Editorial

by Ornoth D.A. Liscomb
<ornoth@shore.net>

One of the jobs of the editor is to take the stories available to him and achieve a certain balance of tone between all the works which appear in any given issue. It's difficult for readers to feel comfortable with a magazine that prints just tragic stories, or just stories that end "happiily ever after". Our goal is a healthy mix of light and heavy, happy and tragic. However, depending upon the nature of the stories that are finalized and printable at any given time, that may not be possible.

I bring this up because a majority of our recent and upcoming stories are dark and brooding, and new readers shouldn't take that as evidence that the magazine is focused solely on printing stories with unhappy endings. That's not the case at all, and if you stick with us, you'll see otherwise. It's purely a function of what material I have on hand when an issue gets assembled.

In Web news, we've added quite a few new features in the past month. We now have all the back issues in ASCII format available at ftp.shore.net/members/dargon/back_ish , and pages summarizing the responses we've received to the user profile and questionnaire . There's now a page with information designed to get new readers up to speed, plus maps and a brief history of DargonZine. And a big new feature is the addition of reference information to Glossary entries, so now if you look up "Marcellon ", you'll also see every story that he appears in! We're really pleased at the popularity of the Web site, and plan to continue providing new features and services through that medium.

This issue contains several items of note. Firstly, it marks long-time project member Dafydd's return to writing. True to form, Dafydd's "Shadowstone" is a wonderful story which I'm sure you'll find interesting.

Our second story is the continuation of Mark Murray's story about Raphael and Megan, and we finally learn some of the background behind what's been going on in Mark's previous stories.

Wendy Hennequin's "Knight of the Moon Jewel" is completed in this issue. Originally a four-part story, Wendy moved on before it could be printed, and as plans for the war changed, parts 3 and 4 were obsoleted. The group struggled for a long time with how to print this story, and finally getting it printed is an achievement in itself and enables us to move on and begin to close the long drawn-out war storyline.

And, finally, we have a new story by a new author: Dan Granata's "Intentions". It's always a particular pleasure to print a first story from a new author, and I'd like to congratulate Dan on seeing his first story through to print. Seeing a story through our peer-review process isn't easy (as Dan can attest -- Intentions 2 is on it's 6th draft!), and seeing your name in our table of contents is an accomplishment that any writer should be proud of.

With that, on to the stories!