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DargonZine |
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| Editorial | Ornoth D.A. Liscomb | |
| Measure of a Man 1 | Liam Donahue | Sy 23-24, 1013 |
| Hidden Talents 1 | Carlo Samson and Rena Deutsch | Yule 24, 1018 |
| Return to DargonZine Home Page | ||
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| DargonZine is the publication vehicle of The
Dargon Project, Inc., 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@dargonzine.org>
or visit us on the World Wide Web at http://www.dargonzine.org/, or our FTP site at
ftp://users.primushost.com/members/d/a/dargon/.
Issues and public discussion are posted to newsgroup
rec.mag.dargon. DargonZine 16-2, ISSN 1080-9910, (C) Copyright September, 2003 by The Dargon Project, Inc. Editor: Ornoth D.A. Liscomb <ornoth@rcn.com>, Assistant Editor: Jon Evans <godling@covad.net>.  DargonZine is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial License. This license allows you to make and distribute unaltered copies of DargonZine, complete with the original attributions of authorship, so long as it is not used for commercial purposes. Reproduction of issues or any portions thereof for profit is forbidden. To view a detailed copy of this license, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0 or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford CA, 94305 USA. |
hat can I say: we're late. Not "late" as in "expired", although
you might have begun to think so, since we've only put out one new issue
in the past eight months. That's not a very encouraging record for a
magazine that says it comes out every six to eight *weeks*. Neither I
nor our writers are very happy about it.
On the other hand, it's been ten years since we've had an
interruption like that. Since 1993 we've produced 85 issues -- 236
stories -- with an average time between issues of six weeks. That's an
impressive run for any fiction magazine. Yes, it's been a long time
since we last appeared in your inbox, but I can assure you that this
kind of lapse is very atypical. If it happens once per decade, that's
still a very good record.
DargonZine has had a very impressive run, printing almost four
hundred original stories by fifty new writers in its twenty-year
history. However, any magazine that relies completely on unpaid
volunteers for contributions is going to have occasional interruptions.
DargonZine can only print new issues when our authors find time to sit down and write new stories, and sometimes other things take
precedence in their
lives. Because of this, there will always be variances in how
frequently we can put issues out, and sometimes that means you won't see
us for a couple months.
The proverbial silver lining is that after realizing how
desperately DargonZine needed new stories, our writers threw themselves
wholeheartedly into their writing. One of the ways they motivated one
another was to make "pledges", with each person promising a certain
number of stories before the end of this year. As a result, our
contributors have promised to have a prodigious forty new stories
written within the next four months. That's more stories than we've ever
printed in a single year: enough to fill fifteen issues of DargonZine!
If they fulfill their promises, we won't have another long lapse between
issues for a long, long time.
There's another reason why I'm confident that we'll have plenty to
print in coming months. But in order to tell you about that, I need to
begin by telling you about this year's Summit...
The Dargon Writers' Summit is an annual gathering intended to
strengthen our community of writers. This year's event took place in
Austin, Texas in late April. Hosted by Rhonda Gomez and P. Atchley, the
2003 edition had a record dozen writers in attendance, including three
first-time attendees.
Half our time was spent in working sessions, where we focused on
DargonZine and writing. The highlight of this year's working sessions
was the presentation of three "white papers", where three of our writers
gave brief talks on specific writing topics they had done research on.
After the working sessions were done, we had the rest of our days
to socialize and do more touristy things. If you want to know more about
this year's Writers' Summit, a much lengthier write-up and several
photographs are available on our Web site at
<http://www.dargonzine.org/summit.shtml>.
However, the real revolutionary part of this year's Summit, and the
reason why it pertains to the topic of our lack of submissions, was the
"writing retreat" we held.
It might not seem very innovative for a bunch of writers to
actually spend time writing, but it's something we'd rarely done at previous
Summits. We'd had a few short exercises before, but writing takes a large
amount of time, and time at our gatherings is a very precious commodity.
In addition, only a few amateur writers are comfortable sitting down and
writing on demand; it's much easier to write in one's own environment,
at one's own schedule, and without anyone looking over one's shoulder.
However, in planning this year's Summit we tacked on an additional
two days that would be devoted exclusively to writing. Furthermore, we
polled the writers to determine what they wanted to work on, and it soon
became clear that people wanted to create one large story arc and divide
it up between them, with each person writing one section of it.
Of course, agreement in principle is very different from agreement
in action, and it took several hours of wrangling at the start before we
had a premise and basic storyline that everyone was willing to work on,
and then assigned ownership of individual sections. However, we
eventually got there, and everyone found a quiet spot where they were
comfortable and started banging away at their keyboards.
By the end of the second day, we had a detailed plot and over 38
thousand words written. We'd begun twelve new Dargon stories, and
embarked upon the largest collaboration and the single most ambitious
work this project has undertaken in its nineteen-year history. If all
goes as planned, this one story arc may also provide enough material to
fill more than a dozen DargonZine issues.
The writers, knowing that DargonZine needed material, volunteered
the time and energy necessary to double the duration of the Summit so
that they could launch this massive story arc. Four months later, the
work still continues. At last count, there are ten writers developing 25
chapters, one-third of which have already been circulated internally as
first drafts.
As I stated above, our writers have pledged to have forty new
stories done by the end of the year, plus at the Summit they undertook
an immense collaborative effort that will provide more than two dozen
closely-integrated stories. Our writers have realized that it's up to
them to keep the magazine going, and they have responded to the
challenge. While I won't (and can't) tell you that there won't be
another lengthy gap between issues, I can definitely tell you that there
are loads of stories in the works, and the writers are more committed to
the project than ever. So long as that's the case, we'll keep putting
out issues as frequently as we can.
I hope that you enjoy them, because our writers, all of whom
struggle to fit writing into their busy lives, work very hard on every
single story. And on behalf of all the writers I want to offer our
apologies for how little you've seen of us so far this year. But our
next two issues are already taking shape, so we are looking forward to
spending a lot more time with you this fall.
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