The end was the beginning...
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.