July 15 2010 9:28 AM · 5 notes
Buy my girlfriend's new short-story-crossword-Mad-Libs zine. →
This is my girlfriend’s new zine; she’s been working on it about a month or two. It’s a collection of short stories and poems and drawings and comics by her and her friends. I contribute a short story, perhaps the only bit of fiction I’ve written since high school.
Key words in the stories and poems have been blanked out, Mad Libs-style. Beneath the blank is the part-of-speech, but also the part-of-puzzle, because it’s also a massive 300-blank crossword. Each line has two clues, one in a list and one derived from the context of the Mad Libs blank in the story or poem.
The brilliance of this zine is that it forces the owner’s hand from passive to active involvement. You can’t read the stories as they’re intended until you solve the crossword and fill in the blanks. And once that’s done, you can re-blank the blanks and get a friend to fill them in without context, perhaps while riding in the back of a car. This zine is an instant toolkit to becoming both an artist and a friend, two of the highest forms of collaboration ever conceived.
And it’s $5. Details below; click through for the Paypal button. You should buy two. Think about it.
The Cross My Words and Hope to _____ (verb) Activity Zine is available now! Only $5+s/h. Here’s how it works:
(Click to enlarge/read/understand.) So for only $5, you get three short stories, six poems, five comic strips, one enormous crossword puzzle, and a lot of mad libs and…
