the drops of moonlight zine ebooks are... messy!
I'm going back and forth with whether or not I want to make a proper post about this, like the last one - I'm thinking no, because at this point there's only more he said/she said and a moral debate about whether or not the mods' conduct was justified (LOL). It's just not relevant to the original issues (mods' conduct, no communication, et al).
But, the zine's ebook versions were finally released on July 13th. I'm amazed!
I'm also amazed that, despite my sending in a request to be removed from the zine on June 24th, 2023, this did not happen and my work is still there. It's a PDF and the only one that wasn't getting a physical book. They had a whole year to hit backspace a couple of times, but couldn't be bothered.
Additionally, my contributor bio contains an error: I'm listed as liking "Reinako" (Rei and Minako, romantically linked, for those not in the know) and I did not make mention of any romantic relationships of any kind when I wrote up my bio. I noticed on Reddit that another contributor stated that they had the same type of error with their own bio. It begs the question of what other mistakes are lurking within these zines, and it's incredible that apparently copy/pasting what other people wrote is too difficult, let alone proofreading it over the last year.
Finally, the way contributors are credited is extremely problematic. The way they have it laid out, only visual artists are highlighted in a sort of honeycomb credit image (pictured above). Contributors of written works just get their bio in the digital only ebook zine. So if you wrote a story or an essay, screw you, I guess. Imagine putting all that time in on Word only to not even be listed in the table of fucking contents. There's also tons of wasted paper on a survey and zine demographic analysis. Why this didn't go purely digital to make room for more printed works is, as usual, unknown.
The layout is more or less what I expected when I originally counted up the totals for work distribution: just pages and pages and pages given to single people. It's crazed for a zine with limited print space.
The mods/organizers had to be begged and pleaded with to release these ebooks - people have been talking about it since at least February. They've been pinged numerous times for updates over the past months and ignored all of it. One mod's Discord profile straight up says not to message them about the zine. Only when someone reached out to a mod on Tumblr did they get any kind of response. It's beyond comprehension.
Despite all that, these people still want you to pay them more to ship your physical zines and whatever other goodies that have been languishing in the ether for two years.
Absolutely no respect here, for anybody. I still find it unbelievable.
