As Editor, I am supposed to make this site (specifically the front page) fun, fresh, and exciting. Sadly, I cannot always deliver great content on a weekly basis. My own blog has not had a post since May of last year. That may change in the future, but FFDO need not suffer for my lack of inspiration. Not once I finish forming the FFDO A-Team at least.

What is the FFDO A-Team? That is the team of volunteer writers that will work under my supervision providing the whole #FridayFlash community with interesting articles, interviews, and information once a month. Each of these writers will get a chance to address everyone here on FFDO about events and findings from around the world. These topics could be almost anything, as long as it relates to writing, flash fiction, publishing, or tools that may be helpful to writers in general.

Does this sound like something you would be interested in doing? Do you want a chance to share your interesting finds? Can you commit to one 250-1000 word article per month? Do you have a passion for informing your fellow writers? Have you participated in #FridayFlash? Then you may be just what I am looking for on my team.

Now, there could be a flood of people that want to do this, and I would be very happy if that were the case. Based on the number of people that are interested, I may offer a contest (potentially the biggest in FFDO history) to narrow the field. For now, that remains to be seen. Remember, this is a monthly commitment, but I am pretty flexible about when articles can go up and what not.

If interested, send me a message (edjohnson/fridayflash/org) with the subject line of “FFDO A-Team.” In the body, tell me what kind of articles you would be most interested in writing and why. That is all there is to it. If a whole bunch of people are interested (and I welcome this), I will hand pick sixteen for a contest. Any less than that, and I will have to save the contest idea for another time. And that would make me a sad panda, so everyone should try to join the FFDO A-Team.

~ E. D. Johnson

I have been pretty quiet around the FridayFlash scene since around October. The last two months of the year get unbelievably hectic for most, and mine are no different. I wanted to make it a point to get in here to insert well wishes from everyone at FFDO, regardless of which holiday(s) you may or may not celebrate. We may not all agree about which holiday, but I am sure we can all get behind the general sentiment of good will and enjoying family, friends, and food where able.

To that end, I wanted to invite everyone to do what we do best, share stories. I want to hear everyone’s fondest holiday moment, be it Thanksgiving, Christmas, New years, Hanukkah, Kwanza, your birthday, or whatever. Just a quick blurb of a tale that warms the heart and gives a glimpse into the world. Try to keep them short, but really, a word limit for something like this would be tedious and drab.

Ordinarily, I would share my own memory, but to be perfectly honest, they are all really rather vague. No one holiday stood out from another, because all were filled with at least some level of love and family. My wife and I have started a tradition of baking cookies as presents for many of the family, mostly because we have more family than we could ever realistically buy presents for. She bakes them, because I am klutz in the kitchen. I have taken to decorating them though, so if I had to select any one memory that warmed my heart it would be the Cookie Massacre.

Online, people can find all sorts of awesome stuff, and in November of 2009, my wife found cookie cutters in the shape of gingerbread men, but with an arm, a leg, or the head “bitten off.” She naturally bought them, and that became the shape of the cookies we made that year. She made some rather nice sugar cookies, but they lacked something essential to make it really memorable. She was just using a white frosting to coat the cookies, and then I had a brilliant idea. Apparently, they make food-safe colored markers, so we ordered those. I then decorated the previously bitten cookies that were otherwise quite innocent and turned them into cookies with X’s for eyes, frowns for mouths, and bloodied red stumps where they had been bitten. The broken bits of cookies even got decorated with red and tossed into the packages that then got shipped from Oklahoma to California.

Overall, quite memorable, but the story does not end there. Most received the cookies, had a little chuckle, then proceeded to devouring the box. That was the idea. But one box went to our Mexican family, and the adults knew they were cookies. Thinking nothing of the container of cookies, they passed the boxes off to the children who happily disappeared into the back room to begin eating. A few minutes later, shrieks and screams from the children drew the adults in to see what was happening. “The cookies are dead,” they cried. “And their parts are here too, ewwww!” The only way it would have gotten better would have been to actually hear the events myself, but I will just have to live with secondhand stories. All of the cookies got eaten, so it could not have been too horrendous.

So now that mine is out there, let us hear some of everyone else’s stories. Or if you already wrote one, say for FridayFlash, feel free to link it here. And as an added bonus, one lucky respondent will get something special by New Years.

Again, best wishes to everyone, and may you enjoy the last of 2011 with those you love and care about. Peace out.

~ E. D. Johnson