Welcome to a new DargonZine!! Well, okay, not really. But it is a new face to the zine. After many years of consideration and evaluation and subjugation and retribution and all the wonderful things that come with site redesigns, a lone voice in the group stood up and said, “Let’s make it look like this.” And so we did. And that lone voice was returning author Victor Cardoso, to whom I am greatly indebted. Well done, Vic! The site redesign is intended to be much more geared toward an online magazine, and to show off the authors and their work with a more modern appeal. Please feel free to send us feedback on the redesign; we definitely want to hear about it! E-mail can be sent to “dargon@dargonzine.org”.
Meanwhile, some of you might be asking “Who’s this Jon Evans person, and why is he writing the Editorial?” Well, after two years of being both an Editor and running the production side of the business, Liam Donahue decided he was more happy doing the production side. He asked if I would be willing to step up to the job, having been involved in the project for almost 20 years, and I said “Yes.” Fool that I am. 🙂 To be honest, I don’t know much about running a magazine. But we have a very competent support staff for me to stand on. We even elected a few new offices into existence just to help me out. The Assistant Editor is still John White, whom you might know as author Dafydd Cyhoeddwr, our premier author of incredible quality, insight, and volume. Hard to get those three things together in an author, particularly one who writes for no better reason than because he wants to. The roles of Secretary and Treasurer, which I previously held, are now being taken over by Liam. We switched. But we also realized that “production” probably falls under the realm of “secretary” so we forced it on him. Additionally, we voted into office two more permanent positions: Mentor Leader / Dargon Project Writers Workshop leadership is being run, still, by our distinguished author, Jim Owens. He is a writer of great personal relationships, and is rather well suited for the personal work involved in that role. Finally, we formally established a Marketing Leader, and assigned that role to Victor Cardoso, who as previously mentioned, is also working website redesign.
So, what’s different for the readers and writers? The truth is, we hope you see a new energy in the zine. It may not be apparent immediately — most of the stories in our current publication schedule were written in the months and even years prior to these changes. But we have had ongoing discussions on our new authors’ forum — which we intend to make public in the future — about changes in the environment, how we deal with literary devices such as magic and villains, and even the website’s redesign. We hope to reach out to more interested readers and writers that want to join our crazy little group of writers. We want to remind people why it is we have been around for nearly 25 years, why we have received so many awards and praises for continuous literary quality and integrity. And I hope our own authors themselves are reminded what excellent work they do. I urge all of our readers — first timers and long-time fans — to provide feedback to the authors, either through our simple web-based tools or through personal e-mails. We write because we enjoy it. But we publish because we hope that you do, too.
So, to the new issue. We have three stories to offer this month: “Uprooted” by Rena Deutsch, which was part of our slice-of-life series we created during last year’s Summit Challenge; “The Game, part 3” which continues the series that Mark Murray and Pam Atchley co-authored; and Liam Donahue’s “The Stone Man,” also a result of the 2007 Summit Challenge. Before I let you go, I give you three commands: Read, enjoy, and let us know how we did.
Best, -J
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