February 2026

 February was short and so cold. Even a short trip to Florida for work did not provide much of a break because it was cold and windy there as well. Definitely time for hibernation, and there was some of that happening with me. A few weeks where I felt I was fighting off a cold, and a few weeks of things to keep me busy. 

Jen and I worked on a few new zines, and in the process, as a fun distraction, I built a zine-building web app. It’s definitely an early version of something that could be cool, but it works, and I used it to create a physical copy of The Last Automator and an instruction zine about how to use it. You can try it here, but be warned, you will find bugs and quirks, nothing is safe, and it works best on a computer or an iPad. 

zinebuilder.hauntedkeypress.com 

As you can tell by the name of the zine builders .com address, Jen and I started a small press so that we have something we can publish these zines under. Again, just for fun, but as I type this stuff here, it seems like I did not hibernate as much as I thought I did. 

For writing this month, Jen and I worked on a zine about meditation, and it’s one of my favorites so far. I wrote it in the morning, not surprisingly following a meditation, then Jen took that and made it special with amazing illustrations that pulled it all together. 

I also worked on the bones of another zine that may show up in the last month or two, but I do like the off-the-cuff experience of having an idea and making it happen quickly. We’ll see what March brings.

I also worked through a bigger story in my brain, and one day I’ll be able to sit down and start churning that one out. 

And lastly, there are now physical copies of The Last Automator, and that’s always fun.  

I only watched a couple of spooky movies, well, one spooky movie and one by a spooky movie director. The Monster by Bryan Bertino. It was good and spooky-ish. It had a monster. I also watched Eddington by Ari Aster, who has made some freaky, scary movies. This was scary in a different way, and he did a great and unnerving job of capturing the weirdness of the covid pandemic. A little hard to watch as a result, but really good. 

For books, I am just about done reading Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez. The story has shifted, and there are some true horrors within it, but they are not familiar horrors, and some have disturbed me more than I thought they might. 

I also finished Babel by R F Kuang, it was an interesting take on colonialism and rebellion set in oxford where the world is powered slightly by words, language, and silver bars. What was interesting was how little the magic played a part in the story, even though it was a major part of the story. Regardless, it triggered other thoughts about politics and revolution, and I liked it.

The difficult book club book this month was the collection of poems, You Better Be Lighting, by Andrea Gibson. The poems were great, funny, thoughtful, heartbreaking, joyful, and everything you could want out of a book of poetry. I went into the book having only heard one poem read aloud by Andrea Gibson, MAGA hat in the Chemo Room , and I remember it being great, but that was about it. Andrea is a spoken word poet, and while completely readable and amazing, I thought it would be better to hear them in their own voice and cadence, and I’m glad I did. I had not heard they passed, and found out after listening to a particularly moving poem, and I looked up Andrea on Wikipedia. I also found out there is an Oscar-nominated documentary about Andrea’s battle with cancer, and watched it, and it was amazing, funny, joyful, and heartbreaking, just like their poems. Final take, I’m so thankful for this book club, the great people in it, and getting introduced to something I may not have read otherwise.

Well, that’s it for February. I’m getting ready to head down to a Zine Fest to spend the day hanging out with Jen and a bunch of other zine makers. 

If you are on BlueSky and interested, follow me here: https://bsky.app/profile/spwhite.bsky.social

This is a picture I shared earlier after forgetting to hit the collate option when printing out and putting together The Last Automator. As a result, I had to organize all the printed pages by hand.