Long time, no writing!

We apologize for the long radio silence about Zisk. We’ve had a lot of other projects taking up our time. For example:

--Steve spent all of his free time in the fall working on the 20th anniversary of his music ’zine, The Reynolds Top 20 as well as recording and posting 30 podcasts to mark the occasion (you can sample them here.)

--Meanwhile, Mike was putting the finishing touches on his first book, The Hanging Gardens of Split Rock, which will be published on May 22nd by Gorsky Press. You can get more info about the book through the site for Mike’s ’zine Go Metric.

--Mike’s band Egghead. recorded their second album over the winter. It’s their first disc in 12 years and will be coming out this summer on Knock Knock Records.

--We also pitched our Zisk book proposal around and had a couple of bites, but no deal as of yet. We plan on hitting up some more publishers this spring and summer. If that doesn’t work, we just may go the self-publishing route. We’ve done that for over 11 years already, why stop now?

So with all of these things in the works over the past few months (as well as trying to have time with our loved ones), we’ve decided to only publish one issue this year. Our deadline for submissions is Friday, July 30th. Issue # 19 will be published the week of August 16th.

We also have a special focus for this issue. This year marks the 10th season for both Albert Pujols and a longtime Zisk favorite, Ichiro Suzuki, making them qualified for the Hall of Fame. To mark that milestone, we’re looking to have a few articles or essays about both players. So if you have any anecdotes about either player, or you think you can write an entire article, lets either Mike or myself know. And if you have ideas for other articles, we’ll look at them too.

Send your story ideas to either Steve or Mike.

And one final note on the blog front from Steve:

One of my favorite baseball books of the past decade is Fantasyland by Sam Baker. His tale of joining the Tout Wars fantasy league is so entertaining that I went back and re-read it this winter to get myself ready for my own fantasy league. That was the total amount of preparation I did for this year. I went into our draft with no plan and no idea what players were injured (except Joe Nathan). So I’ve decided to chronicle my risky fantasy season on the Zisk blog. Look for the Dental Hygenesimmons (my team’s name) Chronicles to start this Friday and to appear a few times a week through the rest of the season.

Whew. That was a lot to catch up on. We hope the spring is treating y’all well,

Steve Reynolds & Mike Faloon