This is the end…
My friends. The End.
David Lee Beowülf
To be brief: This will be the last issue of Ink 19 for which I’ll be the Features Editor. It’s been a great run but the time came for me to…
The time came for David Lee Beowulf to seek a new level.
The opportunity came for me to be a player in a real-life game of WarCraft . For the next six months, as part of my day job, I will be a key player on an engineering team in one of the world’s hot spots. My job will be to participate in the design and construction of units for a combined force of Humans and Orcs. I’ll be designing eleven lumber mills, ogre mounds, gryphon aviaries, dragon roosts, even a church!
But to take part in this high adventure, I’d have to give up my editorial duties with Ink 19 .
It wasn’t an easy decision, but it’s the right decision. For me, I get a great adventure, and Ian and Julio can stop freaking out because I’m always late on stuff! (My middle name shouldn’t be “Lee,” it should be “where are this month’s features?”) I won’t be leaving the magazine at all, in fact, I’m going to sneak in a few reviews between bullets. My time after the day job (notice I don’t say “free time”) is already infinitesimal, so much so that I’ve often felt a lot of genuine guilt over being late with this or that. I spread myself thin, but, man, when more than three hours of your waking day are devoted to catching trains (or missing them, as the case might be) and then you live in a crammed little room where you share everything with two other people, I’m surprised I had time for anything. I’d get home at nine PM and there was all this material needing review staring me in the face… Argh! Then it was trying to come up with feature themes that would work and people not wanting to write and…
So much for my excuses… James Mann will assume the role of Features Editor from now on, and I wish him much success. I’ll be a sort of “Editor-At-Large,” and I’ll continue to contribute feature essays, because I cannot stand to keep quiet.
I’ve been with Ink 19 since the beginning – well, officially, it’s been since issue two, but Ian and I were housemates (along with Helen Wheels) when he and Francis P. Dreyer 3 started the magazine. That was back in the waning golden days of WFIT and the Melbourne scene. Ahh, the memories… Ian and Frank would work on the magazine all day and let me use that reliable Mac IIsi for my thesis research all night. I wouldn’t say we worked hard, because it wasn’t really work, was it? Transcribing interviews is work, but going to the shows for free and getting to hang with bands like Flipper more than made up for the long hours spent sniffing contact cement.
There isn’t much more to say than Ink 19 is great.
Ink 19 is the most free of publications I’ve encountered. I know of no other magazine that’s as writer-friendly, that’s as music-friendly (we review what we like – and we like a lot of different things), that’s as intelligent, that’s as generous, that’s as honest, and that has such a diverse and loyal base of readers, both of the print and Web versions.
I thank you all, and I’ll be back in full swing in May. ◼
