Dave Richardson
Record Staff Writer
Joan Popek can be described as a bookworm for the electronic age. You’ll often find her with her nose in a book, but more likely than not it will have no cover to flip, no pages to dog-ear and no ink to smudge. 
Instead, it will have a power switch, buttons to push and an electronic stylus for notes: It’s an e-book, a futuristic new gadget that Popek says will revolutionize the way we read in the future.
Popek can barely contain a child-like glee as she shows off the e-book. On the screen, pages, digitized and stored in the device, flip by with the touch of a button. The text is clear and easy to read, and there are a variety of options to aid the reader, including an electronic dictionary to look up strange words, the ability to underline words or passages or even take notes. The device is small and re-assuringly unimposing: rectangular, black and, well, book-like.
One reason, perhaps, why Popek is so excited by the gadget is that the book flipping by on the screen is her own, an anthology of science-fiction stories titled “The Administrator,” published by The Fiction Works, and available only as an e-book.
Popek describes herself as “an age-challenged grandmother with one foot in the dark ages and the other in the twilight zone.” She is a prolific writer and the author of hundreds of short stories, poems and articles. And she is one of the new breed of authors whose works appear primarily in electronic media, like the e-book, and on the Internet. She describes the emerging electronic publishing industry as a powerful, dynamic force, still fairly new but with tremendous advantages.
“It’s a terrific way for new and upcoming authors to have their voices heard,” Popek said. “It’s really hard for new authors to get published by any of the big publishing houses, but on-line magazines are often more willing to take a chance on an unknown.”
Popek herself is co-publisher and editor of both Millennium Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, an on-line publication that publishes a yearly anthology in hard-copy, and of the Roswell Literary Review.
Popek arrived in the 21st century from a long and prolific life that started just down the road from Roswell. She was born in Dexter in 1944, but her family moved to Roswell when she was one month old. Her father, Austin B. Copeland, was a mechanic, and her mother, Crystel, was a cook at the local hospital. When Popek was a girl her mother was badly burned in an accident at the family’s Roswell home, where Popek lives today with her husband, Joe.
“She was a strong lady,” Popek said. “She taught me the main lesson I have learned in life, and that is how to love unconditionally. I try to, but I’m not perfect at it. But she actually understood the true meaning of unconditional love.”
Popek said she always had the desire to write, and knew someday she would be a writer. But, as most budding writers eventually realize, in order to write you have to have stories to tell, and the best way to find them is to go live a life. 
So, Popek put aside her writing and married her first husband at age 15. A year later she gave birth to her oldest son, Joe Wayne Jeffries, now 39, of Socorro. Over the years, she managed to have four more children: Teresa, 35, and Christina, 25, both of Roswell; Kal, 33, of El Paso, Texas, and Kimberlee, 22, of Wichita, Kan.
Popek has 14 grandchildren.
During her life Popek moved around quite a bit, mostly in the West, and returned to Roswell when she was in her 30s. She worked as a bartender and attended Eastern New Mexico University-Roswell part time, getting a liberal arts degree. Later, she taught classes in Adult Basic Education at the school, and  in the school’s Customized Training Program while finishing up her bachelor’s degree.
Popek said she started writing seriously for publication in 1993, focusing on short stories.
“I’m an impatient kind of person,” Popek said. “I don’t want to get bogged down; I want to get it done.”
Her first story was published in Millennium, a piece titled “The Incredible, Edible Mr. Glump.” Since then she has had more than 100 stories, articles and poems published.
Popek has been co-publisher of Millennium since 1993. Since then the magazine has migrated to the Internet, where it is published monthly and available free to Web surfers at http://jopoppub.com.
In 1998, Popek took over as editor and publisher of the Roswell Literary Review, a quarterly publication that is, so far, hard-copy only.
While the Internet and on-line publishing offer great opportunities for writers and publishers, and provide a great way to make good writing that might otherwise go unnoticed available to the masses, it can be a hard place to make a buck. Luckily for Popek, it’s not profit that moves her.
“Millennium is my baby,” Popek said. “I’m really proud of it. It’s a great place to showcase writers with real talent. But we don’t make any money on it. This is for love, not money.”

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