A Pub is Born
how No Crime in Rhymin’ came to be
What a first week it has been!
20 published pieces, by 14 different writers, in 7 days. Whaaat!!?
This publication was conceived and brought to life literally in one day — last Saturday, May 25. I awoke early that morning with the pestering thought that Medium needed a home for humorous, irreverent poetry.
Pronto.
For the past year and a half I’d been writing exactly this type of poetry — along with essays, rants, translations and some more serious poetic fare — and had been farming my work out to several publications that were sort of the right fit, but not exactly.
Further, I’d noticed along the way that many of you also write clever, witty, quirky verse that refuses to take itself too seriously.
It was time.
So I feverishly got to work, knowing that I needed a catchy name and some bootstrap graphical tinkering to come up with a unique brand identity.
I wanted a name with a rhyme in it, and also something that conveys humor. I considered Poetry in the title, but, but as it turns out nothing rhymes perfectly with Poetry, except maybe Coventry and Chemistry.
(Lemon Tree Poetry? I didn’t think of that near-rhyme last week, and in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t.)
Next, I experimented with Verse and Rhyme. Some ideas that ended up on the scrap pile: Terse Verse, Perverse Verse, Prime Rhyme, Chimin’ Rhyme, Grimin’ and Rhymin’.
I had almost settled on Two Timin’ Rhymin’, but Harper Thorpe who volunteered to be my sounding board luckily talked me down from that ledge.
The name I finally chose, No Crime in Rhymin’, came in a burst of inspiration, and once I sounded it out, I knew I had a winner.
Coming up with the visual branding took at least as much time, as I am no graphical design artist. I knew that I wanted the cover image to be a painting, to give the publication a veneer of classiness. Once I picked out the Laughing Fool image, I let the reddish-orange color palette drive the design choices for the rest of the publication.
Using an online photo editor, I came up with the sideways smiley avatar, with a stylized semicolon and close parenthesis for the eyes and mouth. In addition to the avatar, which has to fit inside a square-shaped box, Medium also requires a logo, a rectangular image used to the left of the navigation menu atop each story. While many publications choose to reuse their avatar, I opted to display the pub name, as the name would not otherwise appear at the top of a standard story layout.
After all this was in place, on to the fun part — recruiting writers.
I had a short list of friends who I knew had the right sense and sensibilities for creating great content for NCiR. Beyond that, it’s been a pleasure watching the roster of followers and contributing writers grow organically.
On Sunday morning, the official launch notice went out.
I was blown away by the quality submissions that started hitting our queue from day 1. You early adopters helped make this first week a glowing success: Jane Vogel, L M Glegg, Michael Stang, B. Michael Logan, Matthew de Lacey Davidson, Mark Starlin, Noe, Bebe Nicholson, Stephanie Jackson, Lise Colas.
And of course much gratitude to my co-editors, who also offered up some fine homemade dishes for this initial pot luck: Mary Holden, Harper Thorpe.
Plus, my collaboration with Roy to cap off the week!
Keep ’em coming!
Very excited about the weeks and months ahead!
Cheers,
Editor-in-Chief
