Dear Authors,

We hear you. We really, really do.

We hear you, and you are not alone.

In fact, you are legion. Well over 1600 works a year are submitted to flashquake.

Over 1600 songs, 1600 voices, 1600 hearts, souls, treatments of angst-ridden confessions, childhood tragedies, dead grandparents, pediatric cancer, racist neighbors, beloved pets, sophist rants, unrequited love, catharsis', soliloquies, truisms, clichés, stories of abuse and neglect, suffering, barbarism, charity, poverty, cruelty; pop tunes, vapid discourse, word play, self sacrifice, gratitude, hatred and sublime, resplendent joy.

Conflicts and resolutions, hurt feelings, regrets, amends, revenge and absolution; there is plenty to go around.

It is very often disquiet that makes an author sit down and create.

So thank you for taking the time to express your suffering and joy so that others may feel they are not alone. Thank you for offering your way out of the pit of despair. Your glimmer of hope. Your reflection of our psyche, our values, and our contradictions. Your reality check that perhaps things aren't so bad. And your warning that as bad as things seem, they can always get worse.

These are things we all need to hear and although English is our common tongue, we don't all speak the same language. Although your work may get rejected, remember that that decision is based solely upon our assessment of the words on the page and not the person that put them there...no matter how thin the scab over the wound.

Writing is a skill, being a compassionate, thinking, fragile, human is an art.

So keep laughing, keep crying and keep talking, we are listening.