Slow Going

Things are going slowly this month at FMM. Both the Editor-in-Chief and the Managing Editor have been taking part in a special focus group this month, leaving the rest of the staff to manage as best they can. Our new Administrative Manager went MIA, so we hired a new one, and training takes time. All of these are are excuses, but we do hope you'll forgive us our slow turn-around times this month.

Here are the current stats:

We have received 194 submissions so far this quarter.

We have rejected 107, sent 3 back for rewrites, held 4 for voting, and accepted 3 (though we still haven't contacted those authors yet*).

We have 10 submissions before the editorial board right now, and 67 left in our inbox. We have not reviewed any submissions received after February 7th.

Thank you for your patience!

JDawson
Editor-in-Chief

*Why does it take so long to send out an acceptance letter? Before I send out an acceptance letter, I read through each story carefully for any typos. Our acceptance letters include a list of any edits we would make to the story, so the author knows exactly what we would change (with permission, of course!). Mark, Lydia, and Adam, I will try to get your acceptance letters mailed next week.

New URL, same website

For now our new URL will still point to the same pages, so there's no need to panic, but we do go ahead and purchase http://www.flashmemagazine.com - something we have meant to do for some time.

We will slowly copy pages over to the new url, leaving duplicates where there are right now so no one misses anything.

It'll be a while before the old pages are completely replaced.

Winged Halo Productions will remain our publisher and will continue to have a link to the website for as long as it is our publisher, but the staff wanted the magazine to have it's own URL and now it finally does.

JDawson
Editor-in-Chief

Top Four Reasons a Story is Rejected

Top Four Reasons a Story is Rejected by Jim Harrington
(Editor & Development Coordinator for Flash Me Magazine)

There many reasons why a story might be rejected by the editors of Flash Me Magazine. Here are the top four based on editorial comments.

4. Obvious endings -- The resolution of the problem is telegraphed well in advance. The editors don’t look for, nor necessarily expect, surprise endings, but they don’t want to guess the outcome half way through the prose either.

3. Telling, not showing -- Telling the reader about the characters and events of the story is not only boring, it displays amateurishness on the part of the author.

2. Poor grammar and spelling -- The fastest way to get a story rejected is to submit one that has not been thoroughly edited for spelling and grammar errors. Misplaced commas, missing quotation marks, and using “their” instead of “they’re” are examples of mistakes that jump off the page and take the reader out of the story.

1. It’s not a story -- A story consists of a believable character who has a problem that is resolved by the end of the story in a satisfying manner. Prose that lacks any of these elements is no more than a scene, story snippet, or perhaps a character description. As well written as the text may be, it doesn’t meet the requirements of a story.

Website Maintenance

The server wingedhalo.com is hosted on will be undergoing a hardware upgrade at approximately 11PM MST on Friday, February 13th. We expect the downtime for the account to be 1-2 hours. We apologize
for any inconvenience.

FMM Staff

Slush Pile Update

We have received 134 submissions so far this quarter.

We have rejected 74, sent 1 back for rewrites, held 2 for voting, and accepted 3 (though we still haven't contacted those authors yet).

We have 13 submissions before the editorial board right now, and 41 left in our inbox. We have not reviewed any submissions received after February 1st.

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You'll notice we're a bit backlogged right now. We'll catch up - we always do.

FMM Staff