By Toh Hsien Min

April has been a cruel month. It started well, with what my department head never tires of saying really means higher expectations at work, but things really started taking a dive after the Manchester derby. My only consolation around that weekend was that I knew someone who had a worse weekend. The week before, this friend of mine, who for his own sake shall not be named, had messaged me to say he had a ticket to watch the game at the City of Manchester Stadium: "I'll give you a wave." In midweek, he boarded his plane, and it took off on a flight to Manchester via Munich. While he was in mid-air, a volcano erupted in Iceland. He landed at Munich on the Thursday only to be told that his onward flight was cancelled. He tried to make progress overland, but land transportation was in a complete mess as well, and he made it only as far as Frankfurt, where he had to watch the match in a pub with the ticket still in his pocket. City matched United stride for stride throughout the game, but then lost to a desperate goal just as the referee was about the blow the whistle. On top of that, Spurs, the other main challenger for Champions League qualification, unexpectedly beat Chelsea to move ahead. And the poor sod was stuck in Germany for the next week, unable to fly either forwards or backwards.

It's a lesson on how things can trip you up at the last minute that was repeated again with us during the production of this issue. Many things were fine at first, we started working on it earlier than usual, and many of the editors got their selections in earlier again than probably for any issue in the past two years. And then the hiccups came. There were complications with a couple of pieces. And then two pieces that were selected and even marked up for upload were withdrawn upon our notifying the contributors, on account of them having been accepted elsewhere.

This gets our collective goat; Kai Chai was muttering about wasting his time, for instance. During this round, he had already seen one submission of two short stories that had not only blatantly disregarded our guidelines not to send simultaneous submissions, the would-be contributor had the brass neck to put six journals in the To: line of her email. I wonder how many of the six bothered to read the stories. The truth is that while sending work to more than one journal simultaneously might seem to be a more efficient way of going about things, what it really does is to transmit inefficiency to the journals - as in these cases where we had to do quite a bit of work to get them ready for publication and then had to take them down all over again. It isn't just coincidence that journals more often adopt a no-simultaneous-submissions policy than otherwise. Besides, what is the time saving to the writer of a simultaneous submission? From our records, in the past year we've had an average response time of 64 days, maxing out at 117 days. Admittedly not all journals do the same, and I've personally had work tied up at a journal for 494 days before receiving a positive reply before, and 573 days before receiving a negative one. But if a contributor will not allow a piece of work to be ring-fenced for 2-4 months, there are a number of conjectures that one could make. Try it out: how many of them are positive ones?

Looking on the bright side, we did manage to put out what I thought was a good issue. In poetry, the competition was firm, despite or maybe because of Cyril Wong and George Moore having two poems each, alongside a number of regional poets. Kai Chai picked four short stories from one of the largest crops he's had to read, of which two, from Alfian Sa'at, who is of course known as one of Singapore's most naturally gifted writers, and Jason Erik Lundberg, are intriguing composites of flash fiction. We have an essay, and an interview with Fiona Sze-Lorain, our first in a long while, and also three reviews of recent work.

Let's hear it for May.

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