Welcome to the second issue of Dargonzine for 2008. I am Jim Owens, one of the writers for the Dargon Project, and guest editor for this issue’s Editorial. In this issue we present three offerings by long-time contributors to the Dargon Project: “The Game 2” by Pam Atchley and Mark Murray, “Let Me Help” by Jon Evans, and my own “Stolen Thunder”. Each presents a slice of life in our fictional realm of Dargon.
Life is about discovery. At birth, our world is small. It centers around Mom and Dad and family and home. As we grow our world grows with us, expanding out into school and church and work and community. We learn lessons from life, if we are wise, and sometimes as we age we discover entire worlds that were right under our feet, unnoticed until something or someone prompts us to stop and look down and explore what was right before us the whole time. In many ways the Dargon Project has also been maturing. As our writers age and pass through the various stages of life, so the Project has had to grow and adapt. There are many discussion going on behind the scenes, on mailing lists, in our new forum, and even offline in telephone conversations and over dinner in exotic restaurants. We are making plans to grow and change, and you can expect to see some of these changes emerge in the months to come.
Every year the writers of the Dargon Project hold a Summit. As part of last year’s Summit, a challenge made for each writer to create a story, based in Dargon City, that takes place entirely within a 24 hour period of time. The purpose of this exercise was to explore a city that we have been writing in and about for 24 years but which remained strangely unmapped in our canon. The result was stories such as last issue’s “Walking the Venilek” by our premier writer Dafydd Cyhoeddwr. This issue of Dargonzine presents two more stories in that vein: my own “Stolen Thunder”, a brief tale of a flawed entrepreneur and his attempts at sudden success, and “Let Me Help” by Jon Evans, a story of reconciliation by two people who were never really estranged, but who were never really together. But first we present the second part of “The Game” by Pam Atchley and Mark Murray, a dark story of intrigue and honor. This story is the tale of an honest man who weaves pleasant fantasies for a living. His life teeters on the edge when an obsessive woman implicates him in a horrible crime.
I hope you enjoy the stories in this issue, and I also hope you continue to explore the world of Dargon with us as we grow into this new century.
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