2001 Dargon Writers' Summit

The 2001 Summit was our smallest in five years, having only six attendees: Carlo Samson, Dafydd Cyhoeddwr, Ornoth Liscomb, Rena Deutsch, Rhonda Gomez, and Stuart Whitby. In addition, former Dargon writer Max Khaystus also tagged along for part of the trip. In addition to exploring our home base in San Jose, California, we also made an expedition up to San Francisco.

Rena Deutsch, a maternity nurse who has been with the group for three years, did a fabulous job hosting this year's Summit. As usual, we balanced our time between morning working sessions and afternoon and evening social activities.

This year's working sessions focused primarily on co-authoring, featuring both discussions about collaborative writing, as well as a lengthy co-authoring writing exercise. Other topics included sharing some project folklore, figuring out how to improve our mentoring program, talking about shared elements of the milieu, reviewing our annual goals, and a contest to see who could write the best story lead-ins. The working sessions were intense, but among the most productive we've ever had.

Our social time was equally intense, and very interesting. On the bizarre side, we visited the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, and also the Winchester Mystery House, one of the most ludicrously-built domiciles made by man. In San Francisco we crawled around on the rocks at the Cliff House, walked the Golden Gate Bridge, and sang with the sea lions at Fisherman's Wharf. All that, in addition to the Summit standards of billiards, mini-golf, go-karting, crazy tabletop games, and, of course, plenty of eating!

While 2001 didn't have as many attendees, we had a very close group and benefited from not having to to worry about the logistics that a larger group would require. In the end, it was at least as productive and fun as any previous Summit, and that's what it's all about.

At right are thumbnail versions of some of the pictures we took at the Summit. Clicking on an image on this page will bring up the full-sized picture with a more detailed caption. The photos generally are a reasonably-sized 30-65k each.

If you find these images interesting, check out our other Summits, which are documented on our Dargon Writers' Summit page.