Bug-Eyed Magazine

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(Redirected from Unicorn Star)

Bug-Eyed Magazine was the name of SWIL/Psi Phi's annual literary magazine from 1984-2008. The name was changed from "Unicorn Star" in 1984 and stuck until 2008 when it was changed back. Besides the name, the SWIL magazine has remained unchanged in content since its creation in 1979. It is published in the spring of every year. It generally contains a fair selection of short stories, poems, filks, and artwork, all in the fantasy/science fiction genre. It is run by the Mistresses (or Master and Mistress, or whatever is appropriate) of BEM, also known as the Co-Editors, or "coeds" for short. Their tag line is "Submit to BEM!"

An archive of past BEMs can be found in George. There's another archive in the McCabe Treasure Room, if you can get into it. It might be worth checking at some point whether these archives are complete.

Table of contents

1 Notes for BEM Coeditors

1.1 How to get money for BEM
1.2 Frequently asked questions
1.3 Soliciting submissions
1.4 Putting BEM together

2 Past co-editors

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Notes for BEM Coeditors

BEM coeditors are the people who will advertise, decide which submissions should be accepted, edit the submissions, decide which art submissions should be accepted, scan, expand and shrink art, and do basic layout to make art fit the page, make page numbers go where they should, etc. Additionally, someone needs to have a car or some other means of transportation to get the box back from the printers, and someone has to have enough cash on hand to pay for copying, or know how to get this money from Budget Committee. It's a pretty big job, and is usually shared by two people.

Presidents should be aware that the position of BEM coeditor is usually held from appointment until graduation. Coeditors who are seniors should do their best to involve freshmen or sophomores in the publishing process, to ensure that they have successors.

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How to get money for BEM

BEM is allotted money in SWIL's annual budget, which the treasurer submits each year.

There are two ways to get this money. The first (and easier) way to do it is to front the money yourself (or get someone else to do it) and then give budget committee a receipt. The other way to do it is to go to budget committee ahead of time, get a cash advance (in the form of a check to yourself), cash the check, print BEM, and then get a receipt, which you bring back to budget committee. Do this before budget committee closes for the year. If this isn't possible, talk to budget committee, they're usually pretty reasonable giving you a few extra days, but don't do this every single year.

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Frequently asked questions

One question often raised by potential contributors to BEM is whether BEM counts as prior publication when submitting stories or artwork elsewhere -- the rule of thumb is that any publication's print run would have to be several times BEM's in order to qualify, and BEM is closer to a "vanity publication" or "privately circulated publication" than actually being published. Many aspiring SWIL authors have published work originally submitted in BEM elsewhere with no legal ramifications.

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Soliciting submissions

Fall semester and beginning of Spring semester: Bother people for submissions. Yell "Submit to BEM!" at meeting. Make sure that the e-mail alias, bem [at] swil.org, has been updated to forward to the coeds. Post prop, soliciting poetry, prose, artwork, etc, and advertising bem [at] swil.org as the submission/information alias. If you want there to be a manila folder on the SWIL board to accept paper submissions, put one up, or have people send you things through campus mail. It's possible that putting prop in the art building might result in more art submissions.

Set the BEM deadline for about a week after Spring break. It takes about a week to get the promised submissions in after the deadline (the last deadline, that is. :-) Then it takes however long you have to put it together.

Spring Break: Cajole your friends into writing or drawing something if they haven't yet. Also, research printing options, like the vast number of online printers. Is a pretty perfect-bound BEM that fits within our budget a mere pipe dream? Perhaps, but it's still a good idea to look. In any case, there is a Kinko's on the Baltimore Pike, near John Harvard's and Borders. They'll do it fast and relatively cheap, and you don't have to worry about anything being lost in the mail.

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Putting BEM together

When you have time: Put digital submissions as they come in into a dedicated BEM folder on computer, extra credit if it's in a backup location too. Scan paper art submissions and put them in same location as digital submissions, but hold on to originals just in case. Look through the written submissions for anything that looks like an error. If it's minor and looks accidental, fix it. If it's major or looks like "artistic license", point it out to the author first. Make sure you have the titles of the works, not just grendelsworkshopstory4.doc, and make sure you have the names the contributers wish to go by. Think about formatting.

Middle of April, or by whenever it needs to be at printer: Format your document. You could use LaTeX or one of those other scary programs if you want, but this is what works for us:

Copy and paste edited written submissions into a Word document.

Look at each art submission one by one, because you might have to do things in Photoshop, which, luckily, can be found on the data-software server if you're on the network. If a picture should be black ink on a white background but there's a gray background from scanning it or weird fuzz from turning it into a smaller data format, you can actually fix this easily in Photoshop 7.0, selecting the pull-down menu Image, then Adjustments, then selecting Threshold. This will probably magically make everything better by making all the almost-white pixels white and the almost-black pixels black. You can fix other problems too, just poke around for a bit and don't save until you're ready. Word seems to treat Photoshopped images as Holy Writ, so if you have MS Paint or equivalent, copy and paste the image into there and then from there into the Word document. This lets you resize and move around the image as you please.

Play around with margins and fonts and section breaks. Try to put things in a logical order. If BEM will be 8 1/2 by 11 inches, you may want to put text in two columns, but this will lead to headaches because Word will do odd things every time you make changes. If you're making a larger BEM, A half-sized BEM can look more like a paperback book. If you have pages with only a little text and too much empty space, you can resize the less-complicated pictures and fill it up. It's all an art. Make sure you number the pages, and you can do headers and/or footers if that's your thing.

When you have the rest of BEM done, make a title page as a separate document so the page numbers don't get messed up. Do the cover separately too. You may want to use another program, such as Publisher, because then you can have a more free-form design. Try to peform the the magical Image Adjustment rituals on that too.

Late April: Get it printed, choose thick and colorful paper for the cover. Get someone to drive you to the printer's to pick up the resulting boxes of BEM. Distribute! Celebrate! We usually try to have the finished product ready for distribution on Walpurgisnacht, although as a last resort we aim for the last swil meeting of the year.

Before you go away for the summer, put your notes and original artwork in the BEM box in George, for archival purposes. Posterity would appreciate it if you could print out copies of digital stuff, too. And make sure to leave some (15-20, or however many you can't get rid of) spare copies of BEM in George for alumni to pick up later, as well as an official George copy on the shelf of BEMs.

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