DargonZine
Volume 20, Number 4 |
Distributed: 11/05/2007
Circulation: 638 |
 |
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://ftp.dargonzine.org/.
Issues and public discussion are posted to newsgroup
rec.mag.dargon.
DargonZine 20-4, ISSN 1080-9910, (C) Copyright November, 2007
by The Dargon Project, Inc. Editor: Ornoth D.A. Liscomb
<ornoth@rcn.com>,
Assistant Editor: Liam Donahue
<bdonahue@fuse.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-nc-nd/2.5/ or send a letter to
Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford CA, 94305 USA.
|
Editorial
by Liam Donahue
<liam_the_red@dargonzine.org>
nother year is drawing to a close for us here at Dargonzine. It
wasn't our best year in terms of production, with only four published
issues to show for it (though we may try to get another one out in
December). It was a big year of change for us, with both a turnover of
leadership and a lot of reflection on what we were about. This brought
us to some realizations and ultimately to a fairly major change.
Ornoth has posted enough about our history in these editorials that
I won't go into a lot of detail (but if you want the detail, go to A Brief History of
Dargon on the About DargonZine
page). The zine has been around for 25 years, having started as FSFNet: a
magazine that included articles and reviews alongside works of fantasy
and science fiction. The Dargon Project, a group of writers creating
stories in Dargon's shared world, began a year later. For two more
years, Dargon stories shared space with non-Dargon stories. Then FSFnet
became Dargonzine, and only published stories from the shared world.
Along the way, something interesting happened. A peer review
process developed. It was, I think, necessary in a shared world to
preview each other's stories before publication to avoid conflicts
(which didn't always work, I'm told), but it became more than that, as
the writers began to help improve one another's writing. That is
something that stayed with the project, and became part of our vision:
"Aspiring writers helping to improve one another's writing, and having
fun doing it." This went on for a long time. Writers joined the group,
wrote Dargon stories, reviewed each other's writing, and had fun doing
it. Some stayed for a short time, and some for a long time.
Over the past several years, though, we've developed a problem. The
number of active writers is shrinking. We've always had writers leave,
but there have also always been new writers to replace them. So, what
happened to our new writers? Were they not joining? No, we had plenty of
people sign up and join the group. The problem was that they weren't
being published. In fact, since I joined in 2002, only two new writers
have actually been published. I'm one of them. The other one just left
the group. And very few of those who did join even submitted a draft
story for review.
So, what's going on? It took a long time for us to realize it. The
Dargon Project actually has two goals: to write in the shared world of
Dargon, for our own enjoyment, and to help aspiring writers. For a long
time, those goals worked hand-in-hand. Two things changed over time, too
slowly for anyone to notice. The first is that the shared world, which
was originally almost a blank slate, has developed a vast and
complicated history. While (we think) that is a part of its appeal, it
is a daunting task for a new writer to go learn that history, or at
least enough of it to write a story. This challenge was compounded by
the second change that occurred: the quality of the writing improved.
While that may sound obvious, given that we were *trying* to improve our
writing, or even arrogant, it's certainly true. Read some of the early
issues, and you will almost certainly see what I mean.
We finally recognized that our new writers were faced with a double
hurdle: the shared world and the writing quality. What were we to do?
Lose the shared world and become just another generic fantasy zine?
Certainly an option, but not one that sat well with most of us. Lower
our standards for writing quality in the zine? Kind of hard to credibly
say that we want to improve each other's writing if the quality of the
zine goes down. We decided another solution was required.
Dargonzine, as the publication vehicle for stories set in our
shared world, will continue, with no reduction in our standards. But to
both help new writers become acclimated, and to be able to offer help to
aspiring writers who may not want to write Dargon stories, we have
created the Dargon Project Writers' Workshop, or DPWW for short. What is
the DPWW? That will be answered in detail in a large FAQ that I am going
to finish up over the next week or so. In brief, though, it is a
(non-published) forum for aspiring writers to join and submit their work
for peer review. This will be done without the constraint of the shared
world (even non-fantasy fiction is welcome) and without an eye toward
getting the story printed in the zine, so the feedback should be more
geared toward the needs of each writer. There will be no charge to join,
only the expectation that members will be open to feedback and willing
to review each other's work. It's our hope that some of the writers from
the Workshop will come write for DargonZine, but that is not required.
For more info, go the the Dargon Project Writers Workshop. There is a (very)
abbreviated FAQ there at the moment, along with some other features.
Okay, enough about the DPWW for now. This issue brings you two
stories. The first is an offering of mine called "A Father's Gift",
which I hope you enjoy. The second is the penultimate chapter of Nick
Wansbutter's Great Houses War.
Enjoy.
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