What's New?
flashquake will be on holiday hiatus from December 15th through December 30th, so that our editors can enjoy the holidays with their families. You may submit prose, poetry, and artwork for consideration, but we will not be processing or acknowledging submissions until after the 30th.
Attention, Artists! Our art director had a bad experience with his Internet service provider and in the process, they lost all of the artwork he'd saved for this issue. If you submitted artwork for this issue, PLEASE RESUBMIT.
I hope you'll join us in celebrating our Pushcart Prize nominations. The choices were tougher than ever this year, but I think you'll agree that the ones we've selected were worthy. As ever, you can send comments — or in this instance, congratulations — to any of our contributors via the "Make Contact" link at the bottom of each page.
This issue's guest editor Mary Estrada has agreed to join our crew on a permanent basis. Welcome Mary!
In other flashquake personnel news, founding editor Vanitha Sankaran will be taking a sabbatical for the next issue or two. Vanitha has worked as an editor and our contest director since flashquake began in 2001.
The guest editor for our Spring 2007 issue is Valerie Gaumont.
Valerie is an evil genius whose mission is to take over the world. Her latest efforts were thwarted when her flying monkey army discovered beer. Currently they are in Rehab because no one likes a drunk flying monkey. (Thank you for your cards and letters of support.) When she is taking a break from villainy she can often be found with a pen in her hand. Yes, sometimes she is doodling, other times writing fiction and discovering new and interesting ways to combine reality with the outré. She has had short stories in the Violet Ampersand Anthology, Poetry, Prose, and Other Voyages to the Edge, and the online Journal, Gothic Fairytales for Melancholy Children. She has been a featured writer at The Read In and her second novel, a murder mystery entitled Roses for Juliet will be in print in December.
With the holidays in mind, we asked our editors to share some of their favorite things in our new feature, May We Suggest... For your convenience (and our stipend piggy bank), we have linked each suggestion to Amazon.com. Take a look and see what you think. As ever, we welcome comments, via the "Contact Us" link in the left side navigation column. And if our recommendations don't inspire you to click, we've included a search box that you can use to select something else.
Can you make every word count? If you're up to the challenge, sign up for our newsletter. Around the first of the year, we'll be announcing the details for our Less is More: A Celebration of Micro-Flash contest. In short (pun intended), we'll be looking for micro-flash &mdash 100 words or less — and mini-poems known as "fibs". "Fibs" are six-line poems originated by Gregory K. Pincus at GottaBook (http://gottabook.blogspot.com), based on the mathematical Fibonacci sequence featured in The Da Vinci Code. And to acknowledge flashquake's long commitment to the visual arts, we'll showcase "micro" photographs taken with cell phone or PDA cameras.
So start thinking small, and keep your eyes open for our contest announcement with all the details!
And last, but certainly not least, editor Didi Wood's story "Ghosts" is still available for review in the Autumnal Equinox issue ofCezanne's Carrot.