What have you ever sacrificed? Whatever you gave up, what was the reason? Was it worth it? What has someone sacrificed for you? Was there ever a moment in your life where you had a chance to risk your safety, your stability, everything for someone or something you believed in, and you didn’t?

The theme for Issue Six is sacrifice. We’re putting out the call for stories of people putting others before themselves, the reasons why and the ramifications of their actions.

Send in your stories of sacrifice, fiction and nonfiction. We will still be reading work not pertaining to the theme. However, any work that does not deal with the theme will be considered exclusively for online publication.

A message from our new intern!:

Dear reader, my name is Janelle Luce and I’m the newest addition to Annalemma Magazine. I’ll be reading and editing submissions. For the blog, I’ll be sharing, commenting, and giving you behind-the-scenes glimpses. I’m your gal, basically, and I’m putting it all out there, no bullshit. Some famous person once wrote that calling yourself a writer is like calling yourself a breather since it’s just something you do. So, I’m not a writer. I’m me. And I’m here for you, dear reader.

Welcome to the team Janelle!

Tent and chairs: check.

Keg of decent domestic beer: check.

Shadow puppets: check.

Magician: check.

All right, now we’re ready to have a party!

I’m usually too busy running around picking up cigarette butts and worrying about whether or not everyone is having a good time to take decent pics at these events that I throw so this won’t be the most comprehensive look at the Issue Five release party, but I’ll do my best.

Travis Winkler, mentalist/magician, kind of blew everyone away with his feats of psychic ability.

And I did a video reading and Polly helped me with the shadow puppet show. See? I told you this wasn’t that comprehensive.

“Hey, you guys are cute with your little puppets and all but we came here to do two things: Keg stands and kick ass…”

“…and it looks like we’re almost done with the keg stands.”

I can neither confirm nor deny that this is a picture of the esteemed editor of this magazine doing a keg stand.

Nick silently tolerated this childishness.

What would you call this? Reverse keg stand? Human stand?

I don’t know about yall but I had a blast. Thanks to everyone for coming out and making this the best release party we’ve ever had!

If you live in Orlando and lament the limited amount of cool stuff to do and cool people to hang out with, then you sound like kind of a bummer and we don’t really want you to come to our party. However, if you are up for some fun times, some even funner entertainment and some infinitely fun beer, then you are in for a treat my friend. See you tonight!

Taking a cue from PANK, Annalemma is announcing our nominees for Dzanc’s Best of the Web anthology. Get your tuxes pressed and dust off your sequined gowns:

– If I Could Lend Him My Words by Sam Nam

– The Big Dipper by Meg Pokrass

– Seducing Matt Mitchum by Tim Jones-Yelvington

This was seriously a tough decision to make. In the couple of months that we’ve been publishing stories online we’ve had the opportunity to post some good’uns, but these three slightly stand out as some of the best. Thanks to Sam, Meg and Tim for letting us run your work.

Hats off to the esteemed Jeff Hamada over at Booooooom for giving us some cyber ink over the weekend. Thanks Jeff!

On an unrelated note, apologies for the radio silence for the last couple days. I had some personal, but in no way unfortunate, business to take care of. To make up for it there’s lots of good content on the docket for this week. Keep your peepers pealed!

If you were at all interested in the getting the coolest thing we’ve ever done sent to your mailbox with no more effort than a few keystrokes then you entered our twitter contest last week and now! The results.

Winners:

– @poduski

– @octohawk

– @j1310m

– @Jim_Panzer

– @kylebeachy

Congrats folks! I’ll be getting in touch with you individually for your info. Thanks for participating and enjoy your new issue!

Couple of things coming up in a couple of weeks that you need to attend (regardless of your proximity to Orlando).

Super excited about this! It’s pretty rare that an author like Stephen moseys into O-town and it probably won’t happen again for a long time. Be sure to attend. You won’t be disappointed. And if you haven’t already, buy the book.

Also, we’re doing little thingy the Friday before…

This is going to be somewhat fun as well. I realize it’s kind of weird that these things are so close together, but what can I say. That’s just how it happens. What are you going to complain about? That there’s too much cool shit happening in Orlando?

A customer recently alerted us to some shenanigans that the US Postal Service has been up to. If this has happened to your shipment please email us with pictures of the flagrancy and we will do what we can to make it right.

This makes me equal parts furious and sad.

Hey! So we’re doing a new Twitter contest wherein we are giving away five free copies of Issue Five. How do you win? Well…

1) Go to the twitterspehere and follow us.

2) Throw up a tweet with an #Annalemma hashmark.

3) Kick your feet up and wait for your free copy to show up in the mail.

If you already have your copy and feel the need to possess another then you are more than welcome to enter. Is the uncertainty of winning killing you? You could just buy it now!

This contest ends 9/12/09.