Hello:
I sometimes try to push plastic sailing ship modeling on the "Seaways' Ships in Scale" discussion group. They asked me to write an article for their magazine.
They got me: my mouth is typically bigger than my background. Surely, I would write such an article if there weren't the following impediments:
- I am fairly new to plastic sailing ship modeling
- I like it to build sailing ships, though, my library and my background of the subject is not huge. What can be more boring than an article without any nice anecdotes to the ship in question and things like that.
- I do not have a CCD camera for documenting my building experience, thoug, that could easily be remedied by by consulting ebay for a cheap one.
- And I am from Europe and I do not have any single copy of SiS magazines, though, I plan to buy the SiS CD collection to get a feeling for the writing style and articles in general.
My stance on the newsgroups actually was and is: more plastic kit topics of ancient sailing ships would attract a lot of people because that field is not covered by any other magazine. I also argue that shifting interest to plastic sailing ship kits will not cost any hard core wooden ship kit modeler a gray hair because we are not expecting from a journal dedicated to classic musics to shift its interest to Ozzy Osbourne.
Are there any builders out there who would like to write such articles? I mean as Clay (the former owner of Seaways' Ship in scale business) rightly states: without submissions dealing with the subject - what should they do?
The first start could be a collaboration between many. I gather that a lot of builders are not journalists and finding the rigth tone is often not that easy. But I also assume that a lot of people would help in reading the first versions of such an article.
So, if you are an assiduous builder of historic plastic sailing ships: do not hesitate to convince yourself to make the first step in starting such an article project. Do you know the situation when you see fire and think for yourself: "Oh man, I will not call fire police because it is highly unlikely that no other one has done that before me because I am surely not alone in seeing the fire". But in reality: all the people think that others will call the fire police.
Do not hesitate.
Regards,
Siegfried Gonzi (Katzennahrung)