A Note to Our Contributors and Our Readers:

As we celebrate our sixth year, our editors here at A&A have been deeply contemplating our current role in the Flash Fiction zine community, how saturated the market is, and how difficult it is becoming to curate submissions that fit our rather quirky and surreal style. It’s gotten so bad that less than 10% of  submissions adhere to our guidelines or fit with our surreal thematic requirements. When we started, we wanted to give new writers and outsider writers  — those who choose to work outside of the mainstream literary fiction tropes — an appreciative place to park their odd. In six years, with over 400 Authors and 73,893 Reads, we think we have accomplished what we set out to do, and we did it all without funding. We did it with goodwill, a lot of sweaty hours, and a love of the written word.

We’ve published stories of all sorts by writers from all over the world. We’ve even published high school students from time to time. If we liked the story, we were willing to publish it. We never gave a crap about credentials or connections. It was always about the words.

Thinking to the future, we have been mulling over the idea of shuttering our doors. We had hoped for ten years, but each year the publishing climate becomes more and more challenging . . . and extremely frustrating for editors here and everywhere. Glenn and Sarah have been with us since the second year, and a few authors who took a chance on us during our early growing pain days later became regular contributors and/or anonymous guest editors. We thank them for their hard work, their endurance, and most of all their patience and selfless dedication to the craft.

We are very proud of our staff and all of the authors we have published. We are proud of our content, though we are a bit surprised that we lasted this long, considering the negativity that seems to breed organically in this industry. We’ve gotten quite a good whiff of fertilizer lately, and since our only interest in doing this was altruistic in nature, we always felt that when the fun stopped and it became just another grueling day job sans the paycheck, that we would stop. We’ve all got grueling days jobs, so we think we might have reached patience’ end. That said, we are closing to submissions and taking an extended hiatus so that we might each pursue our own idea of zen. Too much screen time and petulant primadonna writer drama has made us creatively lethargic and just a little bit pissy. Pissivity can only be cured with fresh air and sunshine, the only vaccine against the gangrenous human condition that often torments editors these days. We even took a very long summer vacation in order to get our bearings, see what the world was like without us, see what we were like without the magazine. In truth, nobody missed us or it.

We might return in the new year. Maybe with an altered publication schedule, something more vernal/autumnal and theme based. So . . . until we decide how we are going to move forward, or not, please enjoy our archives. Our contributors are some of the finest wordsmiths out there.

The Editors