I can hear Darrell Mansfield, of all people, singing that Wedding song. I think it's called "Today Is The Day." I don't know. But it's the final countdown for the July/August issue. I've got so much I want to say, but only so much room to say it in the little "note from the editor" page. Hopefully, this issue will be amazing and great.
In the face of "oh, everyone is going online" and "this is an abomination and a waste of our environment!" (which was an actual quote filmed for some crew during SXSW, with a reporter holding up a copy of HM Magazine and talking about how it was a waste of trees, etc. A friend of mine walked up and saw all this take place. I would so love to see that segment)... But anyway, in the face of all this so-called "movement" away from paper and onto digital/online editions, we are actually upgrading our paper to a thicker, shinier, higher quality stock! That's right! The next issue of HM should look a lot more beautiful than usual. The first 8 pages (on either side of the "double flip cover") will be on an 80-pound thickness paper (instead of the current 60-pound). We are getting rid of the polybags, which initially were used to hold inserts, like the old CD samplers we used to do, and then were kept on to help resist tearing of the covers in the mail. Now, with a thicker cover, the magazine should be able to resist damage in the mail stream. One of our advertisers used to always request placement on those up-front pages of thicker stock, back in the 90s when we used it before, because he loved the way it looked. He's going to be pleasantly surprised. I think I will be pleasantly surprised at how good it looks, too.
Sometime around 5pm I will be drinking a 16 ounce can of Monster (blue) Energy drink. That'll be my stage two rocket booster to work as late as it takes. I still have the album review covers to pop into the album review section, the Hard News section, Live Report, a few more ads to place, the columns. I'm toying with the idea of making a big ink spill on the page if one of our columnists doesn't turn his column in. Make it look like an accident and freak everyone out ... or run a big "subscribe to HM" ad with a live shot in it/next to it. I might try to push the envelope of a celebrity endorsement by placing a "Subscribe to HM" narrow ad next to a photo of an artist. I have reached out to the label and management of this artist to get permission to use photos for a subscription ad, because that's kind of like an endorsement, but if I separate the ad part as its own portion, leave a sliver of white paper in between and then have a live photo, it can legally (at least in terms of what the post office calls an ad) be described as an in-house ad next to an editorial piece. I like both ideas, though. The ad/live shot and the big old ink blob.
What do you think?
Oh, my friend from Uganda, Dennis, sent me an encouraging verse today:
"...that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And He has committed to us the message of reconciliation."
Wow. God is not counting men's sins against them. That is huge! And another huge this is He is giving us the message of reconciliation! We get to tell people that God has made peace with them available. We are actually called "ambassadors" in the next verse.
Being so close to 2 Corinthians 5:17, I couldn't help but recall that moment of great joy, gratittude and sense of accomplishment. The joy of knowing it was God's work and not mine erased the self-satisfaction part and put it into a "grateful I could serve God and somehow be a part of that" when I saw some people on the floor of the Casper Events Center arena, praying over the "It's Cool To Be A Virgin" certificates we had handed out at one of our out-of-state shows with Lust Control. By God's grace, we can believe the promise that our failure has been wiped away and that we are truly "new creatures" in Christ Jesus. We've been pardoned. This is amazing, freeing stuff.
Posted by Doug Van Pelt at May 20, 2008 10:48 AM