News and Advice, mostly in Bold.

Hello, readers. You've been fairly impressively abandoned of late. It's not that we lack news. It's more than I wasn't entirely sure how to work the blog after it moved to its new location. The answer is in precisely the same fashion I used to work it previously. What do you know.

But news. Such news. I forget what it is for the moment. You'll know about the new website, won't you. We're all very proud of the new website. That was mostly Gav's doing. I propose a few cheers for Gav. Three, I think, is customary, but the size of the donation is ultimately up to you.

The best thing about the new website, in my opinion, is that it's vastly reduced the number of complaints we receive about the impossibility of entering competitions online. That's fairly great of it. I hope you're all finding it similarly smooth and silky. It's not been entirely glitch free, to be honest: we've had a couple of cases of people paying for one entry and then submitting three all at once, which wasn't really supposed to happen. Just to make it clear: the Summer Short Story Competition costs £6 per single entry, not for an unlimited number of entries; likewise the poetry competition and two themed competitions cost £4 per single entry. Yes. We can see the weird little symbols too. We can't, sadly, physically forbid you from inadvertantly paying for one entry and then sending us more than one, because we're not quite that fantastic at web design - so please make sure that the number of purchases on the Paypal form matches the number of entries you intend to submit. That'd be more or less great.

And people... please to be specifying your FREE BOOK when you enter a competition. All our competitions entitle you to a free Leaf Book of your choice, provided you choose one that's actually in print, but very few of you are actually telling us which book you'd like. You can mark it in on the comments section of the online entry form, and we'll pop it in an envelope and send it to you, and really no-one loses out. And if you enter twice, and pay twice as well, you get two free books. Which I think deserves at least a muted hurrah.

I'm enjoying all this bolding.

(I've given no specific advice as yet to non-online entrants. What I'd mostly like to say is please, please write your name and all contact details quite clearly on the entry form. Some people are not writing their names and contact details particularly clearly, and that makes us sad and confused. Don't worry though. I'm not going to do any naming and shaming. Mostly because I can't read your names.)

Now then. NEW BOOKS. Don't get over-excited. It's not as though they're actually here or anything. But we have yet another estimated time of arrival, and this time I think I believe it. They're now supposed to be here next Monday. Sorry, grovellings, sorry again, but it's been out of our hands for some weeks now. The latest stage in the saga has something to do with the binders' having cut the books too high (which I think must be a technical binding term that outsiders are not necessarily supposed to understand), and now they all have to be re-printed and re-bound. It's terribly sad and a little bit tragic, but everyone's being pretty heroic about it and the printers are pulling a couple of all-nighters and hopefully the whole sorry tale will conclude next week with some really shiny and properly cut books.

Finally. Other Stuff. Well. We've judged another competition. That was fairly exciting. It was the Short Short Story competition. All the winners have been informed, except for the ones who live in far away countries and haven't provided us with email addresses or telephone numbers, and the date of their knowing the happy news is entirely dependent on the whims of the postal service. Let's send hopeful and hurrying thoughts to the postal service. We'll put the winners up on the website and on the blog at the beginning of next month, which is very soon really. And then we'll open our new Short Story competition, which has a terrifically handy word limit of 1,500-5,000 and is utterly open in topic terms and invites you to submit stories on any subject whatsoever (such as grapes or athlete's foot or paper clips or the offside rule or professional trampoliners or integral calculus or peanuts - we are full of ideas). But don't submit them until October the 1st, after which time we will welcome them with open arms.

And that's about the size of it.

Sam.