Extrait :
PÓM: Cool. OK, the next thing I wanted to ask you about is Dodgem Logic, and how that’s going along.
AM: What’s happening with Dodgem Logic at the moment is that with issue eight, which will be the next one to come out - a little bit later than normal, we’re sending it to print the middle of next month – issue eight will be the last issue for a while. This is because Dodgem Logic has been entirely funded with my money, and we have not yet managed to break even. This is for a number of reasons, partly because we did not want to have any paid advertising in Dodgem Logic. We also wanted to have good quality production values, which would enable us to have things like Melinda’s artwork, or Mitch Jenkins‘ photography, and actually show them in the way that they deserve to be shown, which I’m not sorry about at all. We were very, very close to reaching that break-even point. Obviously, very close is not close at all, in some senses. On the other hand, if our distribution problems could have been sorted out, or if a couple of other things - but we were getting to the point where we would have been breaking even, and the magazine could have continued. What’s happened instead is that we’ve reached the point where I pretty much had to write off the money, but I was prepared to do that, because it was important to me to do Dodgem Logic in the way that I saw it, as the vehicle that I saw it being. I didn’t want to compromise on it.
What we’re doing now is, after issue eight has come out - which is looking like a very lovely issue, it has to be said. We’ve got a ten-page piece of new writing from Michael Moorcock, ‘A Child’s Christmas in the Blitz’, which we’ll be running, and lots of other lovely stuff as well. What we’re doing after that is we will be putting original content up on the website, which we’re redesigning to make it more user-friendly, ’cause it was very pretty before, but not necessarily easy for people to use. It was a bit fussy and complicated, so on a lot of people’s computers there was a lot of delay time, and we’re trying to get around all those things, and we’re also talking with people at successful magazines, things like New Humanist, who are discussing ways that it is possible to make the magazine pay for itself, using things like presubscription, by changing the format, coming up with some sort of compromise whereby, say, there were a number of high quality colour pages, so that we could still accommodate the visuals that we wanted to, but where pages that didn’t so much benefit from the high production values, where it was just articles, or pieces, we could print them - where the values are slightly more affordable. So, I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to manage this, obviously, but we hope we can, because Dodgem Logic, I’m really proud of it.
I’m really proud of those eight issues. They didn’t compromise, they did exactly what the magazine set out to do, and I think that they set a wonderful example, and the response that we got was getting better by the issue. People were saying that there seemed to be a coherent agenda evolving from between the varied and various contributors to Dodgem Logic. And, yes, I think that was happening, and I also think that the times that we’re entering now are the perfect times, they’re times when we need a magazine like Dodgem Logic, or some kind of underground equivalent that can… I mean, we’re going through what the Chinese would have called Interesting Times, you know. There are power struggles and explosions going on all over the world, and I’ve no reason to believe that our country is going to be immune to it, so, yes, I think that Dodgem Logic, it would be nice if we could find some way to keep it going, because I think it was fulfilling a useful purpose. And also, in the eighteen months or so that the magazine’s first volume existed, we were able to do quite a lot of cool stuff for Spring Boroughs, including the parcel delivery that we made last Christmas, where we are incredibly proud of the fact that Ann Timson was one of the recipients of our Dodgem Logic food hampers.