IndieBiz - The quest for legitimacy

Hi folks,

I’m off on a quest! Today is the day I slay the beast of self doubt and pluck the beating gem of a heart from the scaly, green chest and carry it back to my kingdom of smut. Behold! The zine maker admits to a world beyond scissors and glue sticks, staples and photocopiers.

As the publisher of Lickety Split smut zine, I am often asked questions that center around semantics as some peeps try to suss out Lickety level of legitimacy in the straight world. For example, I was at a party in Ottawa last night filled with lots of lovely PhD candidates, lawyers and policy maker types who were fixated on whether we defined our content as porn or erotica or smut and whether we were a zine or magazine or journal. I won’t divulge the conclusion here as this sort of talk bores me a little bit and perhaps should be saved for cultural studies papers. But it does lead me to this feeling I’ve been getting lately of needing to get my act together. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m turning 26 in January or that I need to challenge myself a bit more here, you know, get my ducks in a row and do my own laundry (thanks sweetheart!).

So in the next several weeks, I will be sharing my experience as I write a business plan for the zine, register myself and generally pull up my socks. This new tide of get-it-togetherness is also crossing over into other parts of my life and surely those will leak into my IndieBiz posts as well: recording an E.P. with my band Nightwood, setting up a tour, committing to a more balanced existence with my life partner. I guess this is growing up!

I look forward to keeping this process accountable to your hungry eyes! Here’s a bit more about Lickety Split smut zine as a send off:

Lickety Split is a pansexual smut zine dedicated to encouraging sex-positive expression and thought. The zine promotes collaborative art making and encourages diverse contributions to climb into bed with one another, because one sexual expression just does not satisfy. Lickety Split wants to help make the masses cum with smutty photography and art, essays and stories in order to fulfill the whole human being and address the complexity of sex.