Hello, and welcome to the November issue of Synchronized Chaos! Thanks for the feedback on the webzine’s content and how we can best benefit authors and artists, and please continue the discussion.

This month saw a small variety of highly individual submissions, each somehow presenting the theme of creation. Fletcher Goldin’s flash fiction piece’s speaker builds a highly detailed house of sand out of his memory or imagination, fully aware the waves will eventually wash it away, yet still building for reasons he leaves unstated. Sodalis’ piece deals with creating an identity and developing friendships of one’s own choosing, not simply taking on expected roles or preferences because of one’s race or ethnicity. Alisha Fisher’s photography combines nature, spirituality, and a sense of humor in an unique way. She takes everyday ponds, leaves, and natural materials others step on or overlook and turns them and her own body into artwork. In the same way, the characters in Tosca Lee’s Havah create beauty while making their way in a strange new land by working with the natural objects around them, developing objects at once lovely and pragmatic: shapely smooth clay pottery, intricate designs woven into useful winter blankets, harmonic chants to assist women in labor.

Life – past and present, from prehistoric times to the experience of a modern San Franciscan writer – continually provides a series of challenges to our physical and social development. These works illustrate ways of working with challenges…choosing to create and enjoying the product for a short time even though it is impermanent, valuing the process of creation as much as the outcome, turning one’s creative energies inward to focus on developing one’s own sense of self when one lacks physical raw material or other people who understand and are on the same page, using whatever materials one has available, finding ways to honor memories while discovering and appreciating the positives of one’s current situation.

We at Synchronized Chaos thank November’s contributors and join in honoring and celebrating the creative impulse in all its forms and in a variety of circumstances.

We also invite people to check out the Benefit Auction/Sale portion of the site to help out members of our community and fellow artists who’ve come upon difficult emergency situations. Please pass on the link to anyone you think might donate (art or cash 😉

Thank you all for all of your support! Happy Halloween/Samhain/All Hallow’s Eve/Dia de los Muertos for those celebrating 😉

Press release from NASA’s Mercury flyby/photographic exploration: http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/oct/HQ_08-275_Messenger_Mercury.html

Apparently the planet is old, has been bombarded evenly with electrical charge and meteorites. Many new images of a much larger surface area than before seen.