Like the Wind was only a concept six months ago – an idea. A twinkle in our eye. It was something that we wanted to do, but had no form, no actuality. The first thing we did was to create a website – this website – and started asking people to send contributions. The response was great and we loved being able to read stories and see pictures and illustrations. But everything was files and .pdfs and .jpegs. There was still nothing all that real about LtW.
Since those early days – that feel so long ago, but really were just before Christmas (and let’s face it Christmas was not so long ago that we have shed the memories of family gatherings and traditional feasts yet) – the magazine has continued to develop. We had some dummies made up with the different paper weights that we were considering using. Their arrival suddenly meant that we could pretend we were holding the magazine, flick the pages and feel the heft in our hands. We could mime the ways that people would read the magazine. But we were still looking at white pages, so not real yet.
Today is the print deadline. Today we have to send all the hard work and all the art and all the emotion, that so far has been captured in pixels and code, to someone who will put all of that on to paper. They will print the pages on huge sheets and the cover. Next those sheets will be folded and glued into the cover. And finally a guillotine – a huge, pneumatic guillotine with heavy steel blades as sharp as razors – will cut away the excess. And we will be left with the magazine. Then it will be real: it will be tactile and smell of ink. The pages will pulse with colour or quietly carry words full of meaning. It will be imperfect and yet perfect at the same time.
For now there is still a sense of ‘unrealness’ about all this, that will not dissipate until we have a copy in our hands. It feels as though it has been a long time coming and we can’t wait for the magazine to arrive. We can’t wait to see how you react to it. Not long to go now…