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.

Book and/or short story trailers are, by their nature, very weird things. Trying to convey a mood or feeling of a piece that does its best conveying in a completely different medium in a short amount of time is a recipe for clumsy and awkward “filmmaking”. AV Cub just came out with a pretty good one:

But most of them are really, really, ridiculously, embarrassingly bad:

Reason I bring this up is cause we’re gonna be posting some trailers of our own up here some time next week and I want to make this solemn promise to you, dear Annalemma disciple, that we will try our damnedest to make our trailers as interesting and non-embarrassing as possible. Keep your peepers pealed.

Thanks HTMLGIANT.

So we were all set to print at the beginning of the week when I get a call from Jen saying that the trim size is too big. The printers contacted her saying that we were a quarter of an inch over what we were quoted and they couldn’t do it without switching machines and ordering new paper and ultimately costing thousands of dollars more. “That’s bullshit,” I said, and decided to call the printers. As I was dialing I remembered that we had, in fact, changed the print size two issues ago because of this same cost issue and I’m such a fucking idiotic simplton that I just plum forgot what size my own magazine was and gave Jen the wrong size from the get-go. Sound confusing? It is.

Nevertheless, Jen sighed, shook her head, silently cursed my unborn children and got to work re-formatting the entire magazine. And did it in one night. So we’re going to go out tonight and I’m going to buy her new buns because she worked hers clean off this week.

Oh, and this is the cover. It’s from Danny Jones’s series Dawn of Man which appears in the mag. And it’s the sexiest cover we’ve ever had the opportunity to print.

Thank you Jen and Danny and everyone else involved for being way more professional than me.

Old Chicago bud Chris Bower has adapted a story he wrote for our very first (and currently out of print) issue into a short play that will start its run this weekend. Go check it out if you live in the area and enjoy turbulent relationships and mysterious fish!