I don’t generally socialize much, being too preoccupied with reading and writing to “waste” a lot of my precious free time. The reasons I joined science fiction fandom originally in the late 1960s, and again in the late 1980s after a dozen years away, were social reasons. I’ve made a lot of friends through my fanpublishing, and I’m very pleased with it.

I discovered fandom through Lin Carter’s column “Our Man in Fandom” in WORLDS OF IF. After I dipped my feet into the waters by attending NYCon III in 1967–and it was such a wondrous experience I was hooked!–I joined the N3F (“The National Fantasy Fan Federation”) where I made my first fannish friends through a round-robin letter. I dropped out of N3F after a year though, because I did not feel there was much else to do in the organization.

Recently I learned that a few of my VISIONS OF PARADISE readers–Tom Feller, Sally Syrjala, Janine Stinson–are currently N3F members, and they speak well about the organization, so I decided to give it another try. Since my expertise–slim thought it may be–is in fanpublishing, when I learned the N3F president was looking for an editor for the quarterly fanzine, I volunteered to help out. The president took me up on my offer, with a recommendation from Janine, and I spent a lot of hours this past weekend editing THE NATIONAL FANTASY FAN. It was the first time I have ever used MSPublisher, which I found both easy to use and a good piece of software.

I hope the members of N3F like my issue, because I intend to get a bit more involved in the organization while I feel my way around it, see if it’s really a good social outlet for me. You see, it’s not really wasting time if I’m doing my socializing by reading, writing and editing! ☺