DargonZine
Volume 12, Number 4 |
Distributed: 4/17/1999
Circulation: 705 |
 |
DargonZine is the publication vehicle of the
Dargon Project, a collaborative group of aspiring fantasy writers on the
Internet. We welcome new readers and writers interested in joining the
project. Please address all correspondance to
<dargon@shore.net>
or visit us on the World Wide Web at http://www.dargonzine.org/. Back
issues are available from
ftp.shore.net
in members/dargon/. Issues and public discussion are posted to newsgroup
rec.mag.dargon.
DargonZine 12-4, ISSN 1080-9910, (C) Copyright April, 1999
by the Dargon Project. Editor: Ornoth D.A. Liscomb
<ornoth@shore.net>,
Assistant Editor: Jon Evans
<godling@mnsinc.com>.
All rights reserved. All rights are reassigned to the individual
contributors. Stories and artwork appearing herein may not be reproduced
or redistributed without the explicit permission of their creators, except
in the case of freely reproducing entire issues for further distribution.
Reproduction of issues or any portions thereof for profit is forbidden.
|
Editorial
If you're a loyal reader of DargonZine editorials
(and I know you
are), you probably realize that they fall into two styles: me telling
you about recent events and improvements in the magazine, or me
pontificating at length about some esoteric aspect of what we do.
After two consecutive issues of the latter, I think you'll be
pleased to know that today I have a lot of great news to relate, and
won't have to resort to the angry old man schtick that encouraged our
writers' sprichwort: That's just Orny -- don't encourage him!
The first bit of news is the debut of our first new writer to
appear in 1999, Rhonda Gomez. Her "Cords that Bind" appears in this
issue, and is a delightful short piece, written with sincerity and a
wonderful tone. If this story is representative of Rhonda's work, I'm
sure there'll be many folks out there who'll be anxious to see more from
her!
The second bit of news is that we've made more than *thirty* more
back issues available in HTML format on our Web site. Previously, any
issues prior to 1994 were available only in ASCII format via ftp. Today
our HTML archive goes as far back as mid-1988, when FSFnet became
DargonZine. Although we have not yet converted our fifty FSFnet issues
to HTML, it's definitely in the works for later this year. All can be
found on the "Back Issues" page of www.dargonzine.org.
As if that wasn't enough, there's still another big announcement;
but this one will take some explaining.
If you receive your issues via email, you know that about a week
before each issue comes out, we send out a brief email announcing the
coming issue. For the most part, we do this so that we can identify
subscribers whose accounts have expired, so that we don't get a lot of
bounced email when we send the huge issue out a week later.
As you know, we've been gradually putting issues out more and more
frequently lately. And since there's less time between issues, there are
fewer accounts expiring and less need to send out that preliminary
mailing, because there will be fewer bounces. Because of that, we're
toying with the idea of eliminating that announcement, or only sending
it out when there's four weeks or more between issues.
With that in mind, we've decided to do two things: send our next
issue out *without* the usual pre-issue announcement, and conduct a poll
of our readers to find out whether they want to receive pre-issue
announcements or not.
If you receive full issues via email, DargonZine 12-5 will arrive
in your mailbox just three weeks from now, with no pre-issue
announcement. For us, this will be something of a test run to see how
feasible it is to distribute issues without a preliminary mailing. If
you don't receive full issues, but only a brief announcement of the
issue's availability when it is distributed, you will receive that
mailing just as you always have.
In addition to this, we would like to hear your opinion about the
pre-issue announcements and whether we should keep them or not. We
originally thought we'd just stop sending the announcements until we
heard that some readers like to receive them so that they know what's
coming.
To facilitate this, we've put together a Web page which will allow
you to quickly and easily express your preference. We'd really like
everyone who receives full issues via email to cast their vote, even if
the question doesn't matter to you (yes, that's one of the possible ways
to vote), so that we can get an accurate idea of what our readers want
us to do.
So please take the time to vote; it's quick and painless and will
help us better understand what you want. The voting page can be found at
<http://www.dargonzine.org/ping_vote.shtml>.
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