About us and ScoTpress
Once upon a time, back in 1974, there was a Star Trek convention held in Leicester; the first Trek con held in the UK. Although two of us were at it, and met very briefly, we didn't really 'connect'. Our duties at the con led us in different directions, kept us apart all weekend. However, New Year 1975, the con organisers held a party, and everyone who played an active part at the con - committee, stewards, etc - was invited.
Janet and Sheila made contact at that party, and spent most of it talking. We spent most of that *weekend* talking.
Some eighteen months later, the Elsons, who organised that con and another one in 1975, and in addition ran the Star Trek Action Group (STAG) had to drop out of active fandom for a while because of Jenny Elson's ill health, and Janet took on the running of STAG; she asked Sheila to join her committee.
One of the first things we did was decide to put out a zine - Log Entries, later changed to Enterprise Log Entries.
Our policy for the zine was - no death of main characters, and stories must be about the crew of the Enterprise or at least involve as a main character someone who appeared in aired Trek.
To encourage submissions for the zine, we ran a fiction competition in the club newsletter, and Valerie was one of the very early winners. Sheila and Valerie carried on a correspondance for some time before we all met up - we'd bought some Trek episodes on 8mm film, and spent one summer holiday touring the UK, with club members in different parts of the country hosting 'film evenings'. Valerie was one of the hosts, and we got on so well with her that we invited her to become an unofficial helper with the zine editing; which eventually became an official position as one of the club committee.
Both Sheila and Valerie wrote, both separately and also occasionally in partnership; they edited the newsletters and zines. Janet's strength lay in organisation and dealing with factual matters (although she did produce one story) and hers is the technical hand that posts this page. Sheila is only semi computer literate; at the moment, Valerie doesn't have a computer at all.
Originally the zines were put out as STAG zines; after a while, for a number of reasons, we decided to split zine production away from the club, and ScoTpress was born. However, when after eight years we decided to pass STAG on to a new committee, we took ScoTpress, which was our baby, with us and carried on putting out zines. (The name was more or less a play on words; we were putting out Star Trek zines in Scotland.)
As well as Log Entries, we put out novels and another series of zines, Enterprise Incidents - all the stories in each volume of EI were by the same writer.
When The Next Generation came out, we started a new club, IDIC, with a club zine devoted to TOS stories, as well as Make It So, a zine of TNG stories. However, although Sheila wrote one TNG story for the first issue of Make It So, Valerie never wrote any TNG stories. We both found it impossible to write in a series that was still in production.
We finally stopped putting out zines in 1996, at which time we also closed IDIC. Although we enjoyed our involvement in it, after twenty years of active fandom we all felt burned out. Now, some six years later and over that burnout, we've decided to re-enter active fandom in a small way by starting a web page for our stories and possibly also, in time, some of the stories by those ScoTpress writers with whom we still have contact.
We published a total of 233 zines between 1975 and 1996 - 69 when we ran STAG, 19 through IDIC and 145 through ScoTpress; approximately 17,400 pages.