Freelance Traveller

October 2014	Department	Article Title	Author
	From the Editor		Jeff Zeitlin
	Featured Article
	Active Measures	A Troubled Mind	Timothy Collinson
	Critics’ Corner	Mongoose Traveller Supplement 7: 1,001 Characters	Megan Robertson
		Other People’s Toys: Game Master’s Guide: How To Run Fast & Exciting Combats	Timothy Collinson
	Active Measures	Nostrum	Michael Brown
	Doing It My Way	QREBS in the Shopping Mall [Addendum]	Timothy Collinson
		Character Generation Rules: John Law III: Police Character Generation for MegaTraveller	David Jaques-Watson
	Raconteurs’ Rest	Funny Fish: Playing With Matches [Part 2]	Andrea Vallance
		Lost Diaries #1 - Lost in the Ziru Sirka	Rob Eaglestone

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The articles listed and linked above are also linked in their appropriate sections of our website.

From the Editor

I’ve been noticing a trend in Freelance Traveller. I’ve been getting fewer articles (and having to resort to reprinting older articles from the website), and generally from the same few authors. That’s a problem, in a couple of ways: first, it makes Freelance Traveller look like a closed clique, with new blood not permitted to enter. That’s simply not the reality. I’m willing to print good work from anyone. But the key is the word “good”. Some material that is submitted is almost fit for publication, and where I can clean it up (e.g., grammar and spelling) without ‘breaking’ obvious authorial intent, I do so. Where I can’t, I’ll try to reach out to the author for clarification or revision. That’s one place that I see problems: Often, I never get a response from the author, and, eventually, I try one last time and get a server bounce saying that the address is no longer valid. That’s sad; it means that a potential author has missed a chance to be published. I admit, sometimes I have to take part of the blame; if the original article is submitted, and not responded to at all for months or years, I can understand the author losing interest. That’s definitely a place where I have to say mea culpa; at the very least, I should acknowledge receipt immediately, and give a first reading within a month and comment back to the author. I’ll try to do better in the future—but I do need the new articles submitted to be able to do it.

Second, it makes it harder to maintain an approximately monthly schedule. That what I’ve been getting is generally inching up in length isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it means that fewer articles make a same-sized issue—but it would be so much better if issue size were also creeping upward. Unfortunately, though, it’s becoming a given that there will be one or more reprints in each issue, just to keep the issue size steady. That, in my opinion, is bad. It’s a sign that there isn’t the same level of support in the Traveller community for Freelance Traveller that there has been in the past. Which in turn makes me wonder why, and why, if it’s something I’m doing—or not doing—I haven’t been getting any feedback about it. Please, talk to me. Let me know how I can make Freelance Traveller better. Write, or draw, or review. Help me make Freelance Traveller into the Traveller magazine you want to see. I’m willing to work with you, but I can’t do it alone.