Finding your story when you're not in the Author Index

[Robert_Moriyama]

Although we hope to have a (mostly) up-to-date Author Index in the Archives Any Day Now, in the meantime, recent contributors may have a hard time finding their work once the issue in which it appears has slipped into the Past. The following provides some tips on How To Find Stuff (your work or other authors' work).

Stuff that appeared prior to 2003 or so (as of this writing) SHOULD appear in the "Author Index" listing generated when you click on the the name of the author. Honest.

Stuff that appeared from 2003 through to whatever the latest issue listed in the "Index of Back Issues" (click on "Index of Back Issues", near the top of the "Archives" page) can usually be found by entering something like
by Joe Blow
or
part of the story title (preferably a unique part, correctly spelled)
in the "Aphelion Back Issues Search" box (near the top of the "Back Issues of Aphelion" page), and hitting the "Search " button. Clicking on a link produced by this method brings up the Editorial for the issue in question; scroll down to the appropriate section ("Serials", "Shorts", "Poetry" or "Features" to find the link to the actual story (or novella or article or poem).

Stuff that appeared in an issue not yet included in the "Index of Back Issues" MAY be accessible if you do a good old-fashioned Google-type search for '"By [author name]" Aphelion'. You may need to 'repeat search with these results included' to get past links to Forum (lettercolumn) entries discussing the story...

Finally, if you know the category, year, and month for the piece you are looking for, you can try

"http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/[catego ... /[filename]"

where category = shorts, serials, features, or poetry
year = four-digit year (e.g., "2008")
month = two-digit month (e.g., "08")
and filename = [some string based on the title].html

The filename is probably the trickiest part. Sometimes every word in the title will be included (especially for shorter titles), but not always; some words may be capitalized; spaces may be omitted, or replaced with underscores ("_") or dashes ("-").

If NONE of these tricks works, an e-mail or Forum Private Message to the editor who accepted the piece will probably yield results.

Robert Moriyama
Aphelion Short Story Editor