home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
-
- WHY ME?
- ---------
- by Simon Plumbe
- -----------------
-
-
- Every magazine or fanzine goes through a lot of problems before it is finally
- launched. However, it seems as if THE FINAL FRONTIER has had more than it's
- fair share of them!
-
- Work began on issue one in October 1990 (!) and the mag was originally
- scheduled for a May 1991 release, but I had no where near enough material to
- fill a disk. On top of that, the animation I was waiting for didn't arrive
- until the middle of July!
-
- Music caused a few headaches as well. I had two musicians working away,
- trying as hard as they could to convert a selection of tunes from the films
- and THE NEXT GENERATION. However, BOTH of them came to me in mid-May saying
- that the tunes were impossible to convert! Aaaarrrgh!
-
- Then I had a read/write error on the disk I keep the files on that I'm
- working on meaning that, even after I had used disk doctor, I had lost
- several files. Luckily, I had made a back up a week earlier, but I had also
- made a LOT of changes!
-
- Then the same thing happened again in mid-August and I lost the disk
- containing the Richard Arnold article (all 90K of it) plus four other
- directories totalling over 350K! Luckily I was able to salvage all of it
- apart from one directory which contained the charts, the trivia and the
- screw-ups. I had an old back up, but I'd literally re-written all of them
- since!
-
- Also the original transcript of the talks by Richard Arnold was lost! This
- was the file the article was based on and it was over 160K!! Basically, that
- meant that if I wanted to add any more material, I would have had to type it
- up from tape again!!
-
- To top it all off, I found that both my working disks, plus the two disks I
- save the finished files to AND my Workbench disk were infected with a virus!
-
- Things couldn't get worse... or could they? The answer is yes! With four
- weeks to go, the coder suddenly went on holiday for a week before starting on
- the intro! He was also designing the menu screens and he hadn't really
- started on them either! To make things worse, when he came back we only had a
- few days before I went off for a week to another convention! So that left us
- with just a couple of weeks to get everything finished and put together!
-
- As well as all that, I couldn't get hold of the artist who created the title
- screen for a few weeks meaning that essential changes couldn't be made! (The
- orignal version of the title screen had a July 1991 date on it - obviously
- I couldn't use that!)
-
- Now you can begin to understand why it's taken a year to create this mag!
-
- My advice is if you want to create a fanzine or disk mag is forget it! The
- stress and agony is unbearable!
-