DargonZine
Volume 13, Number 5 |
Distributed: 5/28/2000
Circulation: 746 |
 |
DargonZine is the publication vehicle of the
Dargon Project, a collaborative group of aspiring fantasy writers on the
Internet. We welcome new readers and writers interested in joining the
project. Please address all correspondence to
<dargon@shore.net>
or visit us on the World Wide Web at http://www.dargonzine.org/. Back
issues are available from
ftp.shore.net
in members/dargon/. Issues and public discussion are posted to newsgroup
rec.mag.dargon.
DargonZine 13-5, ISSN 1080-9910, (C) Copyright May, 2000
by the Dargon Project. Editor: Ornoth D.A. Liscomb
<ornoth@shore.net>,
Assistant Editor: Jon Evans
<godling@mnsinc.com>.
All rights reserved. All rights are reassigned to the individual
contributors. Stories and artwork appearing herein may not be reproduced
or redistributed without the explicit permission of their creators, except
in the case of freely reproducing entire issues for further distribution.
Reproduction of issues or any portions thereof for profit is forbidden.
|
Editorial
n many ways, DargonZine is just like any other amateur writing
group that you'd find meeting in libraries, bookstores, and coffee shops
everywhere. In some ways, those traditional groups have certain
advantages over us: it's much easier to critique a work face-to-face
than via email, and the author has much more control over how widely his
or her works are distributed. Why, then, would writers accept these
shortcomings and submit their stories to DargonZine?
The answer is you: our readers. Getting feedback and criticism from
interested readers is one of the most powerful, exciting, and rewarding
parts of writing, and it's something DargonZine is uniquely able to
encourage. Amateur writers come to us because we distribute their
stories to a large number of representative fiction readers all over the
world, and give those writers the opportunity to receive honest and
constructive comments from their readers. In brief, DargonZine uses the
Internet to bring readers and writers closer together.
To foster this interaction, we've always asked readers to send us
their feedback, whether by filling out our online reader profile and
questionnaire, sending mail to the Editor, or emailing individual
writers with story comments. However, reader feedback of any kind has
never been very frequent. So recently we gave some thought to how we
could make it easier and more fun for readers to tell us what they think
of our works so that we, in turn, can write better stories.
So after lots of thought and discussion, I'm pleased to announce
that in this issue we're going to pilot a new idea: giving you, our
readers, the ability to "rate" each story.
If you are reading this issue as an HTML page on our Web site, at
the end of both stories in this issue you'll find a sidebar that
contains several voting buttons that allow you to quickly tell us what
you think about the story you've just finished reading. You can also
display a page with a summary graph of all the reader votes and each of
the comments that the story has received.
By giving you access to other
readers' ratings and comments, we're fostering a little more
communication between our readers, as well!
But the real goal is to give you, our readers, more of a participatory role
in what we do, without asking you for a lot of time or energy. We
intentionally kept the interface and options simple in order to ensure
that casting your vote would be quick, easy, and fun. Of course, we
still eagerly welcome additional feedback, as well. But please take the
time to try rating the stories in this issue! If it works out and is
well-received, we hope to very quickly add the ratings sidebar to all
our stories, both past and future, and we look forward to hearing more
about your thoughts on each of the stories we print.
This issue contains stories from two of Dargon's elders, both of
whom printed their first stories way back in 1986, when DargonZine was
still called FSFnet. The issue begins with
Dafydd's "Talisman Four".
This, the eighteenth chapter in his Talisman saga, begins to tie
together the various threads that Dafydd has woven together over the
past 18 months. The rest of the issue is devoted to a lengthy new story
from another Dargon "lifer", Carlo Samson.
Looking forward, we hope to distribute our next issue around July
1. We are, of course, approaching the traditional time of year for our
annual DargonZine Writers' Summit, so it may take a week or two longer
than usual for us to get the next issue to you. But that issue will
contain a write-up and a pointer to photos from the Summit as well as
more new fiction, so watch for it!
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