2002 News

December 28, 2002

From the Our Programmers Have Entirely Too Much Free Time and Too Little Supervision department: we bring you Eris Discordia's Magick 5 Ball. An genuine, authentic reproduction of a copy of a fifth-century relic of the deservedly suppressed cult of Discordians, this mystic object can used to answer your most vexing questions. If you don't have any most vexing questions, you can always use it to prop open the access portal on your computer.

December 1, 2002

Just a quick update. Seeing as no one has kevetched about the search feature so far, it has also been added to the Wicca 201: Mentoring Elders part of the site.

October 5, 2002

Well, it's been a long hard struggle, but version 1.0 of our search engine is finally on our site. Oo…Oo…the search button above works! Until we get it thoroughly tested and debugged though, it will only be available from the home page. (Just 'cause you're paranoid, don't mean your enemies ain't out to kill ya!) If you experience problems with it, just send an e-mail to our web-master with the problem, which version browser and which version operating system you're using.

For those with aspirations towards becoming a professional writer, our editor has a few choice words about those dreaded Rejection slips you will be receiving.

September 14, 2002

Yee-Haa! The site conversion is finally finished. Now we can concentrate on filling in all those annoying contents forthcoming posted throughout the site.

Also, another exciting installment of CJ Stone: Colossus Unchained… or was it unhinged? I forget. Anyway, Check out—How Was Your Day?

August 17, 2002

This seems to be the month for e-mail doofidity.

First, our ISP somehow managed to "lose" the information in our alias file. (That's the file that says, "When you get e-mail at this address, send it on to the appropriate person.") So, for about a week, none of our e-mail got forwarded. I should have figured something was wrong after two, completely spam-free days!

And second, the spam spiders have lifted all the e-mail addresses from our site, and are now sending out spam with our email addresses forged in the "From:" part of the header. This is especially troubling as some of the spammers are sending out e-mail, with our addresses forged on them, with links to pornagraphic sites.

If you receive one of these e-mails, with an address from stonedragonpress.com, please be informed that we did not send, and are in no way associated with the unscrupulous people who sent it!

To counteract this disturbing development, Stone Dragon Press is removing all direct references to e-mail addresses, and instead is using an indirect reference to a location in a secure database. This will mean that some of the older browsers may not be able to use the e-mail links on our pages. If your browser is one of these, you can still manually enter the e-mail link on our contact page to send us an e-mail. We apologize for the inconvenience, but the spammers have left us no other choice.

July 25, 2002

Another new rant from Evil Incarnate: the publisher—Today, I Threw Your Manuscript Away. If your initials are SSL and you live in NY, this is for you specifically, but it is also for everyone who wants to submit.

May 25, 2002

Added a new rant—Do Your Homework

The work proceeds apace. We are finishing up the button conversion and will soon concentrate on filling in all those content forthcoming issues.

May 22, 2002

We're starting to get things back into gear here. Almost all of our authors choose to stick it out with us, while we got this printing mess straightened out. I'm gratified they continue to support a movement towards printing on demand. This helps move us all towards a future where no book need ever be "out of print."

Maggie Rules Change We can now take much smaller books, so the word count for the Maggie (the Most Dangerous Feminist Book in Speculative Fiction Contest) has dropped to 15,000 words. We are also accepting electronic submissions with permission. Be sure to get permission before emailing your submission.

February 11, 2002

In an effort to improve useability, we've gone to small graphic buttons. They help make navigation more intuitive and will not appreciably increase your load times. As always, please bear with us as we continue to fine tune the site for your convience.

February 3, 2002

As an experiment, we've added something new: E-Books. The contents of these books are subject to frequent revisions as reseach on their subjects continues. Rather than print frequent revisions, these books are best distributed through the internet, where thay can be instantly updated to reflect the latest research findings.

First up—Wicca 201: Mentoring Elders.

January 19, 2002

Things at Stone Dragon have ground to a halt, probably from the interaction between my own irascibility and the gene that makes people want to become printers. At the core, we have not been able to find a printer since May, 2001. That makes it very hard to be a publisher, so we are changing some things.

First, we are greatly narrowing the print books we are taking. In the past, our attitude was, "If it's professional quality, and there's nothing wrong with it, we'll take it." We believed there would be good word-of-mouth for any book that was pretty good, and that combining word-of-mouth with never-out-of-print was enough.

We were wrong. Word of mouth in the speffy print-reading community is not nearly as strong as we thought it was. That means books that are merely "good" and not "very good" or "great" can't get the time of day. So, good-bye to the merely good.

We have also been put in the position of starting up with a new printer three times. We have incurred costs each time we did this. Books of lesser quality don't sell enough to support this kind of economic trouble, and since we anticipate going through this once about every 18 months, we must field books that can carry that kind of freight.

Second, my first love is editing and working with authors on their work. It's one reason I started this whole thing. Unfortunately, it has cut me off from working with anyone we reject because unscrupulous people often pose as publishers who say, "Yes, we want your book, but it needs some work, which you will have to pay for," and who then don't do the job properly and who don't actually publish the book. So, by narrowing what we do take and by making our rejections clear, I may be able to do more of what I love.

Finally, there is a field I also feel strongly about that needs more attention than print, and that's comics. If you think writers in the USA are getting a rotten deal, the thin end of the wedge, try taking a look at what goes on in comics these days. You'll thank the gods for their many blessings and for making you an writer instead of a comics creator.

So, print book folk: we are narrowing the field of what we take. It has to really ring the bell here at Stone Dragon before we'll take it. For those of you writing vampire novels, please read Dracula before you write much more. For those of you submitting werewolf stories, please do read a broad sampling of stories between 1930 and 1990, and be sure to look for stories in Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. In general, send us something dangerous, something challenging, something less "me-too" and more "me-ow!"

We're also sticking with short-story collections because I actually like short fiction better than long fiction.

For comics folk: we are rebuilding the infrastructure after our bad beat. We are looking forward to your submissions.