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Outposts of Beyond

Up a Level

Last Thursday, I got a nice surprise delivered to my house: my contributor's copy of Outposts of Beyond[1]. I knew that my article on resonance[2] was accepted, but I forgot to ask which issue it was going to show up. Seeing it in print answered that question and made my day.

1: http://store.albanlake.com/product/outposts-of-beyond-january-2015/

2: https://fedran.com/resonance/

What floored me was seeing my name on the front cover. That was completely unexpected and also made my day.

Journals of Fedran

I original wrote the article to introduce the concept of resonance in the Journals of Fedran[3]. Even though I had just posted it on the website (admittedly in unedited form), the editor of the magazine read it and thought it was a good pseudo non-fiction article for fantasy writers.

3: https://journals.fedran.com/

The non-fiction bits of Journals have been hit or miss with readers. According to one, most of them are a bit on the dry side. Which makes sense since they are also pseudo non-fiction written in a fictional world. Writing that type of piece is a much different beast than fiction, even when you take into account the differing writing styles within Journals.

I did take the article down for a few months to honor the contract. When it comes back up, it will have a “previously published” comment.

Creative Commons

One aspect about releasing it under Creative Commons[4] is that I wasn't expecting to ever make money from it. It was a risk from the beginning but having a magazine pick it up from the unedited version, clean it up, and then publish it was a nice surprise too. It also meant that I made some money from something that I never expected to make a penny (but I was still planning on paying to get it edited).

4: http://creativecommons.org/

Early Releases

While I started issue #1, I'm not going to post it on the site until I get both #0 and #1 edited. Part of the reason I did it was because I wanted to create the site and I was proud of what I did. I also thought it would only be a month or so before things settled down, but that was jumping the gun.

I'll get better at this, but in the end, I'm still humbled that someone liked it enough to buy it and then put it on the front cover.