I wrote a zine when I was 10

23 Apr, 2026

I don't know why this slipped my mind, but I remembered recently that when I was 10 or 11 - in elementary school - I wrote a zine. I don't remember the contents whatsoever, except that the title was "Have Some Hair!" and featured a caricature of our teacher who was maybe bald?

I created it on our DOS computer using the always reliable program, The Print Shop. We used this program a LOT, the most frequent application being printing custom greeting cards. We would make a design using a library of graphics and templates, send to the ol' dot matrix printer, and fold it so that it displayed just like a cardboard greeting card. Why don't I still do this? Making a greeting card, I mean; there are rarely new greeting cards available to buy that aren't full of terrible innuendo or about drinking. I think kids cards are the only ones that get refreshed.

I frequently copied things my brothers were doing, and I think my oldest brother did his own newsletters / zines in high school, or read them from other sources. He's also the one that taught me basic HTML¹ that got me started on building my own pages. I suppose this is where I got the idea for a newsletter / zine in the first place.

At any rate, I designed and wrote the thing; it might have been 2 pages, I'm not sure. As I said, I don't remember the content. In the elementary class we were in, we had this fake money in class that was some sort of reward system for speaking French²; if you said something in English, and someone caught you, you paid them X amount of "dollars". Damned if I remember what we ever did with this money at the end of the year...

So I made this zine as it were and got a couple of my friends to "subscribe" to it for a few of these fake dollars, and I printed a few copies. I got way ahead of myself, of course, and never made more than that first issue of "Have Some Hair!".

I guess my desire to make things goes back a long way.

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#echo #writing #zines