May’s Table of Contents

editorial by Camille Gooderham Campbell

From the Editors

April showers are supposed to bring May flowers, right?

May is Short Story Month, and in keeping with our tradition of the past couple of years, Flash Fiction Chronicles is collecting links to your favourite online short fiction — get all the details and nominate some stories at FFC, today or anytime this month.

Lifting Up Veronica by K.C. Ball, the first serialized novel from our sister imprint Every Day Novels, is set for its print and ebook release on May 24th. If you enjoy literary suspense with some courtroom drama and illicit romance, help us make its launch week a great one by getting yourself a copy. Don’t let anyone tell you that “literary” means boring — this book has snakes and shooting and sneaking around, all told with clean sparse journalistic prose.

And if you haven’t already found our social gathering places yet, please come and get to know us at the Every Day Fiction Roundtable on Facebook or the Every Day Fiction Community on Google+. We’re always happy to answer questions and get to know our readers, and we love to get into those deeper discussions and side topics that aren’t quite right for the story comment threads.

For Readers

On May 10th, we’re featuring the first place winner of Flash Fiction Chronicles’ String-of-10 FIVE competition: “After the Tsunami” by Linda Simoni-Wastila. Visit FFC to read her interview with competition judge Kathy Fish, see the complete competition results, and read the second place and third place winners as well as the Patricia McFarland Memorial Prize winner for best use of the theme.

In Canada and the United States (and a laundry list of other nations from Aruba to Zimbabwe), Mother’s Day falls on the second Sunday in May — this year, that’s May 12th — so on that day we will be offering you “Home Work” by Madeline Mora-Summonte (with apololgies to our friends in the UK and other places whose Mother’s Day or Mothering Sunday celebrations fall at other times). We should note at this time that we’re highly impressed by this author’s talent at creating fresh and unique stories featuring holidays and occasions; you may remember her story “Mrs. Drake’s Monsters” which we featured on Valentine’s Day.

Later in the month, the United States observes Memorial Day on May 27th, and we got so many fine stories appropriate for the occasion that we’re running a whole Memorial Day Weekend feature with not one but four special stories for you, beginning with “A Familiar Strange Place” by Lynn Vroman on May 24th and wrapping up with “Tommy, Through a Glass” by Sarah Crysl Akhtar on the 27th.

For Writers

We need your Father’s Day stories now, and it would also be nice to have something special for National Aboriginal Day and Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day (and you don’t need to be Canadian to send us stories for those days; nor do they need to be “Canadian” stories). Also consider sending us Midsummer stories, LGBT Pride Month stories, and check out Wikipedia’s June page for more inspiration. Get your targeted submissions in by May 27th to be in time for the June calendar, please, and don’t forget to fill out the Targeted field so they land in the right place in our database!

And now, here’s a complete list of what you can look forward to in May…

May’s Table of Contents