Over the past few issues, my editorials have been very positive. Between the agency that contacted us, and the release of APE, good things were happening in the world of Dargon and electronic publishing in general. It was a happy time.
Since then, some bad news had affected me, personally, as well as the rest of the world. Our economies are struggling, the Sequestration began in the United States, and I was released from my employment due to budget cuts. It’s been a difficult time for me; I haven’t spent a month unemployed in almost 20 years. Then something interesting happened. No, I didn’t get a job offer (I’m still in the market, if you’re hiring! 🙂 What I got was a phone call from an old friend of mine. He had been unemployed for about 10 months, and just got a new job. He was loving it, and very happy. He wasn’t calling to gloat. He was calling to tell me, “Your job is out there. It’ll happen. I have confidence in you.” It was a wonderfully honest call, and it made me feel valued. It was a good thing to do, and it was a wake-up call for me to pull myself out of the funk I had been experiencing.
What does all this have to do with Dargon, you ask? Well, it’s similar to what we do here. We talk to each other, we support each other in our writing, and we try to help each other out. We do good things. The Dargon Project has always been about helping new authors — young and old — connect and learn to grow as writers, using our shared world as the medium by which we accomplish that goal. And, occasionally, we provide wake-up calls to each other to get back to writing. So here’s my wake-up call to you, the readers: a new issue of DargonZine. Read it. Enjoy it. And please, give the authors some feedback — it’s a good thing to do.
This issue, we’ve got a couple of excellent stories coming out. Dafydd continues his saga Ol Tamboch Narhin, Thread 4: Shaping Moonglow. If you haven’t been hooked into this series yet, you will be. And Jim Owens returns to us with To Cleave the Stone, a tale of magic involving the Lady Dargon.
Enjoy!
-Jon
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