DargonZine
Volume 12, Number 6 |
Distributed: 6/20/1999
Circulation: 716 |
 |
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 12-6, ISSN 1080-9910, (C) Copyright June, 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 I had any more news, I'd need a wheelbarrow!
Well, the first thing to talk about is the recent vote regarding
whether to continue sending the announcements that precede each issue by
a week. In the final tally, 30 percent of the people who responded
wanted to keep the announcements, 27 percent only wanted them some of
the time, another 27 percent didn't care, and only 15 percent of people
did not want to receive them at all.
What this tells me is that the pre-issue announcements generally
don't bother people. With that in mind, we will continue sending
pre-issue "pings", although not for issues which follow one another in
rapid succession. In that particular case, sending a pre-issue ping
would clutter our readers' mailboxes, might delay getting the issue out,
and would be unnecessary for us, since few readers' accounts would have
expired since the previous mailing.
That appears to be what you told us through your feedback. I'd like
to thank everyone who took the time to vote. We try to produce the best
magazine we can, but it's hard to know how we're doing without hearing
feedback directly from our readers. Thanks for making the effort to let
us know your preferences!
The second topic is the 1999 DargonZine Writers' Summit, which took
place June 4-6 in New York City. Each year we encourage our writers to
get together to socialize and work on the future of DargonZine. This
year's Summit was hosted by Alan Lauderdale, and was attended by writers
from as far away as southern California and Aberdeen, Scotland! Our
working sessions included discussion of our ideal writing environments,
the things that energize or de-energize us about DargonZine, how much
benefit we derive from the project and how much we help one another, and
more ideas for common events in Dargon.
Social activities included a visit to Fort Tryon Park, which
overlooks the Hudson. While there, we also stopped at the Cloisters, a
medieval castle and museum, which was very interesting; highlights
included several small courtyards, famous tapestries, amazing
illuminated manuscripts, and lots of relics. In a less historically
accurate mode, we also ate at Medieval Times, a feudal dinner theatre
featuring jousts, falconry, and combats. We enjoyed the view from the
top of the World Trade Center, and took part in the usual billiards,
bowling, and mini-golf.
Overall, the Summit was great fun; we enjoyed meeting new friends
and renewing old friendships, and Alan did a great job coordinating
everything. If you're interested in a more detailed writeup or seeing
some of our photographs, check them out on our
DargonZine Summits page
at <http://www.dargonzine.org/summit.shtml>!
Finally, as you will have noticed if you glanced at the table of
contents, this issue features the climactic final two parts of
Dafydd's
seven-part story "Talisman Zero". This series is a major work, both for
DargonZine, as well as its creator, who has been with the project since
1986. I recently took the opportunity to speak with Dafydd about the
"Talisman" series, and he had some great things to say.
What follows is a transcript of that discussion. Please be aware
that this interview contains spoilers, so it is strongly recommended
that you read this interview only after reading the final two chapters
of "Talisman Zero" which appear in this issue.
- DZ:
- Why is your story entitled "Talisman Zero"? Are there additional
parts which follow?
- Dafydd:
- Yes, there are. The first story was called "Talisman Zero"
because that's where the talisman is built, but the series is
really about putting it back together. There's going to be five
more stories, with varying numbers of chapters in each one, and
that's where the real storyline is.
- DZ:
- What is the storyline about, or what's the basic idea or theme
behind it?
- Dafydd:
- Putting the Talisman back together! Each story, even the first
story, has a different purpose and a different tale to tell in and
of itself. In each of the stories after "Talisman Zero", getting
the talisman back together is more or less secondary to what the
story is about. I'm hoping to make "Talisman Five" be more focused
on the talisman itself, but the other four of them are their own
stories.
- DZ:
- How did you get the idea behind the storyline?
- Dafydd:
- I was watching television. There's a Highlander episode called
"Methuselah's Gift". It's about the Methuselah Stone, which in
Highlander mythology gives the holder of it immortality. But the
neat thing about it is that it was fragmented, and the genesis for
the story was that when they took all these pieces that were like
rods of crystal and put them all together, it became a ball, and I
thought that was really cool.
There were other influences as well. There was a song on the radio
going around at that time where the idea of the song was two people
trying to get together, but things kept happening to prevent it and
they kept moving on. And so that added a little bit to it, chasing
people through the ages.
And there's a series of novels called the Deverry cycle by
Katherine Kerr. This series is about a wizard who commits a crime
of passion, who is then doomed to live until the reincarnations of
those who were wronged are able to overcome their troubles. So that
was certainly another influence on the story.
- DZ:
- What kind of things have you learned through the writing of the
series?
- Dafydd:
- With this whole storyline I've been doing more plotting
beforehand. For "Talisman Three", which I've just finished, I did a
whole outline of it section by section, which I had never done
before. It made it very much easier to write, because instead of
having to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B, I knew all
the stops I wanted to make along the way. It was still some effort
getting to those stops, but it was much easier.
- DZ:
- The series, or at least "Talisman Zero" takes place during what for
contemporary Dargon is ancient history. Will this series ever
catch up and integrate with the mainstream timeline?
- Dafydd:
- Yes. Because we're following the fragments of the talisman
throughout time, each successive story is getting closer and closer
to present-day Dargon. Although the stories being told aren't
necessarily about the talisman, the talisman will become more and
more of a driving force as time moves on. What I'd like to do by
"Talisman Five" is have the talisman be manipulating events to get
these people back together, because it's tired of being fragmented.
It will eventually catch up with contemporary Dargon.
- DZ:
- In "Talisman Zero" you've introduced a quartet of people in a
romantic situation. But it's far more common to see a "love
triangle" than a "love quadrangle". Why did you choose to write the
story with a fourth person trying to intrude on a triad rather than
the more familiar established couple with a third person intruding?
- Dafydd:
- Well, I didn't think of it in those terms; it's not where I
started from. In fact, the original outline for the series had
three people creating the talisman and having it destroyed and them
chasing it. So the bad guy didn't come in until later. And it
wasn't supposed to be about that conflict. In the original idea,
the conflict wasn't there. I wanted to explore a bisexual
relationship, which is kind of hard to do if you only have two
people, so I had to set it up with three. It wasn't until later in
the creative process that I realized that there needed to be an
antagonist, and the easiest thing is like you said: having somebody
trying to intrude. But I didn't start with two people and add an
intrusive third; I had started with three people and added an
intrusive fourth. And that's how that happened.
- DZ:
- What keeps you writing for DargonZine?
- Dafydd:
- It's fun. It's a place to write where I know people will read
what I'm writing. A lot of people hand out their writing to their
friends and get almost exclusively praise back from them. One of
the benefits of being with the project is that while everybody is
friendly with each other, they will critique your work relatively
honestly. And then there's the readership itself. I can put my
stories out there and know that people have subscribed to
DargonZine with the intention of reading it.
- DZ:
- Would you ever write on a professional level or for pay?
- Dafydd:
- That's been a dream for a long time, and with all the feedback
I'm getting about "Talisman", it seems like maybe I'm getting to
the level where I am publishable. But a lot of my inspiration for
the kind of writing that I do comes from the Dargon Project itself.
So while it would be really cool to get published, I'm not sure
what stories I would write if the inspiration isn't there.
- DZ:
- If you were to spell your name phonetically, how would you spell it?
- Dafydd:
- It's D-A-V-I-T-H-E C-A-W-H-E-T-H-E-R.
- DZ:
- Is there anything else about yourself or the "Talisman" series that
you would want to share with the readers?
- Dafydd:
- Not really. I hope they enjoy it!
Return to Table of Contents
