EDITOR'S INTRO FOR ISSUE #13

The first issue of LitVision went online September 6, 2004. The site
itself went up around July 3rd of that year, and I’ve still got a replica
of what it looked like. The neon green was actually just a temporary
placeholder for the background, but I came to really dig it and I’ve
never seen such atomic age brilliance on any website. Now the
blinding color has become something of a trademark, but one of
these days I might have to change it, despite the thousands of
emails I get daily begging me not too. We’ll see…

We’re officially celebrating our first birthday in this issue, #13.
Check out the stunning photos from the birthday bash we held in
September. The highlight of the party might have been the 8-hour
presentation I gave on my acts of literary greatness over the past
year. I’ve done a lot, let me tell you, and am now revered, feared,
and beloved by all who know me. For those of you who missed the
speech, I offer up two small scraps of my fame. First, I have
branched out and deigned to co-author a script for the widely
popular Danny’s Big Banana episodes over at Zygote in My Coffee.
I’ve also been duly noted by America’s most popular lit-blogger, Ms.
Maud Newton. Ms. Newton and Mr. Zygote may both kiss my ring...
My anal ring, haha! Okay, maybe I forced that joke a little, but it’s so
obnoxious it just gots to be funny!!

LitVision is expanding in ways I never dreamed possible. We’ve got
the Top Ranked Stephen Crane Fan Site in the world, we have a
Simonelli dot US page, which means I own all of the Simonelli’s in
America, and we even seem to have inspired this site.....
www.litvision.com, which isn’t affiliated to us and I have no idea
what it is. Definitely inferior to the real LitVision, but I am hankerin’
after that cool logo!

Thanks are in order, first to all the writers who’ve submitted to
LitVision over the past year! I’ve enjoyed reading everything, even
the stuff we had to decline. It’s so fun checking my email box every
day, reading what you faceless internet freaks have sent me.
Seriously, thanks, it takes courage to send your stuff out into the
void. I love the publishing and editing roles I’ve taken with LitVision.
At the spankingly young age of 25 I’ve found what makes me happy:
endlessly toiling in the bowels of the small press scene, both online
and in print. I’m very lucky to have this creative outlet.

Another 'thanks' to my talented co-editors, Zeke Iddon of The
Unholy Biscuit and Kelly Hallam of Misanthropists Anonymous. Their
work and input at LitVision is truly inspiring to me, and their own
projects have taken off so wonderfully over the past year that I
sometimes wonder why they stick around here. Then it hits me: the
Indentured Servitude Papers!! Sorry Zeke and Kelly!

Poor Mr. Iddon felt so alone and distraught when he realized that six
years remain on his LitVision contract, he started reaching out to
Nigerian Email Scam Artists!! The resulting exchange is one of the
funniest things I’ve read all year. Check it out!

I considered giving some kind of award to select LitVision
contributors, if only to experience the thrill of alienating the 99.9% of
contributors who didn’t win an award. Lack of motivation, mainly, led
me to abandon this plan. But I did crack open the LitVision stats, and
looked up the number of hits for each page. The most visited writer’s
page was…Steve Kostecke's, which had over 700 unique hits to his
story, Seoul In Slices. Now, Steve and I are fellow gang members in
the Underground Literary Alliance, but I don’t think that, or his
writing talent, put him over the top. No, in LitVision’s secret stat room
I can also look up the top sites that link to each page. Steve’s story
received a link from the interracial homosexual message board,
http://gay-japan.infopop.cc/groupee. Somebody over there dug an
excerpt from his story (Slice #18), posted it, and the rest is history!
The actual post is archived somewhere on the “J Guy US Guy” board,
but ya gotta sign up to find it. That is, if you’re, ah, "curious."    

I’ll remind everyone to order a copy of the first book release from
LitVision Press, Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of An
Underground Writer & His Family, by Jack Saunders. I’m still selling it
direct for $12 (postage paid). Many thanks to those of you who’ve
purchased the book. And for those of you sitting on your bulging
wallets, come on, you can spare $12, cheapie! Jack’s written a great
book, you’ll get much more than your money’s worth. Take a gander
at the updated Buk Never Did This reviews, and our slowly but surely
growing list of bookstores who are carrying our title. Most of the
bigger bookstores out there (and you know who you are, bastards!)
only buy directly from huge faceless distros like Ingram, which
doesn’t give small presses like mine the time of day. So me and my
bookselling allies have to fight for every single sale, every single
placement. This can certainly be a tough biz, but I’m loving it so far!

Lastly, I’d like to direct your attention to LitVision’s Archive, which
contains the hundreds of stories, poems, and visual arts that have
graced our site over the past year. If you’re ever bored at work, this
is definitely the place to go. Looking over all this stuff, I get proud like
a rooster, because it’s enjoyable every time I click on it! Damn, I’m
such a great editor! Oh what?--- er, I mean, you’re all such great
writers! Oh, and check the Resources page, which is our “links” page
to some of the many great contacts we’ve made in our adventures
so far.

To the future of LitVision…the online lit-zine will keep streaming
ahead, and in the exciting but expensive print world of LitVision
Press, I’ll put out as much as I can afford to in 2006. Right now I’m
looking to start next year by releasing a zineful of my own writing
(tee-hee), followed by a couple of poetry chapbooks I’m thinking of.
After that, we’ll see! Happy Birthday, LitVision!!

Yours,

Patrick Simonelli
LitVision Editor
editor@litvision.org