Those Six Days of Christmas stories were a mixed bag but I actually received some positive feedback from one friend regarding them. I’m still waffling about doing it again in December; the lack of a response from others doesn’t mean agreement or approval. But I have been feeling nostalgic about my 10 weeks of unemployment to kick off 1993. It wasn’t a great time, it was seriously stressful (little did I know it would be picnic compared to now). If I were a wiser, braver person, I probably could have enjoyed it more and took the risk on moving to Austin, Milwaukee or Chicago sooner.
Something good did come from my downtime, Picayune and KMAG coalesced into their version 1.0 states. The latter would gel into its first official, formalized patterns by the Summer of 1993 so I will write about its ancestor WMAG later this year. Picayune received more attention while I was moping, staying up too late, sleeping at weird times, watching gobs of TV and keeping my Mac skills ready on the Macintosh LC I owned.
Way back in 1990, my friend Lee (aka Doc) moved from Milwaukee to Beaumont and at Christmas he made a newsletter with his Mac. It was pretty cool for the technology of its day. So I stole his idea when I started writing letters to my friends who graduated from Marquette and moved elsewhere. I was also trying to land something in desktop publishing either at the Milwaukee Sentinel where I was underemployed as a sportsagate, or someplace they used Macs like kinko’s. I recall Deb and Neal were my first official victims of Picayune’s earliest incarnation, Maggi Picayune.
Fast-forwarding through 1991, I did score a job with a kinko’s down on Milwaukee’s southwest side and then GDW lured me away to Central Illinois. Despite learning all about laying out publications, typesetting and the real power in PageMaker 4, Maggi Picayune became infrequent. I do recall it having a couple gems, namely my Fisher-Price cartoons made in MacDraw II for Jose.
Then you all probably recall, GDW came to a predictable, sudden painful close in 1992. I had all this time on my hands because the economy was still in the toilet as 1993 began and there’s never any serious hiring until Spring anyway. I had to do something to pass the days while waiting for my pittance of $132/week from the unemployment office. Maggi Picayune got refined and redesigned with practically an entirely separate issue created for every friend I wrote to: Paul & Helen, Jose, Doc, Deb & Neal and probably Cindy. Some elements were recycled between the recipients but not much, each person (or couple) had different tastes or interests.
When I landed an interview with Chief City Graphics, I felt pretty prepared to take on a typesetting gig. Unfortunately they used QuarkXpress 3 which I wasn’t as comfortable with since college and GDW’s art department took care of color separations; something PageMaker handled poorly. A tad dejected, I continued working on Maggi Picayune, cleaning up scanned artwork in Illustrator 3, writing reviews and listening to music on WXRT or my CD collection. CCG came through later (a story for the near future) which then gave me access to Quark Xpress 3; it wasn’t as formidable as the production manager made it sound neither. My past skill as a typesetter overcame the software’s alleged learning curve.
Thus ends part one on Picayune and KMAG’s ancestors. I will probably pick up with KMAG’s predecessor, the WMAG cassettes, because I could really start doing what I wanted with them once the paychecks from CCG rolled in. Somara has never seen most of the original Maggi Picayune’s nor have I read them since they were mailed. It might be time to review them, see what’s improved and laugh. Hopefully I’ll feel better about them than my archived college papers I received A’s on; makes me wonder if the professors actually read them.