News. Lots thereof.

Well, now we know how to get you talking. Make a two-line post then leave you to it for the next three weeks. Bravo.

Here are some other things for you talk about.

The Micro-Fiction Competition. Having been granted a brief extension (which means pantaloons), this now closes on September the 15th, in ten days time. So you've still oodles of hours in which to send us your short short stories for judging purposes. I hope they're all brilliant.

Judging. Ongoing. We're currently pretty darned close to reaching a result in the poetry competition and the short story comp's biffing along fairly nicely as well. Probably we're a touch slower than usual because we don't have Turbo-Reader Matt to help us anymore, but we're doing our utmost and we hope to make an exciting announcement within the next couple of weeks. Please to be bearing with us.

Books in progress. Outbox & Other Poems and The Light That Remains & Other Short Stories are with the printer as we speak and should hopefully be available for purchase by the end of the month. All featured authors, as ever, will receive a free copy as soon as we can bung it in an envelope and send it in their general direction. Derek & More Micro-Fiction and The Dogstar & Other Science Fiction Stories are both a significant distance along the production line and could very conceivably be at the printer within the next month or so as well. For which a hearty hurrah.

Leaf Itself. Hello there. Now. Probably you've noticed that we've undergone a couple of changes over the last few months. We've mislaid Matt, and Gav's going to go AWOL some time in the near future on the grounds of his needing a job that pays more money. Boo. But it's not all grim. We have, in recent weeks, acquired the assistance of a couple of extraordinarily able web-bods who are helping us first and foremost with Mostly Life, the Leaf Team's new and almost spleen-poppingly exciting project that I do believe Ceci might have mentioned to you once or twice before. It's essentially an online repository for various things humorous and quirksome and generally pleasing. There's going to be a spoof of a village newspaper, a section for less audio-based versions of radio 4 type panel games, the Someday Supplement for the housing of all manner of humorous writings and the Sensorama, for anything amusing in a visual or noisy fashion. Or tactile if you can work out how to do that over the computer. Please keep checking the website at http://www.mostlylife.com/ - we expect it to go live within the next couple of weeks.

Leaf Books itself is going to slightly alter its working processes in order both to match the requirements of its costumers and to enable us to be a bit more massively productive with the whole Mostly Life thing. Basically we'll be running fewer competitions - 2008's preliminarily going to see the production of a poetry anthology and a micro-fiction anthology, both of which we hope will be sizeable and slightly fantastic. We think this is in many ways a smart move. We were possibly getting a bit deranged with the competitions there and we were frankly kind of running out of names for them. A touch of focus was called for. Nothing much else is changing... newsletters will go out on a quarterly basis, all our books will still be very much available for purchase and the website at http://www.leafbooks.co.uk/ is going to get a spiffy new revamp with art deco shapes and coffee-ish colours and improved functionality and all those jolly things. Which is something to look forward to.

And now I'm off for a spot of breakfast. I'm thinking crumpets and lemon curd, and I won't be swayed.

Sam.