Happy New Year and welcome to our first edition for 2014!

As we leave the past year for the adventures of the new, reflecting back brings us here at the mag so much joy. Our first special edition, Women in Writing, allowed us to show you all some thrilling writers that you might not have known about. We thought it was fantastic and you responded enthusiastically to what was our proudest achievement to date. It was such a pleasure and privilege to be able to discuss writing triumphs and tribulations with those wonderful writers.

Our reviewers, Damien Smith and Mysti Parker, also gave us lots to think about with their wide range of choices and thoughtful reviews. I was also afforded the chance to attend a literary festival and discuss it all with you. We also got our forum up and running, as a place for you to provide feedback to us, and while that’s been slow-going, we have lots of hopes for its future.

It also goes without saying that we have been blessed with some great fiction from up-and-coming writers, who we’ve enthusiastically published. It is a joy to us to have submissions from so many quality writers across the globe, and the opportunity for writers to publish in their own dialects of English. We look forward to bringing you many more as the year progresses.

So we want to thank you for joining us for yet another year. Edition 12 is an exciting evolution for us; we’re a bumper issue of seven stories and the Story Quest competition has come on over to sqmag.com. It just made sense; the winners are lauded here and we are part of the online representation of the great work IFWG Publishing Australia is doing. Plus, as the SQ in our magazine title suggests, the competition was one of the main reasons the hard copy SQ Magazine, later the current virtual SQ Mag, came to exist. So welcome home Story Quest!

On that note, we have our winner and second place for 2013’s Story Quest Competition! Lee Murray wrote the winning psychological horror, Inside Ferndale, and it won the judges over. We decided it needed pride of place so you will find it first on our list. Rachael Acks won second place with her uniquely formatted frontier science fiction, Black Smoker Hero. It was a tough competition and Rachael’s depiction of a frontier miner was truly engrossing.

We also have five fantastic stories that came through that we are excited to publish. Lisa Marie Lamb wrote a beautiful and dark childlike fantasy, Over the Bridge. Rie Rose’s Death in the Dust made us think of the old detective stories that we grew up loving. The Color of Tears is Angela Meadon’s twist on every parent’s fear, and has a gritty realism that spoke to desperation. Crawler is aptly named by B.T. Joy—it made my skin crawl when I read it—and is a psychological horror that loses you in the twists and turns of the mind. The magazine culminates in Daniel Ausema’s Bridge to Lok-Altor, a fantasy about a small island cut off for generations that must once again face the outside world.

Our newest serial is a two-parter; Clutter Coach by Tom Barlow. Talk about dysfunction! Tom weaves a supernatural element into a story about hoarding and paranoia. We hope you like it as much as we did!

Last but not least, two reviews for you to mull over. Damien reviews Chuck Wendig’s Under Empyrean Skies, which sounds like a really interesting dystopian concept. Cornpunk! Novel! Chuck is also a great encourager of other writers, so give his blog a look up. I review All is Fair, the latest book in Emma Newman’s Split Worlds trilogy. Emma is the weaver of many a fantastic story and this is no exception. Magic, fae (the dark fairy kind) and mischief—it’s got all the trimmings.

So that’s a wrap for this edition. All of us here hope you are enjoying the holiday season and wish you all the best for the new year.

Here’s to great books, great words, and brand new slates.

Sophie Yorkston

Editor, SQ Mag