DargonZine

Well, I have to tell you, it’s good to be back! For those of you who didn’t notice, it’s been eleven weeks since our last issue came out, back on December 21st. That’s the longest lag we’ve had between issues since 1996!

Well, it’s been an eventful three months, I must say. During the last portion of 2001, we’d run out of stories to print, so we weren’t able to put out as many issues as we wanted, nor as frequently as we would have liked. Then, over the holidays, we took our usual end-of-year hiatus to step back and look at our goals for the coming year. And just as soon as we got through that, we suffered a catastrophic hard drive crash that made it impossible to put out issues until now.

But now the goalsetting is done, the pipeline of submissions is looking much healthier, our hardware has been replaced, and our files restored, so we’re ready to get back to work printing stories for you!

But before I let you jump into the issue, let me tell you about a couple other changes that also took place while we were away.

First, there have been some great enhancements to the Web site. Our “New Readers’ Introduction to Dargon” page has been completely rewritten, making it more organized and more up-to-date. And our new “Map Room” page features five brand new maps, which are available both as flat images as well as Javascript-based annotated versions.

Most of those enhancements were driven by Carlo Samson, our longtime illustrator and cartographer, who joined the project way back in 1986. Unfortunately, Carlo recently decided to move on, and we wish him lots of success in his future endeavors. We’ll be trying to find other sources of illustrations for future issues.

Finally, you may notice that as of this issue, we have a new email address: <dargon@dargonzine.org>. This long-overdue change will allow us to have a single email address that won’t have to be altered every time we change Internet service providers.

That’s all the news for this issue, save for celebrating the fact that this is the first issue in our 18th season online. As you can see, we’ve had some ups and downs in the recent past, but we fully plan to continue our mission of helping aspiring writers develop their craft, and sharing the results with you.

This issue pairs up one of our founders, Jim Owens, with our newest writer, Dave Fallon. It’s very fulfilling to be able to reward a new writer’s enthusiasm and hard work by publishing his or her first story in DargonZine. Dave’s been great to work with, and he brings a lot of energy to the group. His “Baern and the Magic Ball” is paired up with the conclusion of Jim Owens’ fascinating “The Measure of His Love”, Jim’s 22nd story to appear in DargonZine. I’m sure you’ll enjoy them both.

And rest assured that you won’t have to wait three months for DargonZine 15-2 to arrive! We’ve already begun production, and expect to distribute the issue in early April. It will feature a major new work from P. Atchley, and the wonderful conclusion of Victor Cardoso’s “Jakob Sings of Monstrous Things”. So we’ll see you again in just a couple weeks. Or, as they say in Dargon, “sennights”!