Introduction

4000 Flavors is a zine for and by anyone who has ever read something that spoke to them so powerfully it gave them a desire to write something that would have the same effect on someone else. It is for those who write not because they want to become a writer, but because they have something to say and I want this to be the place where those things can be said. 

After graduating college, I had some time on my hands to do things I had been thinking about for years but had been too busy writing papers, going to classes, working, moving across the city and back, and participating in extra curricular activities to actually follow through with. I had dozens of story ideas piling up in notebooks and on hard drives, and needed a reason to just finish one of them. I began taking one of them and developing it into a screenplay, not sure where the process would take the story, or if it could even work. But much to my surprise it turned out to be something i really enjoyed doing and as I kept going through it the story seemed to be more natural and just came together through some combination of instinct, intuition, and I guess a bit of sorting through my 'inner demons'. But as I wrote I couldn't help but think about the other stories, what was happening in them and where they were going. Each one had a place in my mind, taking place and evolving, and developing every day, whether I wrote it down or not they were constantly changing shape according to what I was feeling and the way I was looking at things. And new ones would form, starting with a mere thought or observation that before I knew it would snowball into an idea and eventually an entire scenario waiting to become a story.

I think of my friends as brilliant creative people with so much to say about the world, so many ways to see things, so many perspectives, opinions, experiences, dreams, nightmares, and fears; each one having their own ways of expressing these things. I want them to be able to interact, share their expressions  with each other, and collaborate in a way that they previously couldn't, or at least hadn't thought of. I've spoken to many people who have ideas, who want to write, who do write, who write poetry, who make art, and this zine potentially can facilitate all of those things. Perhaps you want to get feedback on something you've written, before you turn it into a longer story. Perhaps you need a short story to adapt into a short film. Maybe you've seen something you don't quite understand, and you just make up a story about it to ease your curiosity. Or maybe you've just written something you're proud of and you want someone else to read it. Well now they can. 

The purpose of this blog is to keep people updated with the zine's production process, but I will also post artwork, bits of stories, excerpts of amazing things I have read, and anything else I might feel compelled to share. And at some point I will have a link to a paypal site so you can get a copy of the zine through snailmail if you aren't able to pick it up from me or anywhere it ends up being sold in Philadelphia.

That being said I would like to share an excerpt of a short story I read recently which I find very appropriate for this occasion. It is from "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" by Ernest Hemingway:

So now it was all over, he thought. So now he would never have a chance to finish it. So this was the way it ended in a bickering over a drink. Since the gangrene started in his right leg he had no pain and with the the pain the horror had gone and all he felt now was a great tiredness and anger that this was the end of it. For this, that now was coming, he had very little curiosity. For years it had obsessed him; but now it meant nothing in itself. It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.