Welcome to December's Fightin' Words. Katie Welch, owner of a hundred-year-old piano and one of this month's featured fiction writers, kicks us off with the single best word for:

What I'm wishing for: proximity

Ugly holiday sweaters: cringeworthy

The shortest day of the year: candles

My sense of style: woolly

Finishing a book: ambivalence

Something that smells different than it tastes: victory

When everyone stands up to get off a plane: futile

Catching a glimpse of a full moon: twitterpated

If you missed our last live twitter chat with Split Lip EIC Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice -- or if you had so much fun you want to repeat the experience (like us) -- you're in luck! This Tuesday, 12/19, Kaitlyn will be chatting on Twitter, and this time she'll be joined by a whole host of other SL editors! Maybe you're making some new year's resolutions about submitting, or you've always wondered just what it's like to put together an issue. Perhaps you want to know how submissions are approached by an editor...

There's always something exciting brewing at Split Lip, but this just may take the cake. The mantra coined by editor-in-chief Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice and Split Lip Press editor Amanda Miska as a panel for Barrelhouse's Conversations and Connections conference -- Head Down, Keep Writing, Don't Be An Asshole --is now a tee shirt! And it features the brand new Split Lip logo, designed by Denise Weber. 

The shirt comes in traditional and fitted styles and is available now for a limited pre-sale. For $25, inc...

Pictured:

1. Our cat, Mindy. But we call her Mimi. She loves sleeping and warm things. I do most of my writing on my made-up bed.

2. My newish MacBook with Badlands + Blue Ridge Parkway stickers. My old one broke prettymuch at exactly the same time I sold my novel. Life, right?

3. A California mug of rooibos tea. I drink a lot of rooibos tea and I love California.

4. The current manuscript I'm working on.

5. An ARC of my debut novel Whiskey & Ribbons because I like looking at it/having it around.

6. My Kin...

We continue our celebration of the hard-working readers who help keep Split Lip running with Lori Sambol Brody, who reads flash fiction for us. So when Lori's reading your flash, what makes her say yes?

"A chill in the spine as I read the last word, a swoon at the use of language, a feeling that the piece is much larger than the space it inhabits, a lovely sentence and image, a satisfying ending, a story arc."

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Lori Sambol Brody lives in the mountains of Southern California with a family of backyar...