Poll Results: Editors' Control over Derringer Submissions

By a margin of 25 FOR, 1 AGAINST, the following clarification has been added to the Derringer Rules:

"An editor may personally decide not to submit his/her publication's stories for the Derringers. This decision cannot forbid the stories' submission by their SMFS-member authors or by other SMFS members UNLESS the editor has purchased such controlling rights from the author."

2010 Derringer Awards Coordinator

By acclamation, Suzanne Berube Rorhus has been elected Derringer Awards Coordinator for 2010. She will serve from July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010.

Poll Results: Privacy of Shortmystery Members Section

By a margin of 10 FOR, 47 AGAINST, SMFS members have rejected the motion to make Shortmystery's Members list visible only to moderators as a means of preventing e-mail address harvesting and spam. The Members list will remain visible to all members of Shortmystery.

Derringer Awards Voting

To be eligible to vote for the 2010 Derringer winners, you must join the Shortmystery Yahoo! Group before February 1, 2010. This cutoff is in place to prevent ballot-stuffing and recruiting people to the group simply to vote for any particular finalists.

The finalist stories are uploaded to the Files section of the Derringers Yahoo! Group for SMFS members to read. There is no discussion in the Derringers group, only polling. Admittance to the group is monitored to ensure that each voter's SMFS membership dates back before the start of Derringers submissions, February 1, 2010.

The 2009 Derringer Award Winners

As voted by members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society:

BEST FLASH STORY (Up to 1,000 Words)*:
No Place Like Home by Dee Stuart
Published in: MYSTERICAL-E
No Flowers for Stacey by Ruth McCarty
Published in DEADFALL: CRIME STORIES BY NEW ENGLAND WRITERS

*To correct an oversight discovered after the group vote, two winners were declared for Best Flash Story.

BEST SHORT STORY (1,001 to 4,000 Words):
"The Cost of Doing Business" by Michael Penncavage
Published in: THUGLIT

BEST LONG STORY (4,001 to 8,000 Words):
"The Quick Brown Fox" by Robert S. Levinson
Published in: ALFRED HITCHCOCK MYSTERY MAGAZINE

BEST NOVELETTE (8,001 to 17,500 Words):
"Too Wise" by O'Neil De Noux
Published in: ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE

2009 Recipient of the EDWARD D. HOCH MEMORIAL GOLDEN DERRINGER AWARD FOR LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT:
Clark Howard

Yahoo! Groups Planned Downtime, Monday April 13

On Monday, April 13th, 2009 Yahoo! Groups will undergo scheduled maintenance. During this time your group will be unavailable for 30-60 minutes.

The outage is currently scheduled to begin at 1 pm PT, 8 pm GMT. At this time, 1/4 of all Yahoo! Groups will become unavailable while the team services these groups. Once maintenance is complete on that 1/4 of Groups, they will be made available again, and the next 1/4 will become unavailable until all of the groups have been serviced.

In total the maintenance period should last around 5 hours, with the maintenance concluding around 6 pm PT, midnight GMT.

While your group is being serviced, all features of your group, including messages, photos, attachments, etc. will be completely unavailable. However, once your outage time concludes, your group and all of its features should return and any messages that were posted to the group via email during this downtime will be sent out. Please note that your group's outage should only last
around an hour.

In an effort to better communicate to all of you, a blast message will be posted to all groups starting today and continuing on through April 13th, 2009, linking to this message on the blog. This blast message is visible on all groups to all members and moderators.

Thank you for your patience—during the outage, the blog (http://www.ygroupsblog.com) will remain up (and comments will remain open) and we will update you all as information becomes available.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

2009 Derringer Awards Voting

My congratulations to this year's Derringer finalists. The finalist stories are posted here to be read and voted on by SMFS members. To be eligible to vote for the Derringer winners, you must have joined Shortmystery before February 1, 2009. This cutoff is in place to prevent ballot-stuffing and recruiting people to the group simply to vote for any particular finalists.

Voting opened April 1 and will end April 30, at 11:59 PM ET. The Derringer polls record members' Yahoo! IDs so Awards Coordinator Nikki Dolson can check that each voter joined the group before February 1, 2009.

The automated results are unofficial. Nikki will do the official vote count and announce the winners on May 1.