Ornoth

A couple months I ago I received an email from the eBay auction site, indicating that one of my few remaining product searches had been triggered. In this case, the search text was “MAZAR BALINŪ”. What the heck does that mean?

Welp, I recently posted that in high school I was a big fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. And that I was one of the founders of the New England Tolkien Society.

NETS had two publications: a monthly newsletter called Ravenhill that my friend Gary put out, and a (nominally) annual literary magazine called MAZAR BALINŪ that I produced. The name is in Tolkien’s Dwarven language and translates to “The Book of Balin”, which was an artifact that the LotR fellowship found in the mines of Moria.

It wasn’t easy to get the artwork, articles, and stories I needed, so only two issues were ever published: in 1980 and 1983. I photocopied issues and mailed them to our members, which were probably less than a hundred people. So it was pretty amazing to discover 40-year-old original copies on eBay, being sold by someone in the Netherlands!

But seeing them got me thinking. To my knowledge, there are no copies of MB online, and I’m not even sure any exist in public collections. So I scanned my archived originals and compiled them into the two PDFs that I can share with you now.

MAZAR BALINŪ I (pdf)

MAZAR BALINŪ II (pdf)

As an interesting postscript, MAZAR BALINŪ’s focus on original artwork, poetry, stories, and articles was the antecedent for my subsequent internet-based electronic magazine, FSFnet. FSFnet, which I founded in college in 1984, was renamed DargonZine in 1988, and has held the title of the longest-running electronic magazine on the internet for decades. While it still exists today in a torpid, nominal form, we’ll still celebrate the 40th anniversary of its founding later this year.

Renewing another connection with my past lives, a couple weeks ago I made an appearance at one of the annual DargonZine Summits.

DargonZine is the amateur writing zine I founded and ran from 1984-1989 (then called FSFnet) and 1994-2006. In continuous publication for thirty-two years, it’s by far the longest-running electronic magazine on the internet. Since 1995, our writers have gotten together once a year at the DZ Summit to write, talk shop, socialize, and sight-see.

Although the location changes each year, the 2017 Summit took place in Cleveland OH. Since that’s only two hours’ drive from Pittsburgh, I drove up for an overnight visit. Even though my participation in the project ended a decade ago, I’m still good friends with my old crew (Liam, Jon, Daf, and Jim) who are running the show. Cleveland was doubly convenient, because Inna and I had just been there a month before, so I knew some of the sights and was comfortable getting around.

Overall, it was great spending time with my old friends, although 30 hours was just about the right amount of time. I didn’t want to interfere with the business side of the Summit, and the guys… they are all radically diverse people with longstanding differences. But I was glad to see that there wasn’t a lot of tension or annoyance amongst the group.

The frenetic pace of the Summit hasn’t changed since my time as Editor. Although I was only in town for a bit more than 24 hours, we packed a ridiculous amount of activity into that time: a glass sand-casting demo at the Glass Bubble, the Cleveland Museum of Art, snacks at the West Side Market, ice cream at Mitchell’s, Indian food at Cafe Tandoor, and Ethiopian food at Empress Taytu. And we found time to play games Sagrada (too left-brain, even for me), Lanterns (okay), Sushi Go (eh), and old favorite Carcass One (thoroughly fun). The busy pace reminded me of so many Summits past.

Although I’m usually a very quiet in most normal social situations, I was surprised to rediscover that as (former) leader and (former) center of the social circle, my social style with the writers is quite different. With them I’m energetic (perhaps even gregarious), more impulsive, and prone to mischief, such as playfully trying to challenge people’s digestive resilience by suggesting Indian food, ice cream, and Mexican food. And I’ve always pushed people’s physical activity levels, because I get restless and grumpy without an adequate outlet for physical energy.

We have all aged a lot since my last involvement ten years ago, but I was surprised by the health issues amongst the group. It gave me a new appreciation for my own physical state, even if I, too, am less sprightly than I once was.

Also thanks to my friends (and their families), I left with a renewed appreciation for how respectful, responsible, and self-sufficient my partner is. No more need be said!

Of course, with my buddies growing older, this brief re-engagement with DargonZine a decade after my departure brings up the inevitable questions about the magazine’s future: how long it will continue, who will keep it going, and whether it will die in obscurity despite its longevity. With over thirty years of background material to learn, there’s a high barrier to entry for new writers, and it would be hard to nurture a strong sense of ownership among younger members.

So in due time DZ, which was once the most important thing in my life, will probably disappear. But it’s already had an incomprehensibly long run and truly fulfilled my aspirations to create an online community for developing writers, while providing them with a creative outlet and feedback from an appreciative audience. It remains one of my most noteworthy creations, and I’m very deeply proud of our writers and pleased with the friendships that have been forged between them.

And I’m also deeply thankful that they’ve willingly devoted the time and energy to keep it going for so long. Between a five-year stint in the early 90s and the eleven years since 2006, they’ve run DargonZine for nearly as long as I did, which is quite an accomplishment. Well done, team!

Most of you know that in 1984 I founded an Internet-based magazine for aspiring writers called DargonZine and ran it until a couple years ago. I have to say, there’s nothing quite like amateur fiction. As ably demonstrated by the following unedited passages from some of the rough drafts that were posted for peer review. Their beauty is self-evident; enjoy.

1. “Before I do my mother, will you put yourself in exile with me?
2. Skar smiled a mean little smile as Kane recovered himself and quickly snatched the bag off of the table. Skar slowly drank the rest of his ale, and the rose from his table.
3. The baron said, “He’ll get over it, my love. But this could have all been avoided if you had been more discrete.”
4. When she had not conceived after months of trying, it became apparent that something was wrong. Now, years later, there was no denying her bareness.
5. All of the walls around the room were filled with doors, and in the center a grand staircase lead up to a balcony on the second floor.
6. Sandia reached the edge of the doorway and peaked in.
7. “What?” she screeched. “You pick up some orphaned peasant girl and bring her back, then you dump her on me while you gallivant off to heard sheep or whatever it is knights do in this backwater squandry.
8. “I’ll return in two months,” DuVania said forcefully. “No one is being abandoned, Friana. During that time, I’m sure my daughter will fair just as well as she has during the past two months.
9. The tavern was teaming again, full of evening patrons eating and drinking their fill
10. [note here that Parris is a male character] Parris recalled the family tale that had been passed on to him by his father, a weak and bitter man with no ambition. Parris and Clifton’s great-grandfather, Duke Cedric, had been unable to conceive a child.
11. Soldiers dressed in the white and blue livery colours of baron Narragan lunged at him from both sides.
12. There were archers and varying degree of men-at-arms from peasants with farm implements to well-equipped castle guards bearing shields with their lords’ liver colours and chain hauberks.
13. Dara reached them and scanned the deep blue horizon. Sumner Dargon pointed and she was able to make out the white rectangles of sales approaching.
14. When I returned to the room, it looked beautiful. It had always been one of my favorite rooms for this reason. Because there were no windows, the light from the candles and the scone lit the room with a golden glow.
15. He felt the warmth of her through his clothing. He stood still again and let that warmth envelope him.
16. I had already seen that few city dwellers considered woodsmen, wearing simple leathers and fir shirts to be uncivilized.
17. Enough was enough. I remember pushing away the proffered cup of water, and the incensed look on the fishmonger’s face as it spilled over him.
18. I stared at the creature and it stared back at me. Then it spayed water from the top of its head and I was soaking wet; so was every other man standing nearby. It got their attention.
19. “May I come in?”
    “Off course.”

As DargonZine’s founder and former editor, I was asked to make a few comments as they completed their 24th and began their record 25th year of online publication. I thought I’d share my responses here, in case anyone is interested.

Why did you start Dargonzine?

DargonZine, which was initially called FSFnet, really began out of my desire to exchange ideas, tips, and techniques with other writers. I was attending college in the backwoods of Maine, and there really was no one I could have those kinds of focused conversations with.

At that time, BITNET was just coming into being, and several of my peers had founded electronic magazines that focused on computers or humor. But at that time there was really no online forum for fantasy and science fiction fans.

Having edited a fiction-based magazine in high school, I immediately recognized the value of combining this newfound communication technology with my personal needs as a writer. I could attract people like myself, who sought a serious, focused online writers’ group, while entertaining hundreds of fantasy readers by freely distributing the writers’ output online.

Twenty years before the term “social networking” was coined, we realized the power of bringing aspiring writers together and sharing their works with supportive readers, and that formula has been the basis for DargonZine’s success.

Did you ever imagine it would still be running, 25 years later?

During the early years, obtaining enough submissions was a constant struggle, and it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that DargonZine had enough writers to ensure that issues came out on a regular basis. So for many years our focus on getting the next issue out superceded any inkling of how long the magazine would survive.

However, as the few older e-zines folded, by 1995 we had clearly become the longest-running electronic magazine on the Internet. At the same time, we had an established core group of long-term contributors who were willing to do whatever was necessary to keep the group alive. Only then did we start thinking about DargonZine having a future beyond the next two or three issues.

What were the early days of Dargonzine like?

Most people don’t realize how primitive the Internet was in 1984. This was ten years before the first public Web browser was developed, before IRC, predating even commandline FTP. The only service available was text-only email.

The “Internet” was limited to a couple obscure places that would pass email between two incompatible networks. The only sites on the Internet were major colleges and large government contractors, and the only people who had both access and the technical knowledge to use it were computer science students and computer center staff.

At that time, there were virtually no public gathering places on the Internet (pun intended). One of the only ways to find people was to register your name, email address, and interests in a central text file that listed a few hundred “Bitnauts”: tech-savvy Internet users. DargonZine’s first two mailings were sent to users on the Bitnauts List who had listed science fiction or fantasy in their interests.

Back then, when connections between universities rarely exceeded 9600 baud (15 minutes per MB), sending a couple hundred emails at once could bring the entire network to its knees. FSFnet was one of the first users of Eric Thomas’ Listserv software, which addressed this problem by multiplexing email and file distribution to make more efficient use of BITNET’s star topology and slow network links.

What advice would you give to others who want to start a long-lived webzine?

There are two crucial elements in making your e-zine work: the subject matter, and your dedication to it.

Because you’re competing with everyone else on the planet, your e-zine needs to be the single best source of information on your topic. If you intend to put out a magazine about Star Trek, your zine has to be really exceptional in order to stand out among all the other sites already out there. That’s incredibly difficult, but I’ve seen it done.

The other option is to focus on something newly emerging, like steampunk fiction or digital video recorders or GPS phones. If you’re the only zine that deals with your topic, it’s much easier to become the recognized authority in the field. This is what DargonZine did back in the early days of the Internet, when there were no other writing groups or fiction zines online. If you do this, you just have to make sure you do it well enough to discourage anyone from starting a new zine to compete with you.

The subject matter is what will get your zine off the ground, but your dedication is what gives it longevity. I’ve see hundreds of zines and newsletters fold after putting out four to ten issues. Usually there’s a honeymoon period when there’s lots of content and both the editor and contributors are very motivated. But in short order the editor discovers that the pipeline of submissions has run dry and there’s actually a lot of technical drudgery in preparing and distributing issues. It’s here where the editor’s passion and devotion to the subject matter makes the difference between a zine that quietly fades away into obscurity or survives and goes on to enduring greatness. And, really, if you’re not working on something you love to do, you shouldn’t be wasting your time on it.

And if you’d like to impart any anecdotes or anything else, please let me know!

Although the Internet allowed DargonZine’s contributors to work closely together in a virtual sense, our writers have always been physically isolated, spread thinly across the globe. In fact, during our first decade we didn’t see any value in meeting one another in person. Even when that changed, we spent two cautious years meeting in small groups before inviting all our writers to our first open DargonZine Writers’ Summit in Washington DC in 1997.

The ensuing DargonZine Summits cultivated lasting friendships and generated an unexpected amount of enthusiasm among our contributors. Since 1997, we have held annual meetings each year in different cities around the world. The Summits are a balance between working sessions focused on improving our writing, fostering personal connections between writers, and sightseeing in the host city. Although we were skeptical of their value at first, the Summits have proved to be one of the most rewarding, inspiring, and effective activities we’ve ever provided.

unicornpearlz asked: How the heck did you get so good at marketing?

I’d say there are probably three factors.

The first is just simple observation. Since no one can escape being marketed to, it makes sense for an engaged member of modern society to learn how mass media manipulate individuals and groups. This requires examining those media with a critical eye, giving thought to what the media are doing and how they go about doing it. I see that as just basic visual literacy.

The other is that it’s kinda of been part of my job. I’ve been designing Internet information systems since 1983, and that has included information architecture, data visualization, and (especially with the rise of the web) visual design. As such, I’ve gradually become attuned to the fact that layout and illustration do a whole lot more than just make a page look pretty; they control what information the user focuses on, what they perceive as important, and even how they react to that information.

In the early days, web developers and designers had to be jacks of all trades, and I was strong in technology, business strategy, and information design, but my weakest point has always been the creative side of visual design. Thus, the third factor: in 2001 I started classes at the New England School of Art and Design, with the idea of picking up a certificate in electronic graphic design. In 2005, due to extraordinary events in my life, I walked away from the program with just one class left to matriculate. But by then I’d gained all the knowledge I was going to get from the program.

Knowing I sucked at graphic design, that was an interesting and conscious exercise. When one is young, you always play to your strengths, looking for a job you will excel at; when you’re older, you start thinking more about new, more ambitious challenges and the value of exploring and strengthening the areas you’ve always found most difficult. When I started classes at NESAD, my work was actually well ahead of that of the kids in my classes, but over time, my work stayed at about the same level, while theirs improved dramatically. What I did gain was a better understanding of design and designers, and the incredible insights of the Bauhaus movement.

At the same time, it pretty much confirmed my lack of confidence in my creative ability. While I have expert skills providing critiques and making suggestions, and moderate skill at taking an existing design and improving it substantially, I’m an utter failure if I have to start with a blank page; the ideas just don’t come. So I didn’t overcome my weakness, but I definitely learned a lot, and refined my understanding of my limitations.

What’s ironic is that this lack of creative confidence has spread to my fiction writing, as well, which is one (of many) reasons why I decided to end my involvement with DargonZine. Fortunately, at least it hasn’t interfered with my blogging or photography, which have been my major “creative” outlets in recent years.

But really, I think my first two survey courses in graphic design were the most valuable in terms of gaining a degree of visual literacy. They taught me how to look at a piece of media and evaluate it from a designer’s perspective, and some of the techniques and methods used to influence the viewer, whether subtly or otherwise.

My first trip to New York was on November 11, 1984, for a gathering of Internet chat users. Mind you, this was well before IRC was written, or Relay (IRC’s predecessor). In fact, the Internet really wasn’t there yet; it had no interactive messaging facility. I grew up on something called BITNET, one of the consitutent networks that eventually evolved into the Internet. Anyways, this was arguably the first ever Internet chat get-together.

I wasn’t in the best of situations going into it. See, there were these two girls from UConn—Cathy and Randi—whom I was flirting with. Oh, and then my good friend Lothie was coming up, and she and I were kinda getting together somewhat, too. Oh, and have I mentioned that amidst all this bounty, I had my eye on this really cute chick who showed up with someone else? Yeah… That was Linda, my future wife. Those were the days, huh?

That was also the visit where Lothie and I went over to Godiva Chocolatier on 5th Ave, then got caught in one of those abject NYC downpours.

The next trip I remember was three months later, when I took the bus down from Maine to surprise Linda at the computer center at Queens College. I managed to get from Grand Central onto the subway line to Queens all by myself very late one night. Then at one stop, all these huge dirty black guys came on the train with axes and picks and stuff. I eventually clued in that it was a track crew, but it was enough to really scare the little boy from Maine!

There are various memories of trips down to the city while Linda and I were together. Initially, Linda’s parents refused to meet me, so I had nowhere to stay. I remember staying one night at the Bitnic offices, and other nights at a student hostel near Madison Square Garden. In the meantime, I bowled a nearly perfect game at MSG’s bowling alley. I stayed one night on Staten Island with my friend Hillary, and spent several nights during Purim in the basement of an orthodox Jewish household. That was the setting for the worst illness of my life, after I was food poisoned after eating bad Chinese food in Chinatown.

One morning Linda and I were supposed to meet at a subway stop in Manhattan. It was the morning of Hurricane Gloria, in October 1985. Linda didn’t venture out in the storm, but I did, waiting several hours for the storm to pass before I finally gave up and took the train out to her parents’ house. Meanwhile, Linda had left to go look for me, and her folks had no other recourse but to actually answer the door. Thereafter, they loved me, and we didn’t have any more problems with their denying my existence.

Those trips to New York with Linda were great. Hanging around the Village and Washington Square, ice cream at Swenson’s. visiting Tower Records and Forbidden Planet and Star Magic and the Compleat Strategist. Hanging around Astoria and Ditmars Boulevard. Taking the Merritt/Hutchinson River Parkway to the Whitestone. New York pretzels. Each time we returned from Pennsic, her parents’ house was where we got out first warm showers in more than a week. Watching the Superman balloon’s severed hand floating gently to the ground when he got caught in the trees when we went to see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade…

Her parents were… unique. Her mother would buy us all kinds of garbage which we had no use for from the Home Shopping Network. In a house with only three people, they had four televisions, and all of them had to be on and blaring at least 98 dB, or else one of them would come into the room and turn it on and start flipping channels. “What! Don’t you like television! Here! Here’s a science program! I love science programs!” And wearing rubber boots is bad because they’ll make your feet swell up and they’ll have to cut them off your feet. Yeah. What do you want; they read and believe what’s written in the New York Post.

After Linda and I separated, I went down to New York a couple times with my buddies Barry and Sean. We did a little clubbing, and I remember hitting a show at the Knitting Factory. We also caught a Blue Man Group show back around 1992 when they were still a small three-person local outfit, and we sat in the absolute back/top of the multi-floor theater, so we got to initiate the big TP-storm at the end. More good times. Well, except for the Fourth of July, when you couldn’t differentiate between the fireworks and the gunshots, and the concussion made all the car alarms in the city go off simultaneously…

Around 1995 I spent a week living in co-worker Steve C.’s West Village apartment while working on a project for Wells Fargo out of Sapient’s Jersey City office. That was a fun time. And I seem to recall hitting a BDSM club on the west side sometime around then.

But my trips to the city were few and far between after that. Alan L. hosted the 1999 DargonZine Writers’ Summit in New York, which included a trip to Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters, which Linda had always promised to take me to. We also spent a couple hours on the roof of the World Trade Center towers, enjoying the sun, the breeze, the view, and the surprisingly total silence. Two years later, they (the towers) were gone. It’s still kind of an eerie feeling to have been there not too long before they came down. I haven’t been back to the site since.

I don’t think I went back to New York for eight years after that Summit. About a year ago, I took the Acela down in early December to visit a client—a prestigious lingerie retailer—in midtown. I didn’t have much time, but managed to snag a pretzel and wander around a little.

A month or two ago I had to go down for another meeting with the same client, and had a little more time to walk around (and it was significantly warmer than it had been in December). It was nice, although I still would enjoy spending a week or even just a weekend down there.

In case you can’t tell, I miss New York. It is a cool place to visit and hang around, and it was especially good when I had Linda to serve as a native guide. You couldn’t pay me enough to live there—Boston’s a much more manageable and friendly town—but it’s no further away than Maine, where I go every 4-8 weeks, so I really should be making trips down there more often than once every eight years.

I’ve always been a big fan of maps and mapping. I can remember living in Portland (see below), and making a map of the streets in the neighborhood. That’s pretty early, because we moved out of Portland when I was eight years old. I had a whole collection of topo maps by the time I was thirteen, and I one of the first people to own a handheld GPS, back back in March 2000 when Garmin produced its first model. And, of course, I’ve stayed on top of Internet-based mapping technologies from Etak to Mapquest to Google Maps and MS Live Search. I wrote my first Google Maps mashup as soon as the mapping API was released.

However, the mashups I created have been somewhat superceded by new functionality that Google has added to Google Maps, including the ability to share maps, if you so desire. So here’s a few of the maps that I’ve put together, in case you’re at all interested:

Ornoth’s House

A pointer to where I live, Boston’s former Hotel Vendome. Mostly this one’s just somewhere I can point people if they need directions.
 

Places I’ve Lived

A plot of all the places where I have lived, which are all in Maine and Massachusetts.
 

Places I’ve Visited

A general view of some of the places that I’ve visited. It’s only really valid at the state/city level.
 

DargonZine Summit Locations

These are the places where my magazine has held its annual writers’ gatherings. Virtually all of them are located in a place where one of my writers lived at the time.
 

Pan-Mass Challenge

The route of my annual Pan-Mass Challenge charity ride. The route varies slightly from year to year, so it’s not perfect, but it’s close, and will give you an idea where we go.
 

Flickr Map

This one’s actually a mashup hosted by Flickr, but it’s a nice geographical plot of the photos I’ve uploaded to my Flickr account.
 

I agreed to play this meme, so now I have to post.

The idea is this: Ask me, and I’ll pick three of your listed interests and three of your userpics and ask you to talk about them. Express your interest in a comment on this entry.

Here are the ones greatsword asked me to talk about:

Interests: bentmen, hand_drumming, vipassana.
Images: Righteous, sunglasses, puggle

Bentmen:

Back in the early 90s, shortly after my wife and I separated, I started hanging out with friends in Boston’s music scene. There were so many great local bands back then, and we managed to make friends with a few players, including an absolutely amazing guitarist named Eddie Nowik. Usually he played with a band called Crisis of Faith at the Plough & Stars, but he also played occasionally with a band called the Bentmen.

The Bentmen are hard to explain. They play rock with disturbing, eerie overtones. There’s some MP3s on www.bentmen.com and they’re also on iTunes. But the spectacle is the live show. The stage is decorated in the most bizarre fashion, and the band members come out in the most disturbing, scary outfits they can devise. They spray the audience with shaving cream and tempura paint (sic). They hook beanbag chairs up to leafblowers and spray the audience with feathers and little foam pellets. They toss out ice cream sandwiches, severed Barbie doll heads, and anything else they can procure. The venue gets utterly trashed, left knee-deep in refuse.

But beyond all that is the music; they’re all gifted, prominent musicians. They play very rarely, but when they do, it’s chaos, and quite a spectacle. You can see a few pictures I took at their most recent show (last October) here.

Hand Drumming:

About the same time as I started getting into the music scene, I developed a passion for drums. I bought a drum set and spent a lot of time playing around, despite knowing that I have an absolutely horrid sense of rhythm. I later replaced that with an electronic kit, which I still have. And the music store gave me a credit when I bought the e-drums, so I spent that on a set of bongos, although I’d already gotten into hand drumming by then.

I’m not sure when I picked up hand drumming or how. I guess I must have gone to a Cambridge Drum & Dance and liked what I saw, because I picked up a Remo “klong yaw”, which is sort of like a djembe, only taller. You can see it here. I also took a hand drumming course with Inna. Now I’ve also got Inna’s djembe at home, and some miscellaneous stuff, including a rain stick, claves, Boomwhackers, a bottled water jug, a didgeridoo, a cheap goatskin drum a friend brought back from South Africa, and probably some other stuff I don’t have readily in memory. But I’m still just a wannabe in every way…

Vipassana:

Vipassana generally refers to “insight meditation”, a sort of non-sectarian form of meditation derived from Theravada Buddhism, which itself is based around the Tipitaka, aka the Pali canon, the oldest, seminal Buddhist texts. The other Buddhist schools all include other texts which were developed later. Theravada itself seems pretty inocuous, without a lot of the saints and mythological and ceremonial stuff and hierarchy that you get in other sects. But Vipassana is even one level removed from that, which is why “insight meditation” is more generally accepted in the west, where people are all skitchy about anything smacking of religion.

	Righteous: This shot was taken during the 2002 Dargon Summit in Scotland. We were taking a group guided tour of Sterling Castle, which was awesome, and here was this pulpit kinda place in the Great Hall. So while the tour guide was talking, I stood atop the pulpit while my buddy took the picture from below. The shot of someone (especially the editor) on a soapbox, pontificating, is a Summit standard, and I thought that’d be a good icon for when I’m feeling opinionated.
	Sunglasses: This shot was taken at the 2003 Dargon Summit in Austin, Texas. The shot was taken by my Assistant Editor as I was piloting our rented party boat near Mansfield Dam on Lake Travis, while we looked for a swimming spot. That was the largest Summit gathering of all, and the inception of DargonZine’s immense “Black Idol” story arc, the biggest collaborative story we’ve ever written. I use this photo mostly when I wanna be like Joe Cool…
	Puggle: That’s the Puggle! My kittykat! Puggle came to me along with two other cats and a four year-old when ailsaek moved in. When she moved out, I expressed the desire to keep the Puggle, and he and I lived together for a dozen years in great happiness and joy. He was a very important companion for me until his death of congestive heart failure on Christmas Eve 2005. The photo is cropped from this photo, whose caption is: So what if it’s a formal sitting? My foot itches! I used to use this one when I talked about the Puggle or cats in general.

Okay, so who wants in?

      The following is my travelogue from the 2007 DargonZine Writers' Summit. The official project writeup and photos can be found here, while my favorites out of my own photos can be found here.

Wednesday, 21 March 2007

      Woke up to 20 degrees, but at least it was sunny. We'd had snow showers the day before, and a serious snowfall last weekend. I finished packing and swept the house, then left for the airport at 11am.
      We were about ten minutes late taking off, due to the outbound aircraft showing up late, which made me anxious because my connection in Denver was tight to begin with. Despite the fact that we wound up landing on time, by the end of my brisk walk the length of Denver's Terminal B my second flight was already boarding Seating Area 2, which meant me. No time to stretch out my back after a five-hour flight from Boston!
      The flight to Vegas added another couple hours onto that, continuing to stress my back, which has been painful since I stood in line for three hours waiting to tour the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy in Boston two weeks ago.
      The approach to Vegas was absolutely stunning from the air, the Earth a carpet of rugged mountains and etched canyons. After passing over one final high ridge, we approached the McCarran runway that runs parallel to the Strip, passing the Stratosphere, the Wynn, the Bellagio, New York New York, Paris, and the Luxor, among the sights. It was pretty impressive. On arrival at 6pm, it was 70 blessed degrees.
      I met up with two of my writers -- Rena and Dafydd -- at the luggage carousel, then we drove off in Daf's white Lincoln Town Car to meet Carlo -- another Dargon Project member -- in the lobby of the Green Valley Ranch Casino in Henderson.
      From there, we had supper at the Red Hawk Tavern, which was clearly a dive for the locals. The food was mundane, but at least it wasn't a chain, and the waitress was friendly. The highlight, however, was the quite busty other waitress, whom I eyed as she worked the booths. Very nice, I must say.
      After dinner and chat, we hit the Albertson's grocery next door for some supplies, then made our way back to the town house that Dafydd, this year's host, had rented. The nighttime view of the city was interesting: a huge grid of lights filling the valley, tightly bound by arid mountains, with the Strip in the middle.
      As for the house, called Cappellini, there's not much I can say about it but “Oh my gawd!” Okay, aside from the pool and hot tub, and the pool table, and the wireless Internet, the place was gigrontic. I think it had seven bedrooms, but I'm not sure. I wound up picking a nice little suite with -- of all things -- a very high sleigh bed. The place is a new development, and the accommodations were absolutely unsurpassed. Stupendous.
      I stayed up for a while, unpacking and getting ready for Thursday's planned bike ride. I finally hit the hay sometime around 1am, which would have been 3am Eastern. Long day!

Thursday, 22 March 2007

      Sadly, my internal clock was still on Eastern time, so I was awake at 5:45 am. After a casual breakfast, Dafydd and Rena dropped me at Las Vegas Cyclery, where I talked to a friendly dude and rented a 60cm Cannondale Synapse: the other bike I considered when I bought my Roubaix a year and a half ago.
      While the others headed off to tour the Luxor and Caesar's Palace, I started the westward ride out of town, which promised a steady four percent grade, gaining of 2500 feet over a dozen miles. After a few miles, I caught up with another cyclist at a stop light, and I chatted pleasantly with him for several miles, until the end of Alta, where he turned right to do some offroad riding, while I turned left to get back down to West Charleston and Route 159, which would take me out to Red Rock Canyon.

      I knew Las Vegas was in the Mojave Desert, but I had no idea it was surrounded by mountains. You can see the Spring Mountains and Red Rock Canyon from the Strip, and it only took me six miles to get outside of town and into very serious desert scenery.
      Within an hour I turned into the park's 17-mile scenic loop road, which began a more serious ascent, skirting the entire circumference of valley between the Calico Hills (huge thousand-foot cliffs of red sandstone) and the immense Spring Mountains. As I slowly made my way up to 4800 feet, I took a few sets of pictures, but absolutely no photos can do justice to the immense wall of rock on my right. Although it hadn’t taken long, I was very glad to see the sign for the highest point on the loop road, because my springtime legs had been pretty well used up.
      From there, the remaining two-thirds of my ride were all downhill or flat, starting with the descent from the canyon, which featured lots of switchbacks and speeds up to 40 mph. At 2pm I stopped at the end of the loop road and took another panorama of the canyon before hopping back onto Route 159 south toward the tiny village of Blue Diamond.
      Route 159 was great: smooth, wide, and all downhill. Despite a very stiff headwind, I was still making 25-35 mph before I turned onto Route 160, a busy road that led back into Vegas from the south, near where our house was. However, since Dafydd and Rena were touring the Strip, I skipped the house and turned left onto Jones, through an industrial area, where I found a penny in the road. I figured finding money in the streets of Vegas would be a good story, so I took the time to stop and pick it up.
      The last five miles of the 50-mile ride were tough, between the wind, my bad back, and my legs losing power on this first significant ride I've done in six or eight months. I finally pulled back into the bike shop and returned my ride, stretched, then plunked myself down in front of the store to wait for Dafydd and Rena to pick me up.
      When they did, we had to exchange the Lincoln Town Car for the behemoth van we'd use to transport the nine of us around town. That was a bit of an adventure, as we had to return the car in one place (after missing the rental car return exit twice), take a shuttle bus back to the airport terminal, then catch another shuttle to a different rental place. Then we drove the beast back to the house to again meet up with Carlo for dinner.
      After I took a quick shower, we headed out to where Daf thought an Ethiopian restaurant was. We found the strip mall, and even the sign, but the restaurant was gone. However, there was an Ethiopian grocery and a “club” next door with silvered windows that hid the interior. Eventually Daf stepped into the “club”, and we followed timorously.
      Inside looked like a VFW hall, with a bunch of tables, and a group of natives huddled at one. It took several minutes for Daf to get any attention from the residents, but eventually we sat down and were served. The staff seemed very surprised, and we soon found out that they were out of some dishes because it was an Ethiopian fasting holiday. We ordered anyways, but I have to say the food was singularly bad. I got lamb bones and bread, and that's about it, so I was pretty glad to leave that adventure behind.
      From there, we returned to the house. Both Liam and his wife (MaryEllen) and Jim and his wife (Naomi) showed up late that evening, and we played a game of Carcassonne, which I won, surprisingly. Eventually it was 2am, and I hit the hay.

Friday, 23 March 2007

      Friday was another 6am start, but it was a pretty casual morning. Eventually the group got together in the van and Dafydd drove us down to Hoover Dam, where we promptly parked and headed indoors for the tour.
      The tour really wasn't too much: a movie, an elevator ride down to the generator floor, then a walk past one of the huge bypass water pipes that feed the turbines. Somehow I find the dam both stupendously huge and yet thoroughly trivial at the same time. It's 780 feet high, and two football fields deep at the base. The lake behind it is absolutely huge. But ultimately it's just a simple waterwheel. It's kinda like having a 300-foot screwdriver.
      After the tour, we stepped out into the sunlight of the observation deck to take some pictures, then walked the length of the road atop the dam, across to the Arizona side of the Colorado River. The intake towers were kind of interesting, and we spotted a couple lizards lounging in the sun on one of the cement walls atop the dam. Although the wind was calm on both sides of the dam, it was brutally strong right in the middle, which was very odd. When we'd had our fill, we went through the gift shop, then into the cafe for lunch, where I had chicken fingers.
      Then it was back into the van up the arid no mans land along the edge of Lake Mead. The landscape became gradually more and more rugged, and it reminded me a great deal of Scotland: driving winding roads in a van through huge mountains, while half of the passengers slept.
      At about 4pm we finally found the entrance to the Valley of Fire, another immense outcropping of red sandstone. We took a short walk up to Elephant Rock, an odd stone formation on a hill overlooking the visitor center. I encouraged Liam and his wife to climb up to it for photos, while a mother nearby lectured her kids about not leaving the trail.
      After a short breather, Jim fetched the van and we drove on to another point called Seven Sisters. Getting out of the van, the weather had turned breezy and cool, and one could feel the occasional raindrop. The wind picked up to storm levels, kicking up eddies of sand and driving us back into the van.
      From there it was another short side trip to a place with the intriguing name of Mouse's Tank, which turned out to be absolutely fascinating. It was a very narrow box canyon, a third of a mile long, bordered by huge sandstone cliffs and boulders of all sizes and shapes, many of them covered with petroglyphs that could be one or two thousand years old. At the head of the canyon is a small hollow filled with water. The whole area defies description, and was one of the highlights of the trip.
      From there we went a little further to a place called Rainbow Vista, which offered an intriguing perspective: more huge red rocks in the foreground, but contrasting sharply with the verdant valley and higher mountains beyond. It was visually spectacular.
      We returned to the main road and stopped a final time at a place called the Beehives, which not only offered a similar overlook, but also a view of the rainbow promised in the title of the previous stop. By then we were getting pretty tired of spectacular scenery and big red rocks, so we hopped into the van and headed back into town for our next adventure: teppanyaki.

      We piled out at a Japanese beast row called Fukuda, met up with Carlo, and took up positions on the perimeter of a stainless steel grill. Not long after our order was taken, a Japanese chef showed up and starting in on his theatrics, flipping knives and spatulas and eggs and keeping up a lively banter as he began to prepare our food right before our eyes: shrimp, lo mein, fried rice, assorted veggies and meat, and a flaming tower of onions. The meal was very good, and very well presented, even if the chef did drop one knife and a plastic squeeze bottle of oil. I've always been skeptical of Japanese food, but the teppanyaki was a great show and an enjoyable meal.
      When dinner was over, half the group went straight home, and the rest of us went to the airport to pick up Jon, our final arrival. We snagged him, then made a grocery run before getting back to the house. Everyone was tired, and a bit frustrated when we couldn't figure out how to get the hot tub's heat to activate. After greetings were exchanged, we all retired.

Saturday, 24 March 2007

      Once again I was up at 6:30am Saturday. Jon and Liam managed to break one of the house's pottery cups by cooperating too hard. Then we kicked around and played a little pool while waiting for Liam to make a run to Office Depot to pick up an easel pad.
      When he returned, Daf presented us with some amazing gifts he had prepared: several decks of custom Las Vegas Summit playing cards, and a whole case full of ceramic poker chips bearing the DargonZine logo. That was quite an impressive item!
      At the same time, Liam mentioned two books to us. The first was a textbook called “Writing Fiction” by Janet Burroway, and Liam read to us a section about the importance of allowing yourself to write garbage first drafts. The other was the Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones, which is written like a tour guide but makes scathing fun of all the stock fantasy cliches like stew, ale, grand viziers, and so forth.
      With that out of the way, we got into the working sessions, which began with Liam facilitating a brainstorming session on where story ideas come from. The list included:

• My philosophical ideas or inner demons
• My ideas for inventions
• My dreams or daydreams, especially the surreal ones
• External requirements/expectations/motivators
• Doing research, including maps (Dargon or otherwise)
• Start writing about a character and just see where it goes
• Take a visual impression and work it into a story
• Rewrite/alter/extend/follow up on someone else's story
• Getting struck by an idea (character, line, scene)
• A story in an article/book/radio/television/song

      Next I took the floor for the only thing I had to present this year: a talk about how to take a simple basic plot and add complication upon complication until it becomes almost baroque in its ornateness, using the scriptwriting of Buckaroo Banzai as an example. It was a quick session, but hopefully people left with an appreciation of how little work it can be to make a fast-paced story if you pare everything down to just plot.
      After that, Dafydd and Liam talked a little bit about how the Doravin arc had changed under their current plan. I'm glad to see it moving forward, and even if it's not going in the original direction Daf intended for it, it's still a great addition to the milieu.
      By this time it was noon, so we broke for sandwiches. Carlo arrived in the middle, and walked us through some of the graphics work he's been doing, including revised maps.
      And the final item of the day was to go around and talk about the stories we'd each written in response to a writing challenge Dafydd had posted to the list several weeks earlier. My own story was originally written to fulfill the need for a “Dargon walking tour”, as expressed at our previous writers' Summit.

      That left us the balance of the day to go exploring, and Dafydd drove us west of the city to Mount Charleston, at 11,918 feet the eighth highest peak in Nevada. We stopped briefly at the visitor's center, where several people picked up sweatshirts, since they were unprepared for the cold air around 9000 feet. Between Las Vegas' dryness and the altitude, Jim's wife Naomi even suffered a couple inconvenient nosebleeds.
      From there, we drove a few miles to a short trail called Robbers' Roost. This footpath went up into the aromatic conifers that were the only real trees I saw in Nevada, and we were quickly trudging through wet snow among the boulders and pinecones. The mountain goats among us quickly shed followers, until it was just me, Jon, Liam, and his wife, having gone about as far as we could go without climbing gear. As we stood there, I looked up and noticed carabiners on hangers attached to an immense overhang above us, as Dafydd and Jim caught up.
      After a few minutes' rest, we tromped back down to the van, and rode on to the Desert View Overlook. Here we milled around a bit before piling back in the van for the ride back into town.
      The descent was interesting, and made moreso by the van's overheating brakes causing it to vibrate badly until Daf set the van into low gear. But eventually we got back to town, safe and sound.
      Having given up on trying to meet the (fondue) Melting Pot's dress code, our dinner stop was at a place called Thai Spice, which served passable Asian, including my Szechuan chicken. The highlight of the meal was the Summit toast, which was given by Liam and Jon, each alternating words in a hilarious impromptu improv routine. I tried to capture it on my camera phone, but it failed to record the audio, as I'd feared.
      We returned to the house at 8pm, where we again split into two groups. The two married couples -- Jim and Naomi, Liam and MaryEllen -- drove up to the Strip and toured the Paris hotel and casino. Liam came back and validated my impression that the Strip really wasn't worth my time, as I wouldn't have enjoyed it, although Jim did get some wonderful pictures of the Strip at night.
      Meanwhile, Dafydd, Jon, and I hung out in the hot tub, since we'd been told how to operate the thing earlier in the day. I took great pleasure in lounging in a hot tub while eating Haagen-Dazs and some of my $230 bottle Port Ellen.
      We finished the day with another game of Carcassonne, then crashed.

Sunday, 25 March 2007

      Sunday's working session began pretty promptly at 9am, with Jon's review of our financials, followed by voting for officers. One of the votes we took changed the Editor position so that it is appointed by the board, rather than a lifelong position. Another change was Dafydd's election as Vice President, which is a largely titular office, but it was still a great thing to see.
      Liam then led us through a discussion of the tasks that need to be performed in order to consider the DPWW ready. The DPWW -- Dargon Project Writers' Workshop -- was dreamt up last year to give new writers a way to get peer review of non-Dargon works as a way of ramping up on DargonZine and our processes. Five things came out of the discussion: instructions for mentors and mentees, a closer partnership with Carlo's Arcane Twilight, a reorganization of the writers' section of our web site, moving the DPWW mailing list to dargonzine.org, and a document defining the process for responding to new writer signup requests.
      We also were led through a brainstorming exercise on what the word “aspiring” means in our mission statement, since there'd been a debate on the list about its relevance. We came up with the following attributes of an “aspiring writer”:

• Desires to (and does) write and improve, and explore the craft
• Shares their writing with either the public or other writers
• Values critiques, is willing to learn
• Sees their work as not perfect yet

      We ended the working sessions by once again going through our Summit challenge stories, deciding on points where our stories could refer to one another. After taking some time to hash that out, the writers went off to work on their stories, while I kinda milled around a bit.
      We took something like two hours to figure out who wanted what kind of pizza, then trying to find a place to order from, then finding the right franchise to deliver to our area, then waiting for the pizza to show up. It finally did, and we scarfed it down in no time at all.
      After lunch I took a quick group photo, then we played another game of Carcassonne before we finally got the group together for a trip over to South Point, the nearest big casino. After four days, I was finally getting the opportunity to put some money on the tables at Las Vegas!
      We wandered around for a bit, with Dafydd, Liam, and Jon following me to the blackjack pit. I walked around the tables, looking at who was dealing shoe versus hand, who was winning and who was losing, which dealers were talkative, how fast each dealer was operating, where the players were, and the rules set. The rules weren't great: no surrender, and the dealer hit soft 17. As I walked around, Liam asked me what I was doing, and I explained the idea behind scoping the pit out a little before sitting down. Jon commented that I gambled like I write (so cautiously that it never happened).
      There was one table that we watched for a few minutes. The dealer seemed pleasant, and there were four open seats, since there were three people playing. But as we watched, hand after hand the dealer smashed the players, dealing himself improbable 21s and other outs. It was a massacre, so we moved on. A few minutes later, Liam pointed out to me that the table was now empty: the dealer had busted all three players and driven them off.
      What happened next would be termed a learning experience. Liam seemed eager to start playing, so he said he was going to go over to that very table and sit down. I was incredulous, and said as much, reminding him of the bloodbath he'd just witnessed. But he wasn't dissuaded, and Jon and Daf tagged along, so against my better judgment I sat down, as well, laying out a $500 buy-in and telling Jon that “No, I don't gamble like I write”.
      As I predicted, the dealer hammered us. I ate through my buy-in, despite playing solid basic strategy, and put another $500 on the table. From there, things were up and down a bit. Jon managed to get $100 clear and left for the roulette wheel. Daf had purchased a basic strategy card, but turned it over to Liam, who seemed to need it more. He soon joined Jon, with $50 in his pocket. Liam was a different story. Despite having the card on the table in front of him, he made a number of plays that contradicted basic strategy, which jarred my nerves. He blew through his ante, and I was left alone at the table for a while.
      Being so far down, I was in for a long, difficult climb back to even, but I didn't have the time, because we only had about 45 minutes before we had to meet to drive Rena to the airport. So I played it out as long as I could, and left the table still $265 in the hole. Technically, that's not bad, given that I was down about $700 at one point, but it's not what I could have done, given more time and a better table.
      So we gathered up in the parking lot, meeting up with our other group, who had gone bowling in the meantime. We drove through the Strip on the way to the airport, then came right back to the casino, where after some deliberation we backed our way into the inevitable Vegas buffet. It was about what you'd expect -- average food at average prices -- but it was okay to have a normal meal for a change, and the all-you-can-eat soft-serve was okay, too.
      From there, I made my way back to the blackjack table, experiencing yet another distinctly odd experience. I found a happy table and bought in for another $500, and settled in for a good long run. But within half an hour, the guys came by and told me they were done, and Daf was probably going to drive them home at some point. Okay, I said, and continued playing. I'd found a good table and was making hay.
      About 20 minutes later, they called from the house. They had immediately left, and had called to let me know that I should call them whenever I wanted a ride home.
      Well, as it was, I was pretty close to finishing, or at least taking a break. I was about $450 to the good, and I automatically step away from the table when I'm up $500. But I wasn't quite there yet, and it would have pissed Daf off to have to turn around and pick me up after just bringing the others home. So I told them I'd continue playing for a while and call when I was done. The night was still young; it wasn't even 9pm yet!
      So I continued playing, and you can imagine how things went from there: it was a mixed bag, but mostly downward. They called me again around 10pm, checking in just before they started a game of Carcassonne, but I decided to bail. I'd been struggling to keep ahead of the game, and the longer you play, the lower your chance is of winning. So I stood up, leaving the table with $100 more than I arrived with, for a net loss of $165. That's not too bad, considering how the evening started, but it’s also not the $250 gain that was near my maximum gain, either.
      Daf graciously picked me up, and when we got back to the house I started sorting and entering my 300 bills into Where's George, much to the amusement of my companions. At the cage, I'd picked up two straps of ones and $400 in fives, in addition to a fistful of Bens and some spare bills, and managed to give the casino about a dozen marked Grants and about the same number of Bens. Hopefully those'll go interesting places and garner interesting hits, since I've never had a hit on a bill larger than a $20. And now I've got about two months' worth of cash to distribute that was all entered in Las Vegas!
      After I finished all that, we played a couple games of Carcassonne while the others gradually nodded off. Jon and I decided we were going to stay up all night, since we had to leave the house at 5am to catch Jon’s 7am flight. Ugh. Ironically, my last all-nighter was a couple years ago, driving down to Philly and back for Jon's wedding.
      But 5am finally came, and we woke Liam up to drive us over to the airport. We got through ticketing, but security... Well, let's say that the line to go through security was five people wide and about 500 feet long. It was obscene. Fortunately, they were moving people through pretty well, and my flight wasn't until 8:30am. After eventually getting through security, I went to Jon's gate and saw him off, then hung out at my gate until we boarded. Thank you Las Vegas for being the only airport I've been to that had free wireless Internet!

      And that was it for my first trip ever to Las Vegas. The Strip really didn't seem like my cup of tea, and the rest of the town was basically just 1200 square miles of strip malls. And it definitely didn’t come close to living up to its “sin city” reputation at all.
      But the food was interesting, the accommodations were absolutely unmatched, and the landscape and outdoors activities were surprisingly breathtaking. Although I'd known Las Vegas was in the middle of a desert, I hadn't expected it to be surrounded by huge mountains, which were absolutely stunning.
      I'd expected it to be arid, but I was surprised by how that manifested itself. Specifically, my nose was constantly dried out and clogged, and the cuticles on my fingers painfully cracked and peeled. Not exactly the symptoms I'd expected!
      The bike ride was, of course, an absolute pleasure, and I'm very glad I took the time to enjoy that. I enjoyed the whole trip as a photographic opportunity, although I feel like I could have done better if I’d devoted more time and better composed my shots. And, of course, the gambling... Well, I'm pleased that we fit it in, even if I'm not entirely happy with the net result.
      The working sessions were reasonably productive, and the company was good, although I'm always disappointed when we have no new writers at the Summit. As for giving up control of DargonZine, every day convinces me more and more that I need to give up all responsibility and any sense of ownership I still have in it, because it will never be what I dreamed it would. But I still care about the people, and enjoy our annual get-togethers a great deal.
      And it hardly feels like a week has gone by. With the notable exception of our twelve days in Scotland, the Summit always feels too short, and I dread the beginning of the goodbyes and the unavoidable return to the working world. But the Summit itself... that was a wonderful experience, and I'm glad to have my fellow writers as friends to share these wonderful memories with.

So it’s been a couple weeks since the 2006 Dargon Writers’ Summit, which this year took place in Cincinnati. What follows is a highly-hacked up version of the summary I posted to our discussion list.

Typically, I’d say this posting would only be of interest to me, but you might be interested to know that this year I went into the Summit with the intention of resigning most of my responsibilities.

Having run this writing group since 1984 and long having considered it one of the most important activities in my life, my departure represents a major, possibly shocking development. So you might want to read about that. But I won’t get into the details of it until near the end of this missive.

So here’s the story. Note that the original email this is based on is addressed to the writers themselves. The original email text is indented, with comments outdented.

Last Wednesday afternoon Daf, Rena, and I arrived at Liam’s and went to dinner at Longhorn Steakhouse. Rena made her way to her hotel, while the rest of us played a quick game of “You Have Been Sentenced”, an educational sentence-building game designed for a bit younger audience, before crashing throughout Liam’s many guest bedrooms.
 
Thursday the four of us drove a couple hours into the Kentucky Hills. Daf and Rena went to Natural Bridge State Park, where they took a chairlift up to (or perhaps only down from?) the top of a ridge and hiked across the massive stone bridge and around the area. Meanwhile, Liam and I went to nearby Red River Gorge for a 6-mile hike along one ridge, then down into a valley and up another. It was very steamy, hot work, and we were glad to get back to house, exhusted, for a shower before meeting up with Jim and snagging Jon at the airport to complete our complement of six for this year’s Summit. Sadly, there were no new writers joining us this year.

Ironically, we drove through Lexington KY. The only time I’ve been there before was for the 1991 VM Workshop. I returned from that trip to find my wife moving out prior to our eventual divorce, so the area, though very pretty, has very mixed emotions associated with it.

The hike was really spectacular, and I enjoyed it a lot. It was just right: enough exertion so that you knew you’d had a workout, but not so much that we were limping home in abject pain. I was impressed with Kentucky when I was down there in 1991, and came away just as impressed this time.

I was disappointed with the meager turnout of just five other writers, but one can’t expect much, given our rapidly-dwindling numbers. It was definitely nothing like Austin, just three years ago, when we had a dozen. The chronic absence of any new (unpublished) writers was another major irritant for me.

Supper was at Knotty Pine on the Bayou, a nice but rustic Cajun place near Liam’s. Pretty good stuff. Returning to the house, we had a bit of a scotch tasting, mostly thanks to Daf’s plunder from his 2005 Scotland trip, then proceeded with a game of Summit favorite Settlers of Catan before crashage.

I pretty much confirmed my preference for Talisker as a full-bodied, smoky whisky. Nothing else came close.

Friday a few people slept in, while the rest of us got a very substantial breakfast at a place called First Watch. Then it was back to the house for the Summit working sessions. Friday’s sessions were designed to be all focused on writing (as opposed to project administration stuff).

Jon, our impulsive guy, was twice warned not to order a huge plate of pancakes, but decided to do it anyways. He probably ate about 2/3rds of what he received.

The thinking behind separating project business and writing was to do the writing-related stuff before the surprise announcement of my scaling back my involvement, which would be an immense distraction. I also wanted to set the zine up to succeed as best I could, and that seemed to suggest making as much progress on the writing stuff as possible before throwing the spanner into the works.

I opened the ceremonies by sharing a bit of a joke: a map of Baranur where all the place names had been replaced by anagrams. For example, Monrodya had been rechristened “Many Odor” and Welspeare was now “Ale Spewer” and Leftwich became “Elfwitch”.
 
Next up was Liam with a very informative talk about point of view. He made the important distinction (which I hope we’ll observe henceforth) between POV (first person, second person, third person; omniscient vs. limited, etc) and perspective (which character’s head you’re occupying). Then he went on to talk about advantages and disadvantages of each, and rules for their use. Great stuff!
 
Next, Jim—in his usual animated fashion—gave a great talk about medieval ships and shipping. He described their main uses— transportation, fishing, and warfare—the various types of ships, their methods of propulsion, and what life was like on board. Again, great stuff!

The whole idea of “white papers”, where a writer goes off and does some research and then reports back to the group at the Summit, is fairly recent, but has always worked out very well.

While Liam stepped out to get out lunch, I led the group through an interesting writing exercise called “sausage sentences”. The idea was to write an entire story where the last letter of one word was the first letter of the next, “linking” them together. It was fun, but rough! Adverbs are not your friends! And you can just forget about fancy verb tenses and even pronouns! In the end, some pretty interesting works were crafted, including the ever-memorable “gnarly yellow walnuts”.
 
Finally, Liam shared the results of his and Rena’s research into Dargon’s money systems and monetary values. The basic message was that our intention to make the money systems confusing for the characters in Dargon had simultaneously confused the heck out of our writers, as well! The research indicates that although there were a few notable outliers, people have stayed mostly within the ballpark of rational values, and a few specific tweaks might clarify things nicely for the writers. Liam will do one more iteration and present a summary document to the group which will hopefully set the level for monetary values and sexchange rates so you can use them without fear.
 
With the working sessions over, we headed over into Ohio for the first time. We tromped through the Cincinnati Art Museum, which had a fascinating show of dozens of Rembrandt van Rijn etchings; sadly, no photos allowed. Half the group stayed to plunder the art museum while several others went to the Krohn Conservatory’s Australian butterfly show. Later, we met up and made our way to Mt. Adams, a trendy sightseeing district in Cincy. After a bit of wandering and admiring the views of the city, we had a fine supper at Teak, a Thai place.

The butterfly exhibit was nowhere near as impressive as my expectation had been, and the most beautiful example—this iridescent blue species -- adamantly refused to keep its wings open when being photographed. But it was better than wandering around the art museum for two hours…

The Thai food was pretty good. I had cashew chicken, which was probably second only to that at Boston’s King & I.

Returning home, we made good use of Liam’s pool table while putting some brass tacks down in the Doravin story arc. Things are coming together there, especially in the first section of the arc, which will get the ball rolling. A few of us capped the evening off with another round of Settlers, again running late into the night.

I had really hoped we’d make a lot more progress on the Doravin arc, but it wasn’t to be. I think it’ll get off the ground, but I’m not sure how much momentum it really has.

That brings us to Saturday. Liam, despite his bleary-eyed sleep deprivation, got up and got everyone waffled before the working sessions, which in turn focused on the project, what we’re doing, how it runs, and so forth (as opposed to writing).
 
I went through the results of the Web survey from last month, which I’ll publish shortly. The statements that our writers agree with most are that the quality of writing in DZ is very high, that writers feel empowered to run with ideas for the project, that participating has been fun, and that DZ is a great social group. But we don’t feel that we do a good job achieving our goals, nor that the zine could continue in my absence, or that we could rely on our fellow writers to do what they promise. This last one was a big “ah-ha!”, and is a huge integrity issue that stands in the way of our getting anything done, and is something that frustrates the heck out of me, personally.

Basically, this was a 20-question survey wherein I probed how people felt about the project, and about how we’ve done against the goals I’ve always had for it. The results are disappointing in places, and in other places contradict my own beliefs about where we’re at. At any rate, it was educational.

That was, of course, the prelude to my resignation discussion. I started out with some level-setting, including what I get out of running DargonZine and the accomplishments I’m most proud of, before segueing into the numerous things that have driven me apeshit.

Next came “The Discussion”, and I’m as unsure how to talk about it here as I was at the Summit. I guess the short version is that I’m burned out. I have a bunch of specific goals I’ve always wanted the group to achieve, and we haven’t achieved them under my leadership. What’s worse, I don’t think we ever will achieve them under my leadership.
 
I want to actually list what those goals are, so that you can understand where I’m coming from. They may differ from your goals, or your idea of the project’s goals. My personal goals include: making DZ a supportive and nonthreatening and fun environment; helping writers improve their craft; creating a group that values new writers as our most precious asset, whatever their writing level; building a close-knit community; allowing people to form meaningful friendships; building something that people care about and feel they own; building something people will actively contribute to and work to build up; ensuring the project’s survival; advancing my own writing; helping people grow in other ways, like leadership, initiative, and maturity; and providing meaning for my life by helping other people.

Basically, I went through each goal in detail, describing the failures I’ve seen: how we are a closed group and don’t value our new writers, our 2% success rate over the past five years at getting new writers into print, our chronic inability to achieve our goals, and how no one seems to feel any ownership in the zine or willingness to help make it work.

Beyond my concern about how we’re doing against my personal goals, keeping this group moving forward is an immense amount of work, and I’ve exceeded my ability to do that, to the point that I’ve gotten discouraged, resentful, and irritable. It’s no longer fun, and my irritability increases the amount of conflict on the list. As much as I love DZ and as much as it means to me to be its leader, there’s no question in my mind that I have to step out of that leadership role. And I shared that with the people at the Summit, over the course of an emotional (and far too lengthy) diatribe.

For about the past three years, I’ve gone through periods where I considered quitting. Usually I decide to hang on, because I thought things might get better, but now I feel like I have to admit that they aren’t going to get better under my leadership.

I can’t really say much about what it felt like to tell this to these people who have depended on me to run the project since its inception. It was hard. It was a relief. It was painful. It was emotional. I was numb. Putting it all out there, being willing to walk away from my life’s work… Well, it’s a watershed point. It had been coming for a long time, and I had to get through it. Something had to change, and that change was long overdue.

I’m really not in a position where I can or should be the decisionmaker for the zine anymore, so I left it up to the group what they wanted to do next. The cool thing is that I think they responded well to this immense challenge that—for most of them —came out of the blue.

Although I tend to remember the many times the writers have disappointed me by blowing deadlines, dropping the ball, and conveniently forgetting things they had promised, I have to repeat that I was very impressed by how the group responded. They were mature and practical, and accepted my statement of the problem and my inability to continue as leader without question. Then they got into solution mode and came up with some great ideas that I hadn’t foreseen.

So we listed all the things I do and broke them down into four roles: editor, leader, techie, and marketing (the fifth role of mentor having already been forked off as a separate position that Jim presently occupies). Then we looked at what could be reassigned. The majority of the stress in my job comes from being leader/visionary and ultimate decisionmaker, so we decided to take that role off my hands. The ultimate project leader is now Liam Donahue, and he will share that role to some degree with Jon Evans, and I’ll be involved to a much lesser degree, in an advisory capacity. I will continue to perform the editor job (putting out issues), with Liam as the Assistant Editor backup. Dafydd has agreed to share the work load of the techie role, and he and I will work together over time so that he is able to maintain the web site and other technical stuff just as well as I. The marketing role remains a questionmark, but Jon and I have both been talking to former DZ writer Rhonda Gomez, and we believe she’ll be willing to take on some of those duties.

It was kind of a revelation to me that most of my stress comes from the visionary role. Of course, that role also includes arbiter of conflict and ultimate decisionmaker, which makes that person a lightning rod for conflict.

Furthermore, that person is also charged with setting the group’s goals and ensuring that we achieve them, and our constant failure to achieve our goals has left me utterly demoralized.

On top of that, over the past twelve years I’ve tried just about everything I can think of to inspire the group and move the group forward. The perpetual lack of success tells me that my methods haven’t worked, and—since I lack any more ideas about how to motivate people -- it’s time to turn the reins over to someone with more fresh ideas and evergy to try and make them happen.

So let me ask you to pay attention to and work with Liam and Jon. They’re both experienced managers and able leaders and know the project inside and out, and I have absolutely every confidence in their wisdom. The project and where it goes from here is largely theirs to determine. As for me, I’ll remain around. I hope that I’ll be able to contribute more writing in the future and maybe do some mentoring, but we’ll see about that. I’m going to have to spend some time transitioning duties and then see how my attitude responds to this change. However, I’m honestly pretty confident that this change is best for me, for the zine, and for you. I’m excited to see what Liam and Jon come up with.

The interesting thing is that their solution of farming out responsibilities leaves me with the option of staying with the project -- even in an editorial role—while drastically reducing my responsibilities. I think that worked out rather nicely, and it gives me the opportunity to do two of the things that mean the most to me— mentoring and doing my own writing—which I haven’t had the time to do in years.

One of my major harping points has been how poorly we have served our new writers. The Summitteers took up that challenge and completely revised the mentoring system in a way that—to our surprise—received universal support. I’ll leave the details of it to Jim, but the basic idea is to make it easier for new writers to get involved with DZ by giving them the ability to share their existing and new non-Dargon works, then some reduced requirements for getting their first full Dargon stories printed. New writers can start anywhere along a whole continuum of participation levels, with increasing rewards being given for increasingly integrated stories. Everyone thought the idea had a ton of merit, and Jim will be filling you in with more details shortly, but everyone was really excited by the idea. We are even planning to get back in touch with a number of former writers who never got printed, in hopes that some of them may want to try this new way of getting up to speed with the zine.

This was something of a surprise to me. It’s been a while since anyone applied much creative thinking to the project, so I’ll be curious to see how this dramatically new direction plays out. But clearly, if we don’t solve the new writer ramp-up problem immediately, the zine is dead.

After all that painful stuff, Jon took the floor to talk about our financial state and nonprofit status, then gave his presentation on how to manage a project. That might sound like it doesn’t apply to you, but everyone here is involved in little projects, and we have always sucked at getting things done. Several writers have listed these non-writing projects as things that frustrated them to the point of quitting. Jon’s project management techniques, if applied, are absolutely guaranteed to help. The information was straightforward and should help people follow through, so that— unlike today—we can once again feel confident that we can rely on people to actually do what they say they will do.

This reliability bit is a major thorn, and something that really discourages new writers, who might sign up for a task, full of enthusiasm, only to have it unceremoniously dropped in their lap by a veteran. And I’ve always thought this was the most basic form of integrity, so it’s always driven me apeshit whenever this happens in “my” organization.

And yes, these things driving me apeshit is definitely a theme here… Has been for over a decade.

All these sessions will have results placed in the Document Library shortly, as soon as I can collect them from the presenters. I strongly encourage you to check them out, because they were really great presentations that I think will help us a great deal.
 
After spending most of the day on all that heavy stuff, we were eager to have some fun. We moved our dinner reservation up and had champagne (thanks to Jon) and an early dinner at Brio, an Italian place at Newport on the Levee, a touristy shopping area. From there, we went through the Newport Aquarium, which had some really interesting stuff: sharks, avians, otters, gators, and so forth. Afterward we stopped for ice cream at Graetor’s, a Cincinnati original, before heading home. Dafydd showed us his pictures from his trips to Hawaii, Australia, and Scotland, but people were dropping hard, and we went to bed without even managing a single game of Settlers! We’re clearly not as young as we used to was.

The Summit is always a big photographic opportunity, and I definitely plunged in with my new camera. The aquarium was both a particular showcase and a major challenge, since the ambient lighting was kept very low so you could see through the glass. There’ll be some photos posted in short order, and you can also check out this year’s Summit page for both photos and a writeup.

Sunday was departure day, and with no working sessions, people slept in and took good long showers. We got the group photo done and cleaned up the house, then managed a quick game of Settlers before Rena and Jon left for the airport. The rest of us had a quick and enjoyable game of the related Seafarers of Catan before we, too, had to make our way to the airport. Tired good-byes were said, and the journey back home via the evil that is O’Hare was undertaken, carrying with us the precious memories of another wonderful encounter with our longtime friends and fellow writers.

So I got home from the Summit late Sunday night; my flight out of O’Hare had been delayed, and I didn’t get home until after midnight. So that wasn’t a restful night. I’d taken Monday off, but Monday night one of my former writers, Rhonda, was arriving in town for her daughter’s graduation, and wanted to visit. Unfortunately, her flight arrived at 10:15pm, and we were up until about 1:30, talking.

Less than a week later, Janine, another former writer, was in town for a week-long conference. We had dinner together several times, and talked well into the evening. Again, more sleep deprivation!

So June has been an interesting month, as far as my contact with my writers goes. And sleep deprivation like crazy, but at least it’s been in the service of socializing with people I care about, which is a pleasant change.