Well
here it is, time to begin another year of Aphelion. Can you believe it?
We're now 21 years old. My, how time flies.
We had a great time looking back at our history over the past year.
Highlights from our past issues as well as new work by some of the best
writers around. Thanks to you readers, we were voted into the Top Ten
E-Zines list in the Preditors & Editors Readers Poll once
again.
Thank you for your nomination, and your votes. Aphelion took 3rd for
fiction zine and
5th for poetry zine. Denny
Marshall's poem in in the September 2017
issue of Aphelion won for best
poem! Lots of other names familiar to
Aphelion readers and writers also scored big on the P&E Polls.
Sergio Palumbo took 9th for best sf
story in Rogue Planet, Michele Dutcher took 3rd for best e-zine editor
for Quantum Muse, John
Rose got 4th with the cover art for Cheapjack Pulp, and Denny
Marshall
got best cover art, too. I've been saying it for years, and I'll keep
on saying it: Aphelion attracts the most talented people on the planet.
And before anyone asks why I mentioned these people winning
for work
done in other zines-- Why shouldn't I? I'm proud of them, and their
work, and I'm happy they're being recognized by readers. They earned
those votes, those awards, and I'm happy that they hang out here as
well as submitting to and working with other sites.I say, give them all
a big round of applause!
Now, some of you may have noticed the website occasionally acting funny
when you tried to visit us during the past few months: slow load times
and whatnot. That should be fixed now. It turns out that we'd filled up
our alloted webspace storage on our ISP's servers. It took us 20 years,
but we finally filled up 2 gigs of space on the server we're on. We
were faced with a choice between deleting older files, or spending more
money. I chose to buy more space instead of deleting stuff. Aphelion
will now cost me an amount roughly equal to three hours pay for each
new issue. For 20 years it had cost me 90 minutes pay, but we've grown
bigger, so a change had to be made. But don't worry, I'm not going to
suddenly start charging you to get in here. I had to renew our domain
registration, too. That was a fair chunk of change, indeed. But fear
not. One of Aphelion's writers had an unexpected run of good luck a
year or so ago, and sent me a donation that'll keep Aphelion online for
the next 10 years. I didn't want to accept it--after all, I do have my
pride--but it was pointed out to me that our benefactor was simply
"paying it forward" for all the writers that we can help out in the
future. So I swallowed my pride and set that money aside for domain
renewals. Half of it has now been used, the rest will needed in 2023.
Another thing: Iain Muir has been working on updating the Author Index!
As some of you may have noticed, a few months ago I began updating the
Back Issues Index. I came up with a quick and dirty way to do that.
Iain added a few tweaks to my original layout, too. My method may not
be as pretty as one would like, but it does have the virtue of being
fairly easy to keep up with. Iain's Author Index is quite a sweet bit
of work, I must say. When he's completed it, it will have EVERYTHING!
Between the two of us, Aphelion's Archives will soon be up to date
Well, this hasn't been an editorial full of writing tips and helpful
hints, but then, only half my editorials are like that. Sometimes I
come up with tips and tricks, sometimes I just tell you what's going on
behind the scenes. This is a behind the scenes sort of month.
Well, this hasn't been an editorial full of writing tips and helpful
hints, but then, only half my editorials are like that. Sometimes I
come up with tips and tricks, sometimes I just tell you what's going on
behind the scenes. This is a behind the scenes sort of month.
In closing, I'm happy to announce that unless the world ends, I should
be able to retire from the factory in 5 more years. I ran the numbers
through a spreadsheet that I wrote up to calculate exactly when I could
afford to walk out of that factory for the final time. Barring
unforeseen disasters--or last-minute adjustments, my final day of
gainful employment should be February 7th of 2023. After that, I'll be
a pensioner, on a fixed income, and my hated alarm clock will only ever
be needed for special occasions forever afterwards. I'm literally
counting down the days. 1307 workdays left! Yes, I actually have a
calculator written to do the countdown for me, LOL! It's true that the
first year of my retirement will require some careful budgeting, but
during the second year all of my retirement funding will kick in and
things will become much easier.
All right, it's about time I shut up and let y'all get to reading the
first issue of Aphelion of 2018! Enjoy!
Dan
BOILERPLATE:
This is a little something I made early in the year. It's a little
advert for Aphelion. I wrote the music and added a slide show of past
cover art. It's short, and showcases a lot of the changes we've made
over the past two decades. Feel free to share it around.
Feel free to share this on Facebook, G+, blog posts, and other
webpages. But only with the permission of the page or group owners! Be
polite and considerate, always. You'll have to look up the embed code
for the ad on You Tube, sorry about that, but the code won't display
correctly here. But the Share Code for Facebook and G+ is:
https://youtu.be/23qfziyt9Jo
If you do the Facebook thing, feel free to join us
on the Aphelion page there. The link is Aphelion
Webzine.
As an aside, the Editorial Mafia and I have found Facebook to be very
useful. Given our different
locations and schedules, it's come in handy as a way to discuss
production details of new issues. Sometimes there are several of us
using Facebook at the same time, so it's almost like the old chat room
days back in the 1990s.
My first collection of Mare Inebrium spaceport bar short
stories was
published in February of 2015 by Dark Oak Press. It is available in
both Kindle
an Nook e-book formats, paperback, and hardback. I also have three
albums of instrumental music out through the Create Space
self-publishing website. If you like, you can click on the photo or the
link below to
find all the info you would need to purchase my book in your preferred
format, or an e-book of Flash of Aphelion, buy a CD of my music, or
listen to tracks off of the albums on my Bandcamp website. Enjoy!
