On Christmas Eve, around 1812, Pip, an orphan who is about six years old, encounters an escaped convict in the village churchyard while visiting the graves of his mother, father, and siblings. The convict scares Pip into stealing food and a file to grind away his shackles, from the home he shares with his abusive older sister and her kind, passive husband Joe Gargery, a blacksmith. The next day, soldiers recapture the convict while he is engaged in a fight with another convict; the two are returned to the prison ships from which they escaped...

The Freeze-Dried Groom is one of the nine stories in Margaret Atwood's fantastic new collection Stone Mattress. A collection of highly imaginative short pieces that speak to our times with deadly accuracy. Vintage Atwood creativity, intelligence, and humor: think Alias Grace. Margaret Atwood turns to short fiction for the first time since her 2006 collection, Moral Disorder, with nine tales of acute psychological insight and turbulent relationships bringing to mind her award-winning 1996 novel, Alias Grace. A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband in "Alphinland," the first of three loosely linked stories about the romantic geometries of a group of writers and artists. In "The Freeze-Dried Groom," a man who bids on an auctioned storage space has a surprise. In "Lusus Naturae," a woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire. In "Torching the Dusties," an elderly lady with Charles Bonnet syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence. And in "Stone Mattress," a long-ago crime is avenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion-year-old stromatolite. In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood is at the top of her darkly humorous and seriously playful game.

Congratulations to Jennifer Cooreman, the winner of Margaret Atwood's #Freeze-Dried Fiction contest!! Read Margaret Atwood's story, the Freeze Dried Groom, then read Jennifer's story as a prequel. About Sister of The Bride: When Dr. Claire Ledus loses her sister in a tragic accident, her life is changed forever. As she grieves, she struggles to forgive the man whose carelessness cut her sister's life short. Is Clyde Davis a monster, or simply a man who made a terrible mistake? Perhaps Clyde deserves Claire's forgiveness. But when Claire learns the truth about her sister's life after her death, she is no longer certain she can forgive herself.

Stan and Charmaine are a married couple trying to stay afloat in the midst of an economic and social collapse. Job loss has forced them to live in their car, leaving them vulnerable to roving gangs. They desperately need to turn their situation around—and fast. The Positron Project in the town of Consilience seems to be the answer to their prayers. No one is unemployed and everyone gets a comfortable, clean house to live in . . . for six months out of the year. On alternating months, residents of Consilience must leave their homes and function as inmates in the Positron prison system. Once their month of service in the prison is completed, they can return to their "civilian" homes. At first, this doesn't seem like too much of a sacrifice to make in order to have a roof over one's head and food to eat. But when Charmaine becomes romantically involved with the man who lives in their house during the months when she and Stan are in the prison, a series of troubling events unfolds, putting Stan's life in danger. With each passing day, Positron looks less like a prayer answered and more like a chilling prophecy fulfilled. Keep reading and be sure to enter The Heart Goes Last Fiction contest!

What happens when all your apocalyptic nightmares seem to be coming true? In this lyrically poignant piece, Margaret Atwood reflects on growing up in the age of the scarlet fever, diphtheria, polio and the whooping cough that swept Canada in the 1940s. Yellow signs with the words 'QUARANTINED' became a signature of the era and marked doors in neighbourhoods across the country. Drawing from her own experiences and the experiences of her parents who lived through the Spanish flu, Atwood sings words of encouragement, "Take heart! Humanity's been through it before. There will be an Other Side." And while nothing is scarier than an enemy you can't see, there is always hope and there is always another side. In a way that only she can, Atwood takes a look into the past and the present to give us words for the future. Copyright belongs to O.W. Toad and this piece first ran in The Globe and Mail.

"As a child, I was one of those who buried treasures in jars, with the idea that someone, some day, might come along and dig them up. I found similar things while digging in the various gardens I have made: old nails, old medicine bottles, fragments of china plates... That is what the Future Library is like, in part: it will contain fragments of lives that were once lived, and that are now the past. But all writing is a method of preserving and transmitting the human voice." There’s a secret book that no one will read for 100 years. It is a book from the future, so it hasn’t been published yet. It is kept in a locked room, in a Norwegian library. There is a sacred grove that will provide the paper for its pages. And there are 100 authors who will write its secret stories. 100 years. 100 stories. 100 different writers. This is the Future Library (Framtidsbiblioteket). It is being created by Scottish artist Katie Paterson for the city of Oslo in Norway. When Katie had to choose the first writer to contribute the first story, she named Margaret Atwood, prizewinning author, poet, essayist, literary critic, and Wattpad’s official Fairy Godmother. Read Margaret's thoughts about her involvement in the project here. *Watch Margaret on Periscope on May 26th 2015 to witness the live event, and stay tuned for a special Wattpad writing contest coming soon!*

Okie's fifteen. She lives in New York. She's got a few problems: she's failing geography, her dad's a wimp, and her mother, Sumatra, is a stone cold bitch. But things get a lot worse when Sumatra turns into a zombie and eats Okie's dad. Clio, Okie's grandmother, lives in Toronto; but since the zombie apocalypse, Toronto's a lot further away than it used to be. Clio suggests that Okie transport Sumatra across the border, because family is family. But coaching Okie by cellphone isn't easy, and Clio has some zombies of her own to contend with. Luckily she has some garden tools. Naomi Alderman and Margaret Atwood team up for this unusual two-hander. Encompassing love, death, sex, and the meaning of family, The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home will surprise, delight, and convince you of the vital importance of keeping ready supplies of rhubarb and mini-wieners in your freezer at all times. The story unfolds beginning October 24.

Maggie, Lady Hawkins, had a debut she'd rather forget-along with her first marriage. Today, the political cartoonist is a new woman. A thoroughly modern woman. So much so that her clamoring public believes she's a man... FACT: Drawing under a male pseudonym, Maggie is known as Lemarc. Her (his!) favorite object of ridicule: Simon Barrett, Earl of Winchester. He's a rising star in Parliament-and a former confidant and love interest of Maggie's who believed a rumor that vexes her to this day. FICTION: Maggie is the Half-Irish Harlot who seduced her best friend's husband on the eve of their wedding. She is to be feared and loathed as she will lift her skirts for anything in breeches. Still crushed by Simon's betrayal, Maggie has no intention of letting the ton crush her as well. In fact, Lemarc's cartoons have made Simon a laughingstock...but now it appears that Maggie may have been wrong about what happened years ago, and that Simon has been secretly yearning for her since...forever. Could it be that the heart is mightier than the pen and the sword after all? Available everywhere in paperback and e-book from Kensington Books. Legally, this is only allowed to be a short sample of the published book. Read on for Chapter 1!

Evelyn Thomas's plans for celebrating her twenty-first birthday in Las Vegas were big. Huge. But she sure never meant to wake up on the bathroom floor with a hangover to rival the black plague, a very attractive half-naked tattooed man in her room, and a diamond on her finger large enough to scare King Kong. Now if she could just remember how it all happened. One thing is certain, being married to one of the hottest rock stars on the planet is sure to be a wild ride.

If you can never get enough of your favorite authors (and who can?!?), you are going to love H&H's author writing challenge, H&H Quickies. Not only will you get to read fun, original scenes by awesome romance authors, but said awesome romance authors will be writing those scenes based on YOUR prompts! Following up on wonderful Quickie scenes by Susan Andersen, Rebecca Zanetti, Kerrigan Byrne, Lora Leigh, Delilah S. Dawson, and more (see all the Quickies, here), we are pleased to announce today that Valerie Bowman will be the fourteenth author to participate in the H&H Quickies challenge! Here are the details: The idea For the next week, Wattpad users are invited to leave comments on this post with writing prompts/ideas for Valerie Bowman with a historical romance angle. Once the prompting period is over next week, Valerie will read over all of the prompts and pick at least two that she finds inspiring, and use them to write a short original scene. H&H will then post the scene for everyone to read and enjoy (yay!), as well as reveal which prompts Valerie used for the scene (woo-hoo!) for bragging rights.