LEAF BOOKS NEWS JUNE 2008
Current Competitions
New: Poetry Competition.
Leaf Books invites you to submit poetry of any length and on any subject. Enter online or by post. £3 per single submission; £10 for four submissions. Winner receives £200. Runner-up receives ten free pocket-sized Leaf Books. All selected entries will be published in a competition anthology. Closes 31st October 2008.
Ongoing: Mostly Life Competition
Mostly Life (a sister site of Leaf Books: www.mostlylife.com) invites you to submit humorous material in any publishable medium imaginable: writing (fiction or non-fiction, including comic verse), videos (live-action or animated), audio files, cartoon strips, still pictures, games and anything else that comes to mind. All original, previously-unpublished and non-offensive material will be considered.
Video/audio material should ideally be no longer than five or six minutes, if that – remember that it has to quickly capture and then maintain its audience's attention.
Similarly, writing should ideally not go beyond a couple of pages.
Entry fee: £3 per entry, £10 for four entries. One winning entry will receive £200 and publication on the Mostly Life website. Other selected entries may also be published if they sufficiently tickle the judges' fancy. The winner or winners will be announced on the Leaf and the Mostly Life website. All copyright remains with the authors.
Enter online only and pay via paypal or credit card. Note that the payments go to the mothership at Leaf Books.
Closed: The Leaf Books Micro-Fiction Competition 2008 has now closed and is in the process of being judged. Please wait for further announcements.
Now available: The Someday Supplement
In 2007, Leaf Books ran a Spoof and Humour competition. In 2008, we tunnelled our way out of the mound of entries, blinking mole-ishly and very much tickled about the ribs. We were clutching some horoscopes and comical diaries and political satires and product reviews, and useful information on how to tell if someone fancies you via the medium of quantum physics.
The Someday Supplement contains the fourteen winning entries from that very competition – including 1 st prize winner Gearalt MacAodha’s ‘Nota Bene’ and runner-up Robert Wilton’s ‘Horoscopes’ – with additional material by the Leaf Team. The book is available for purchase from our website, www.leafbooks.co.uk and costs £7.99 (plus £1 p&p per copy) or £6 if you’re a featured author.
Standing on the Cast-Iron Shore and Other Poems, which will contain the winning entries from our most recent poetry competition, is in the final stages of production. Keep checking the website for further announcements.
Private printing project: The Siren of Salamanca by Brenda Ray.
Author Brenda Ray recently and joyfully received her copies of The Siren of Salamanca, the book she had printed through our private printing service. For further information about the book and the printing service and to purchase the book direct from the author at £9.99 per copy (via brendaray@hotmail.co.uk), please see our website at www.leafbooks.co.uk.
The Siren of Salamanca :
'Beyond the buildings, I can rise up now, above the cornfields, above the trees towards the blue mountains. A single shadow ripples over the stubble like a passing cloud. I have returned. I have come back. I am home.' – ‘Return Journey’
In this evocative collection of fourteen stories, nothing is quite what it seems. A girl is haunted by the story of a child who vanished from her grandmother’s house many years before. A resistance fighter tells her tale in an alternative England of the 1940s. A schoolboy becomes obsessed by a girl whose name appears on a war memorial. Two boys delivering newspapers discover a severed human head. Unruly children provoke a strange woman they encounter on a tour of Italy, alas for them, while other children are haunted by a strange doll they dig up in a suburban garden. Lovers are parted by the Spanish Civil War. A workplace romance precipitates jealousy and murder. And in the title story, a successful lawyer cheats on his wife whose doppelganger pursues him through the beautiful Spanish city of Salamanca.
Brenda Ray was born in Derby, where she still lives. She has worked at various times in librarianship and as a creative writing tutor. In the 1980s she worked as a free-lance playwright, with professional productions at a number of venues. In the 1990s, she returned to education to take a degree in Photographic Studies at the University of Derby. She has three grown-up daughters and one grandson. She now concentrates mainly on the short story form and her work is set largely in the East Midlands and in Spain, the country that haunted her as a child. The title story, ‘ The Siren of Salamanca’, was the winner of the Allianz Cornhill Short Story Competition at the Guildford Book Festival in 2005.
Proof-reader available.
One of our published authors, Jo Horsman, is looking for proof-reading work. We’re too impoverished to offer her any right now, but we’d like to recommend her to anyone else out there in need of a spot of proof-reading. If you’re interested, get in touch with us at contact@leafbooks.co.uk and we’ll pass on your information.
Shoe Tales.
And finally … our wonderful work-experience person, Sarah, who’s presently undertaking the fairly mammoth task of databasing all your micro-fiction entries, has produced a blog called ‘Shoe Tales’ at http://shoe-tales.blogspot.com/ . In her own words:
‘Shoe Tales is a postcard project. It invites you to tell the story of your most memorable pair of shoes on a postcard. Old shoes, borrowed boots and shoes you laughed in or wore on a long walk - use words, doodles, photos to share their story. As postcards are received they'll be posted on this blog - as you can see it's a-filling up with shoe tales from far and wide. I hope you enjoy browsing through and if inspired, tell the story of YOUR memorable shoes.’
The address to send your postcards to is
PO Box 1048, Cardiff, CF11 1JH
So we think mostly you should go and do that. Good.
