HOW TO DATE DURING A CRISIS

This zine was made by Meghan Crumley a zinemaker from Los Angeles, CA

We gave them some space to tell us about themselves, their process, and what inspires them. This is what they said:

I’m a TV writer and playwright who dated a LOT of men before I met my husband, and now I make zines about it.

I draft each zine on paper before using an open-source program (Scribus) to format the zine pages on my laptop. I usually get in several fights with Scribus, and every time I want to reformat the text, I have to watch a YouTube video to remember how to do it. Then I print out the formatted pages and re-draw my stick figures. I start out very confident while everything is in pencil, then I get very nervous when it’s time to use a pen (I like the Fudenosuke brush pen with hard tip), and I have to really psyche myself up before going over my sketches in ink. I usually screw up at least four times and have to start over, and then I tell myself that this is the final draft I’m going to draw and ink no matter what, and then my pen slips and I do one to five more drafts after that. Then I take the final draft and scan it in at the library on their flatbed scanner, which emails me a PDF so I can print out as many copies as I’d like at home. I have fantasies of selling so many zines it becomes unrealistic to print them at home, but so far that hasn’t happened. Once printed, I assemble the mini zines with the classic cut-and-fold method. For HOW TO MEET A MAN ON THE INTERNET, I originally tried printing it out as five mini zines that I sewed together, but that looked like crap so I called up my sister to help me edit the scanned PDFs because she has a program that can do that. But she’s busy and it ended up being about fifteen hours of editing, so it took a few weeks to find the time and then go through and edit and test-print and edit again. Once that was done I started assembling the zines with a paper cutter, heavy duty stapler, and some glue for the cover page, and it mostly works but about ten percent of the time either the cutting or the stapling or the gluing goes wrong and I try not to cry about losing a zine after all the effort it took to get this far. I must be brave. Making zines requires a lot of bravery. Then I put all the finished zines in a pile and feel pretty good about how they turned out, all things considered.

IG: @meghancrumley
Website: https://www.howtomeetaman.xyz/