This is kinda late in coming, but I feel bad about it. In my freshman English class at UT (English 301, I’m guessing) we were assigned 10 minutes of “free writing” in every class period, which we were to turn in. I enjoyed this exercise, because I have a vivid imagination. However, one day I could not get some Iron Maiden lyrics out of my head, so I wrote them down.
“two eyes in the subway
they burn a hole in your back
a footstep behind you he lunges
prepare for attack…”
When I got this particular paper back, the teacher commented something like, “Good! I like these lines” and she circled the above. I didn’t tell her it was plagiarism.
And we’re still in deadline. The July/August issue is one I’ve been looking forward to for about two years, so it’s a shame it’s been so stressful and difficult. Our original deadline was 5/28, but the last issue’s deadline wasn’t met (but extended a week), which cut into this issue’s production schedule. Now I’ve postponed this one an extra 7 days. This will, in turn, jeopardize the next one (Sep/Oct issue’s deadline is July 30). But I’m also not very confident we’ll make this one. We’ll see. Since I took over ad sales last year, I wear both the editorial and ad sales hat. This is hard, because I can’t use the persuasive “HM is cool, you should advertise” voice, because HM is pretty much me. I think this issue (being our special 25th Anniversary issue) should be the easiest one ever to sell ads for. But it seems the Nashville record labels all hate print advertising now or at best don’t believe in its effectiveness. If you’re friends with any label execs, perhaps you could put in a good word for us. Mikee Bridges contacted me on Friday and booked an ad for the cool new project he’s working with (gamechurch.com). That was an answer to prayer. And the Scream the Prayer Tour contacted us about advertising. I haven’t seen a confirmation from them yet, but I hope that comes through. Those ads are lifesavers for this issue.
A new intern arrived yesterday. His name is Jeff Sistrunk and he just graduated from the University of Arkansas. We’ll forgive his allegiance to the Razorbacks as long as he flashes the hook ’em horns sign right-side up every now and then. I’ll get him to post his first Intern Diary installment today.
Usually I write about 3 stories myself for a given issue. With this issue I’ve assigned myself 9 feature stories. So, as soon as I can shift gears back from Ad Sales guy to Editor, I’ll hop on those. I’m glad we have 3 interns in house right now. One of them left with a sickness on her leg that she wanted her hometown doctor to check out, so Bianca is working on her notebook somewhere near Dallas. Jeff is moving his stuff in and getting settled and Nathan was actually awake at 8am this morning. At least his eyes were open. The lights are on, but nobody’s home yet.
I listened to the new album by Michael Knott. It’s an LS Underground album and Jim Chaffin plays on it. It’s loud. It rocks. It’s all over the place. I’m not sure I like it. It’s good to hear Mike’s voice going off again, though. I’m starting listen #2 now.
Did you know that Outer Circle‘s self-titled debut album is the 24th best Christian Rock Album of All Time? Yep. It sure is.
We had Dave Quiggle design the cover for this new issue. Here’s the design below. Over the weekend I got an email from the label that let me know the band finally took some photos of the new fourth member. I was asked if I could use one of these instead of the trio photos. It makes sense. The poster/centerfold in the last issue of Impending Doom were kind of weird, seeing how the band had five members a year ago and there were three staring off the wall from their poster. The only problem I’m going to have is seeing how different the cover will look with the center photo having a black/dark background instead of the white that’s there now. I’ll mess around in PhotoShop in a few to see what it looks like.
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