisty in the way of a decisive woman who knows the kind of world she wants to live in, and will see that world come to life, damnit.

This afternoon I saw Rose’s most recent show at the Looking Glass Theater. The show was A Memoir, A Monologue, A Rant And A Prayer, a performance to benefit V-Day and raise funding for organizations in New York working to end violence against women. Twelve performers in a black box theater, simple words and a cause. Hard topics, rape and violence and systemic oppression and war, handled deftly and presented in turns with gentle feeling and outright rage. I cried. I haven’t cried so much at a show in years.

During the curtain call the actors raised their hands and clapped to Rose in booth above our heads, cheering, and she waved and clapped right back.

If that wasn’t enough, Rose can sing like nobody’s business. How much singing will we do in the magazine? I don’t know. I hope at least a little, in celebration.

I reconnected with Rose a year ago at a friend’s live band karaoke birthday party, and watched from the audience awestruck as she nailed a song I don’t even remember.  It’s not just that she can sing; it’s that you put her on a stage and she goes for it, sings her heart out and no looking back.

I remember her throwing her head back to hit the slippery notes of the bridge, and the band leader afterward telling her that no one ever hits the bridge. I remember the admiration in his voice and the way he shook her hand, as though she was slightly unreal. No one ever hits that bridge. Except Rose. Every time.

Thank you for joining twenty-four, Rose! Congratulations on the run of your fantastic show!

Contributors to issue one of twenty-four magazine
presented in no particular order
sailing on with Elissa Goetschius

Elissa’s official bio:

Elissa Goetschuis
@egoetschius

Elissa Goetschius is a DC-based artist. Recent projects include an inter-disciplinary installation piece for the 24 Hour City Project presented at the Intelligent Cities Conference and again as part of Digital Capital Week. Recent theatre work includes developing and directing a tour of short plays with patients at St Elizabeths Hospital (REFLECTIONS, Wandering Souls) and directing NIGHT SWEATS with the interdisciplinary EMP Collective in Baltimore. Formerly the Literary Manager at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, she developed many world premiere plays including Dead Man’s Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl, boom by Peter Nachtrieb, and Fever/Dream by Sheila Callaghan. She has worked as a dramaturg at Portland Center Stage, Marin Theatre Company, Florida Stage, Rorschach Theatre, Forum Theatre, and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. She has worked for Manhattan Theatre Club and the Royal Shakespeare Company, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, studied at the British American Drama Academy, and holds a degree in English from Columbia University.

Elissa and I have been friends since our sophomore year of college, when we both showed up for a Shakespeare troupe. She wore green and talked about being a competitive volleyball player in high school.

Two years later she directed The Skryker, with my art direction, and I watched her take a confused, dense story with two incredibly challenging lead roles and turn out a production that was, quite simply, magical. She commissioned our mutual friend to build her her set from steel and scrap metal, cast a troupe of fairy tale creatures who danced across the stage, and let me draw on her cast members with markers.

At the time I thought it amazing that she had found this play, pulled from a vast library of plays that she has always seemed to have on hand in some rich mental bookcase, and decided it was possible to make into a decent production with a group of 22-year-olds. I confess that I thought maybe she was being a little too ambitious. I was so wrong. It was so gorgeous.

I asked Elissa to join twenty-four in part because she’s a dramaturg; incredibly focused in ways that many of us never even notice. My impression of dramaturgy is that it is an exercise in exploring and respecting the enormous stories that inform the tiniest details. Why must this object be placed just so on the stage, and why does a character use this piece of slang instead of that one? Elissa asks these questions, in the quest of world-building.

I asked her to join in part because she’s great to work with, and I have seen her develop fierce friendships and protective instincts with the people she directs. I remember sitting in the audience with her halfway through the run of Skryker, gripping each other so tightly that we might have crushed the tiny bones in our hands, as one of our actors dislocated her shoulder on stage. I remember Elissa shooting out of her seat and running around the hallway to the backstage with me right behind her, our shoes sliding on the wooden floor.

And I asked her in part because I hate her taste in shoes. I know it’s odd; bear with me. Elissa and I share a common love of rather strange fashion, and of elaborate personal presentation. Take a whirl through her tumblr to get a sense of what I mean. This is one of my favorite sources of curated images online, anywhere. And every time I see her, Elissa is wearing tall, elaborate, usually wedge-heeled shoes, along with her feather earrings and brilliant colors. I can’t get over wedges, but I love seeing how Elissa thinks about what she wears, and how her choices make sense within her own sense of aesthetics, simultaneously in line with and extremely divergent from my own.

Thank you for joining twenty-four, Elissa! I can’t wait to see you soon!

Below, Elissa’s portrait, from my portrait project. (I did Elizabeth too.)

And before I launch in, a quick note: Andrew’s site MAY throw a malware warning right now, which you will get if you click on many of my links. It is okay! Proceed! The issue has been cleared up, though the warning remains.

Contributors to issue one of twenty-four magazine
presented in no particular order
forging on with Andrew Losowsky

Andrew’s official bio:

Andrew Losowsky
www.losowsky.com
@twitsplosion

Andrew Losowsky likes to make things out of stories.

He’s written for Wired, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and The Believer, as well as the books We Love Magazines, The Doorbells of Florence, and Visual Storytelling.

Andrew co-curated the independent magazine festival Colophon, co-directs the experience company The Museum On Site, and runs Stack America, a subscription club for people who love magazines. He was previously the editorial director of the European publishing company Le Cool, creating award-winning books, magazines and websites.

Andrew Losowsky is currently the Books Editor at The Huffington Post. He lives in New York City.

Andrew’s bio on his website contains the following bullet point: “I make remarkable experiences, and don’t understand the purpose of any other kind.”

I cannot write a more perfect summation of Andrew than this.

My first and most lingering impression of Andrew is actually of his wife, Lyra, and how she looked at him when he spoke his vows at their wedding. They were standing on the edge of a steeply tumbling cliff, mountains in the background, surrounded by friends and family and a ring of sunflowers. I remember thinking that I hoped to be so eloquent one day.

Andrew and Lyra didn’t know me very well when they invited me to come to Spain and celebrate their marriage with them. They knew Zac, and in the mail one day came an invitation for the two of us, and a few months later off we went across an ocean to stand with them on the side of a mountain range, and launch fire lanterns into the night sky. So I also know and remember Andrew and Lyra as the people willing to welcome an almost stranger into their amazing wedding, a continent away.

Photo credit: flickr user Mothninja

My first encounter with Andrew’s professional work was when he and Lyra worked together to temporarily transform Westminster Street in Providence into a living museum, an exhibit of itself, fascinating in its care and revelation of tiny details. Then I read his book, one of four, attaching miniature stories to photographs of doorbells in Florence. And in our subsequent trip through Europe, after their wedding, Zac and I found a stack of another of his books in a little gift shop off an alleyway in Barcelona, across from an art gallery full of twigs and string:

From a professional perspective Andrew is perhaps 24′s most accomplished participant in the magazine space. His portfolio speaks for itself here, and I’ll add a pointer to this article of his in particular, which turned me on to Boat magazine, and to his magazine curation work at Stack America. A year and a half ago, when I asked him over a cup of coffee where I might start reading if I wanted to learn more about magazines, he replied, with a combination of modesty and humor, that I could, ah, start by reading his blog, actually.

Every time since then that we’ve spoke about this project, he’s been full of ideas of space and creative process, often focused on the grand sense of experimentation, the messy, thrilling part of the making of things. Often these discussions involve him mimicking the motion of throwing papers in the air.

Of course I’m excited to have him on board for this, as a professional. But it seems critical to mention, here, that I am excited to simply know him, as though knowing him will be the vehicle through which, in future years of our lives, I throw paper, make messy creative experiments come to life, and stand on other hillsides to launch fire lanterns again into the night.

Thank you for joining twenty-four, Andrew!

Above, the view from my room at Andrew & Lyra’s wedding. Further above, additional trip and wedding photos.

Also I realized yesterday that I am having trouble counting. It was not ten days. It was nine. Now it is eight. I suppose it depends upon whether one is counting down to one or to zero. I suppose that doesn’t really matter. The magazine is very, very soon.

Onward!

Contributors to issue one of twenty-four magazine
presented in no particular order
continuing with Rose Jasper Fox

Rose’s official bio:

Rose Jasper Fox
Copy Chief
www.copymancer.com
@rosefox

Rose Jasper Fox has been editing periodical publications for most of her life, beginning with Hunter College High School’s long-running science fiction and fantasy magazine, Tapestry. She now edits book reviews for Publishers Weekly and mentors the current Tapestry staff. She lives in New York City with two partners, three cats, seven computers, and several thousand books.

Rose was hard to ask to join twenty-four, mostly because I couldn’t believe she’d possibly say yes. She is so busy it’s become a running joke. She is also, hands down, the most organized person I know.

When Rose’s new website went up a little while ago and I clicked through to explore, the very first thing I noticed was how perfectly the entire thing had been edited. That makes sense, right? A brilliant copy editor of course would have a brilliantly edited website. But look at the way all of her lists line up grammatically, and how the bullets are all of logical and usually similar lengths. I love that she uses periods at the ends of complete sentences but not at the ends of bulleted lists. I love that she believes in the Oxford comma.

I love the subtle thought that went into that copy, the perfection with which each word was chosen. I also love that she writes her contracts in plain English, and is very, very upfront about expectations, deadlines, and goals.

I also linked her to twentyfourmagazine.com and she promptly sent me back an email with two gentle corrections for spelling and consistency. Do you need a copy editor? Hire her.

Rose is incredibly active on Twitter and in other spaces on issues of social justice and anti-oppression work. I think this is amazing of her. She speaks her mind, links constantly, promotes great causes and makes no bones about exactly what it means to be an ally. She is really, really good at having hard conversations about tricky issues, and at making those around her more aware of their own actions.

I don’t know if this is exactly how she’d describe herself; in fact, I doubt it very much. But it is a quality of hers I deeply admire, and one that has encouraged me to act and think more critically. Part of what I have been working on in preparation for twenty-four’s launch is a safe space and responsible content policy, and I am really, really glad to have Rose involved so that I’ll be able to ask her opinion, as we all lay the groundwork for what will hopefully be an ongoing publication.

Thank you for joining us, Rose!

Before I launch into glowing tales of how my best friend tames ferocious freelance beasts, however, I’d like to ask that if you think this is a neat idea, to share the project. Send somebody the link. Put it on Facebook, G+, Twitter, your social network of choice. Pull a brief description here that you can easily forward on. Seriously. I will be working hard to get everything ready for these brilliant people to do work and share with an audience. Finding the audience is what happens now. And of course, thank you so, so much for reading, sharing, and supporting twenty-four.

And without further ado:

Contributors to issue one of twenty-four magazine
presented in no particular order
beginning with Elizabeth Boskey

Elizabeth’s official bio:

Elizabeth Boskey
elizabethboskey.com
@Melebeth

Elizabeth Boskey, Ph.D. is a woman of many hats – most of them knitted in bright colors with googly eyes and floppy ears. Although these days she is primarily a freelance writer and editor who specializes in sexual wellness and animal health (not at the same time!), her other careers have included medical school professor, women’s health researcher, voiceover actress, renaissance festival performer, and front woman for a Klezmer/Irish fusion band.

According to Google, Elizabeth’s primary influence on the world is through her work as the Guide to Sexually Transmitted Diseases at About.com (http://std.about.com), but she also dispenses humorous contraception advice at 101waysyoucantgetpregnant.com and regularly sells her prose (both fiction and non-fiction) to the highest most-interesting bidder. Her home on the web is elizabethboskey.com, but if you really want to know what she’s up to, you’re better off following her on twitter @Melebeth or @About_STD. She can’t wait to participate in the literary flash mob known as twenty-four magazine.

When I first envisioned twenty-four, I thought of it as a project incredibly tied up in the idea of multi-tasking and multiple skill sets, since, among other things, tight deadlines in small teams tend to mean responsibility leaks. Since then the team’s developed for issue one and we have several people involved who’re focused on specific aspects of the magazine’s production: most notably Jack Stratton, our Art Director, and Rose Jasper Fox, our Copy Chief. This makes sense; not everyone can do everything.

When it was still in the early stages, though, I asked Elizabeth to join for one simple reason: I’m pretty sure she can do everything.

Elizabeth has an incredibly flexible written voice, turning out twisted fairy tales and scientific analysis with equal ease, and every time I talk to her she has some new project in a new industry. She has a background in research and academic study that gets applied to her creative work constantly, and sometimes in the strangest ways. She acts and does voice-over work as well as writing, performs aerial stunts on the lyra and reads aloud so well that she can put a room of people in tears of laughter with a smile and a few well placed words.

She also has the kind of work ethic I can only aspire to. Per her twitter stream, she works constantly. She is the first freelancer I ever met with a successful career, and she is the first person I call with career questions. She has managed to arrange her life exactly as she pleases, which is terribly hard and occasionally (to me) terrifying.

Elizabeth also has an incredible knack for presenting hard topics in friendly ways. As the STD writer on About.com, she deals gracefully with questions and issues that leave most of us stumbling over our tongues. She writes 101 Ways You Can’t Get Pregnant, which I think is a brilliant idea, and she writes it because it’s information that needed to be out in the world. The ideas she has that I find the most interesting blend together her experience as a woman, as an academic and as a sex education writer, rather like having an intimate, witty conversation with an incredibly intelligent friend over cocktails, and walking away to discover you’ve learned the history of the pap smear, and a little bit of Shakespeare as well.

And she wears monkey pajamas. Because we can’t take ourselves seriously all the time.

Thanks for joining twenty-four, Elizabeth!

Just so we can get this out of the way up front, part of this post is to ask for your support. And by support, I mean money. Here. Click. Please? Thank you.

Good? Good. Moving on.

In October, at my writing group (actually, we’re a drinking group with a writing problem), an idea I’d had bubbling in the back of my head for about three months welled to the surface. How can one measure when an idea is really born? It was articulated then, at least, for the first time.

“I want to lock a dozen people in a room and have them make a magazine from start to finish,” I said, or something like it. Perhaps it was not quite that fully formed, yet. I knew I wanted a publication, with talented people, and in a model that was sustainable.

Since meeting Andrew two years ago, I have become increasingly obsessed with magazines. Have you seen what is happening in independent magazines of late? How the physical objects are increasingly a part of the dialogue, injecting their look and touch and feel into the worshipful presentation of content and design?

Magazines are so beautiful to me these days. Probably they always were and I have simply now noticed. I find myself inexplicably drawn to their racks and ranks, lingering fingertips caressing the rough spines of eggshell finish covers and embossed titles in bronze and gold.

How does this fetishization of object work against or in harmony with the digitization of content? How to make a magazine that is deliberately engaged with that idea? That justifies its physicality intrinsically within its process?

Creating content for brand new baby magazines can be a rough affair. (I say, having written magazine articles and designed publications and stayed up half the night tearing my hair out while editing journal submissions.) And the people I respect and would want to have join me in any new project are all deeply engaged in lives and projects of their own.

What if I could minimize all of that waiting and email-trading and downtime and commitment? What if I could tap into the best that these brilliant people have to offer, gather it up quickly and get it out into the world before it impacts them too heavily to give so much? What if I could get them all talking to one another and spiraling each others’ ideas into a brighter polish? What if we could make a beautiful something balanced entirely upon the leading edge of inspiration?

Thus, the 24-hour magazine.

So much of my faith in the model of this idea comes from my work with KinkForAll. Unconferences are based upon a model of organized chaos. Organized chaos works. Organized chaos is, in my mind, putting all of the pieces of an infrastructure together without demanding advance explanation or justification for the creative ideas that will be made upon that infrastructure.

I have seen amazing things come of this. Anyone who’s seen a really fantastic improv show, who’s watched a painter put the first strokes of color on a blank canvas, who has been in the audience of an unconference and participated in a spontaneous discussion, has seen this happen. Tools (skills, expertise, space, platforms) plus goal (ideas, content, object) plus people (I am so f’ing lucky) equals great.

This will be great.

So 36 hours ago I pressed the button on my first ever Kickstarter project, and began to bite my nails. And tonight the thing is 20% funded, and even though I’m still biting my nails I am also a little bit stunned. Because it turns out that not only will people join my ideas, they will also buy into them. That is hard to believe until it happens. It is happening now.

Stay tuned as I slowly introduce all of my wonderful issue 1 contributors. And in case you missed it, let me leave this link right here for you. I still, and forever, dear community of the Internet, appreciate your support. Where by support, I always mean love and kind words and mutual excitement. And, just this once, for this baby of mine, I mean money too.

With love,

Sara