A New Post.

Matt tells me I haven't made a blog post in some moons and have so to do, therefore I am. But I embarked on the whole process without anything in the way of a subject in mind, so you're going to have to sit quietly through the vocal exercises and tuning up before the essential meat cometh along.

Memememememememememememememeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Things are relatively quiet on the entering competitions front at present, its being close to Christmas and all. They are less quiet on the ordering books front, very likely for the same festive reason. Probably we shall have to get more copies of The Final Theory printed, which we find a hugely exciting prospect. Hugely. No, really. The trouble with hating exclaimation marks, which I pretty much do, is that genuine sentiment ends up looking awfully sarcastic. What I need to do, or you can do it if you've seriously nothing better to be getting on with, is invent a punctuation mark that conveys the same WOOHOOishness at which the exclaimation mark is so adept, but is simultaneously kind of tasteful. I'm just checking the keyboard for a spare one. ~ <-- Does that have any specific purpose? Can we use that? Probably I should bagsy it swiftly.

We're thinking of putting info about us on the website, and photographs. Note DO NOTE that I do not say true info, nor do I say photographs of us, but the issue is being borne seriously in mind. Thank you.

(And we didn't drown that time we went home in the rain. We were smacked fairly offensively in the collective face with handfuls of surprisingly sharp water, but we didn't drown. Go us.)

Sam.

Christmas Holidays CONFIRMED

I don't much mind Christmas, you know. It's a bit like Easter only much better, I suppose, but not half as good as Summer, which is like Christmas and Easter but infinitely longer, warmer, and more illuminative.

I'm not a religious sort of fellow but I'm all for the socialist element. Not that I'm much for socialism either, but if we're apportioning political standpoints on to what is essentially a pleasant few days in which to give the people you like a present or twelve, then we might as well say that Christmas is the most kindly.

Not that I give twelve presents to people I like, mind, but there we are. I also feel for those less fortunate, and this Christmas is no exception -- on a personal level at least -- since my entirely beloved is abandoning me for three weeks to fart about in the Australian sunshine.

I am most displeased.

In terms of Leaf Books, which is possibly what this was meant to be about, we're going on our Christmas holidays between the 21st of December and the 3rd of January.

If you place an order or enter a competition or send us a novella extract in this time then we're sorry, but it won't much be processed until we get back. However, emails are probably going to remain accessible, so we'll do our best.

Did you like how I turned into We just there? A subtle narrative development.

We're turning back into Me now. I don't deserve the responsibility.

In more significant news I have bought myself a new pair of jeans, which means I'll no longer require the safety pins I'd emplaced in my last pair. Should I happen to walk past any errant magnets they will not pose me any danger. Furthermore, my new jeans make me look more convincingly like a real human adult male, as opposed to a scruffy street urchin, and I will no longer sponge up the puddles I walk through. Nor will I so readily reveal my underpants when bending over to fulfil your orders.

Sam claims to have bought me some kind of gift that involves me 'needing to wear the provided safety equipment.' Personally I am hoping for a crossbow, because combining a crossbow with these jeans would help me look very adult and flash indeed.

Sorry that this update contained nothing of importance, save those two dates.

Matt.

The Brilliant Box of Books

Yes, hello, and a very fond December from me.

Our newest book -- The Final Theory & Other Stories: The Leaf Books Short Short Story Anthology 2006 (breathe...) -- is very beautiful and quite available to everybody. But then you already knew that, didn't you?

What's more exciting, though, as I'd like to tell you, is a box I made today.

Leaf is so transparent that we're stupidly amused to tell you that we re-use envelopes when we can. Particularly we recycle the ones with bubble-wrapping in them. However, so moral are we that we also consider bubble-wrapping a double-edged... protective device... because as sure as it protects our beautiful wares it also takes about seventy million years to biograde. Precisely like a banana doesn't.

So. Today we had an order that was larger than most, and so needed some custom box-building to sort it out. Taking an old box to task -- which mostly involved me setting about it with a pair of scissors and a craft-knife -- I became very much the Dr. Frankenstein and ultimately engineered such a staggering piece of art that I just had to write here about it.

The merits of my home-made (work-made?) box are thus:

1) It's flush to the books it contains, meaning rattling won't occur.
2) It's got bubblewrap sellotaped neatly to its interior, meaning the books won't get bashed by reckless postal service machinery and/or vans.
3) Its corners are reinforced, much like an armoured vehicle.
4) Its postal label is set in 28 point Sylfaen, which I promise is a nice font for a postal label.
5) It contains beautiful books.
6) It is recycled.
7) It is not from Amazon but could well be, given the utter professionalism involved in its creation.
8) It is neat.
9) It is not naff.

That's all. If you'd like a box made by me, or any of the others, then do please order a large amount of books.

I hope you have considered your christmas presents wisely.

Love,

Matt.

The Final Theory

Right. The website update happened. My eyes are too much burned by monitors to spend much time in floridly typing, but the news I was waiting to inform you of was that The Final Theory & Other Stories: The Leaf Books Short Short Story Anthology 2006 is back from the printers and up for sale. Here:

http://www.leafbooks.co.uk/readers/books/finaltheory.html

It costs £6.99, or you can buy it in a bundle with Razzamatazz (the poetry anthology) for £12 the pair. It's great. There is nothing else to be said.

The rain is very sideways and I don't much want to walk into it. Matt and I lack cars and have to do feet, and then trains, and then feet again. And the rain is sideways. Pity us slightly.

Sam.

I am not sick.

There was an expression of concern for my welfare in the comments of the underneathmost post, which is really very gratifying. I do notice that there has been essentially nowt in the way of posting for a week. A primary reason is that I can't tell you about Something until an update relating to Something has been made on the website. A secondary reason is that I was actually going to post earlier in the week but then the databasing took an entire day and I couldn't. The very good news is that databasing is being excitedly rotated between the four of us so I shouldn't have to do it more than once a week (plus one extra day per month, presumably, thinking about it mathematically, like), which actually quite thrills me. I'll be much happier not getting a wage for not-databasing.

What I would say if I was posting is [censored due to Something] and also that we really truly are judging the Summer Short Story competition AS WE SPEAK, and also the two themed ones. We are quite busyish really with the judging. Also, because it's not as though two alsos per paragraph be sufficient, we had an interesting notion about the Summer Short Story competition. T'original plan was to make a flip book (as in Tea Dance at the Waldorf/Sex with Leonard Cohen - and greetings to the people at the Leonard Cohen fansite who've paid visits to our own site on occasion) out of the two winning entries. But what we've found is that there are significantly more than two entries we consider publishable, and we'd frankly quite like to publish them. So we're wanting to do a short story anthology, basically, with a winner and a runner up and then a small fleet of commended stories, and we think it'll be quite great. What do YOU think?

Plus I had my, ooh, what, two dozenth rejection from a short story magazine this morning (resubmitted this afternoon with no further editing - plucky or nonsensical?), so I'm well up for the idea of reducing notifications of rejections.

I wonder if we shall have Christmas decorations in the office.

Sam.

Mostly extending the poetry comp deadline, but also a little bit of singing.

The song that contains the following words is possibly my favourite song in the whole world:

#I once had a whim and I had to obey it to buy a French horn in a second hand shop;
I polished it up and I started to play it in spite of the neighbours who begged me to stop.
De-diddly-diddly-diddly-diddly....

Except really the diddlies are Donald Swann on the piano.

Hello there.

#To sound my horn, I had to develop my embouchure.
I found my horn was a bit of a devil to play DIDDLE-UM-DIDDY-DUM....

You'll possible be wanting some news.

News. Yes.

Oh right. Now, listen to this bit. Don't get distracted by comical song lyrics because it's actually kind of important.

The DEADLINE for the OPEN POETRY COMPETITION is being EXTENDED by ONE MONTH, so it now closes on 31st JANUARY. We've had a little bit of understandable flak in the past for extending the deadline on the Writing for Children competition, which upset some people who'd rushed to make the earlier deadline, and we do apologise profusely if anyone feels similarly pillocksed about on this occasion, but we're primarily doing it because we don't think it's really on to expect people to rush to finish their poems over Christmas. We hope very much that you approve. There.

#WHO. SWIPED. THAT. HORN? I'll bet you a quid somebody did, knowing
I'd found a concerto and wanted to play it, afraid of my talent at playing the horn,
For early today, to my utter dismay, it had vanished away like the dew in the morn.
De-dum-diddy-dum-diddy-dum-diddy-dum-diddy etc.

Otherwise our news is fairly low key, if not mildly tragic in a sort of mundane and essentially privileged fashion. Primarily we had a brief stationary crisis in the office yesterday, wherein we found ourselves quite horribly deprived of both A4 paper, clean and scrap, and sellotape. But we're over it now, and my back hurts a little, because I've spent a good forty minutes of the day bearing the ream of paper across country in my rucksack, in the most dreadful rain, and my umbrella has rusted into several fairly pointless sticks wrapped in soggy cloths, but what of it? We can print words off the computer screen, and then we can tape them to things. We ask little more from life.

Tomorrow we're having another meeting in the pub. This is mostly why our office is possibly just a little bit happier than yours.

#I miss its music more and more and more. Without that horn... I'm feeling sad and so for-lor-ooooooooooooooooooorn....

And if anyone knows where my French horn is, please to be letting me know in comments.

Sam.

On Publicity & Marketing & Having Sore Eyes

The keenly-eyed and beady-fingered (?) of you might well have noticed the posh banner we've got occurring in the sidebar over there ---->

Well, that's been made to facilitate the new media world that is blogging, myspace, livejournals, the lot. Believe me I'm quite the turbo geek so it's of no surprise to me that these things work. Essentially it gives us a 'click-through', that is, that someone clicks it and flies through to the Leaf website whereupon they fall over, marvelling at how brilliant our books are.

I meant to say something earlier but by all means please take one for your own blog, myspace, livejournal or even website. I know writers are more keen on having official websites than scrawly blogs but there we are. If you don't know how to embed one then don't hesitate to email us -- I'll say something nice to you with instruction. Otherwise you can email and request that you very much want to use the code, and with forthright politeness I'll send you it at once.

After that you can place it in your HTML editor, or your 'edit profile' page, or any place really that might happily support a spot of pan-internet sorcery.

Our appreciation is -- and always will be -- legion.

Matt.

PS: I sourced out my own safety-pin thank you. And elsewhere my eyes are behaving wrongly and are resolutely hurting my upper-face. And... and and and... if you're doing the National Novel Writing Month... well. You understand precisely what I mean, and good luck to you. I'm 8,000 words behind schedule myself.

I would like most of all to be printing (or in New Zealand).

What I'm doing right now is primarily passing time until the printer on the desk behind me ceases to be in use by people who are not me. It's fairly frustrating. Not that I'm begrudging the other printer-user. Well, I am slightly, but I'm aware that my begrudgement is unreasonable and somewhat mean, so mostly that makes it all right. It's sort of intermittently in use. The printer. I keep thinking the coast's more or less clear for me to get cracking on the sizeable-ish printing job I have to do, then it whirrs again into action - as it did just then - and I have to pretend I was just wheeling my spinny chair in its direction for the sheer bally joy of the thing. Oh woe.

Also we're slightly out of envelopes. And we badly need brown paper. The brown paper acquiring mission was set for last Friday, but it sadly failed when the designated vehicle broke down and stranded the operator, who is even now housebound and socially isolated and having to order food over the internet. Goodness knows how people without cars manage to do ANYTHING AT ALL. Possibly that was slightly low. I apologise. I genuinely feel sorry for people whose legs and train timetables have been eaten tragically away by their cars.

On the plus side, the sun has somewhat come out. But the printer is only deceptively silent.

Sam.

Razzamatazz and Other Poems.

Razzamatazz and Other Poems landed happily in the office earlier this week, and very keenly and with many salutations was it received. We're all agreed that it's an inordinately smart little publication, and chock full of really very excellent poetical offerings. I discover that I really quite despise the word 'chock'. Razzamatazz and Other Poems (it has a subtitle as well that I can't offhand recall - has something to do with its containing the winning poems from the 2006 Short Poetry competitions, which is nothing short of the truth) is available for purchase from the website. As are numerous other jovial publications. Did you know you can buy a Leaf Super Mega Turbo bundle type thing? I don't think it's exactly called that, but that's very much the idea behind it. It's the entire back catalogue in one absurdly exciting package, and it sets you back only about 89p per book. So, you know. That's rather jolly.

The Final Theory and Other Stories, which is the microfiction compilation, is due to go off to the printers very much shortly. There was an exciting blip with the cover at one point, where in these clever tilted monitors decided to hide from us the fact that the cover had gone kind of stripey, and it was only noticed when Matt stood up and looked at it a bit sideways. But that's all been beaten back into shape now, and everything is pretty much well. And I wish to apologise at this juncture for the fact that the Short Short Story competition results never went up on the news page, which is sadly unnewsworthy at present. I'd update it myself only the software's gone wonky. Badger Gav slightly in the comments and he might perhaps oblige.

We are mostly quite well. Matt still waits in vain yet touching hope for his safety pin. He is unravelling sadly from the ankle upwards. I told him he should've offered a free book.

Sam.

Also!

Because I am a scruff and because I wear my jeans too low, I have a hole at the bottom of my left trouser leg.

Would anyone be kind enough to include a decent-sized safety pin in their next postal submission to us?

The first person to do so will get a photograph of my repaired jeans placed here, with many kind thankyous added to the post. In effect they will receive an entry dedicated entirely to them .

No really, they will. I can't actually walk in them. It's very sad. They are my favourite jeans.

Help.

Matt.

Surprisingly for a publisher this post is actually about our books

The Final Theory & Other Stories is finished and very much about to fly off to the printers, having been lovingly crafted and commented upon by all as smashing. A perfect companion piece to Razzamatazz & Other Poems, which is due back from the printers today or perhaps tomorrow or perhaps never, because they're so good and clever they might well've turned sentient and ran off to their respective authors to appear on their welcome mats as smiling complimentary offerings.

And I might add that it is cold, and that even with two pairs of socks on my toes are possibly frostbitten and are probably only still attached to my feet because my laces are done up so tightly.

Anyway, there'll be a sneak preview of the new book's cover (The Final Theory's that is) up on the website over the weekend, with those having patiently awaited the poetry book hopefully fulfilled and happy by next week.

Otherwise, I smell massively of lockets again.

Are any of our readers doing The National Novel Writing Month? If you are... well. Let's hope that for Leaf's sake you fail and end up writing a stonking short story instead. Or if we pursue this novella idea your 50,000 words are edited nicely into something well below 40,000....

Can I do a smily?

I think I can do a smily:

:)

Matt.

Novella.

Tut. What's Gav going on about down there? Paragraphing, is it? Gav has a thing about paragraphing. We find it best to nod politely and then find a less upsetting job for him that has nothing to do with paragraphing.

My thing is mostly comma splices.

The printer behind me is churning out envelopes with a soothing whirr, and my blue spinny chair makes me feel most wondrous like an emperor. And what a fine day it is to talk about novellas. Novellae. I was too late for Latin. Don't tell me it's Greek. Possibly French. Yes, I am fairly ashamed.

The novella in all its darling fewer-than-40,000-wordedness cropped up in our Monday morning meeting. We were having a thought. A devillishly fine one. How about, we were thinking, a novella competition? 'Cause we don't do novels. We do bite-sized morsicles like poetry and microfiction and the jolly old short story. But a novella encompasses petiteness like pretty much no other form. 'Cause it's like a novel, only knowingly diminutive. We love them anyway and we think they sit well with the whole Leaf ethos, especially the bit about publishing new and struggling but downright excellent types. We were reckoning, so we were, that folk with a novella to display to the world at large are probably not having a lot of luck with their mission.

And we rather want to know what you think about that. Unburden yourselves. Are you faintly in love with the whole juicy idea of the novella? Do you write 'em? And how are you faring when it comes to getting them accepted by a publisher? Would you be well up for the idea of a novella competition? Would you enter in your droves?

Please say yes. OH DO.

(Razzamatazz should be with us in the next couple of days, by the way. It's almost painfully splendid. Have a squint at the website and then have a bash at ordering a copy. £6.99 a go. It's a damnably fine book, ma'ams. Sirs. Damnably fine.)

Sam.

A New Convention

I've taken 20 or so Summer Short Story entries home to read this weekend. A task I rather enjoy, but I do have an observation and a question. Eight out of the twenty entries what I'll describe as having internet paragraphing: so each new paragraph is a block of text rather than being indented.

Now the reason that text on a web-page such as this one is done in blocks is down to the way a web-page is constructed and the language (html) it is coded in, though this is changing with the advent of a language called CSS that can replicate print conventions.

A separate paragraph should denote a scene-break or a significant change but if they are used continually then the flow is interrupted and the writing can feel stilted.

So I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts about why this new style of internet paragraphing is becoming so widely used in the real-world?

Gav.

Breaking things for fun.

Momentarily at a loss for something to do before the minor deluge that was the arrival of the post, I was pleasantly surprised when I inadvertantly scattered several hundred paper clips across the carpet and was obliged to dedicate a good ten minutes to their retrival. We have a very fine collection of paper clips. One of them's purple, one of them's industrial in size and significance and another is entirely round. Ceci was speculating as to whether we made a net loss or a net gain when it came to paper clips, but I'm fairly confident that we harvest from competition entries more paper clips than we subsequently commit to bundles of paper in need of shepherding.

Next, I might, for my own amusement, dismantle and remantle the photocopier.

Sam.

Minor hauntings.

Hello. Have you been neglected slightly? What were you wanting to know? We could tell you about the proofs of the poetry book (Razzamatazz & Other Poems: The Leaf Books Poetry Anthology 2006) that returned at the end of last week and were great and fine and approved. The book's looking ever so splendid and should be available for purchase in about a week's time. We'll let you know when this promise comes to fruition.

But the big news of the day is that one of the toilet cubicles is haunted, or plagued, or possibly beset by or with scorpions. I was occupying said cubicle and was not unnecessarily perturbed by anything I encountered therein until I emerged to learn that people had been lingering around outside talking about 'something scary within' and hoping to zap it, and when it was free they flooded in on a mission of sorts and they wouldn't tell us what was going on. I am faintly disturbed.

(Also we have a new telephone number, which we mentioned once before, but we meant to mention it again. It was the lack of telephone calls that reminded us. It's on the contact page of the website. Possibly putting telephone numbers on blogs leaves one open to telephonic spamming, and that would be somewhat miserable.)

Yes.

Sam.

A mostly polite note about free books.

Dear peoples,

Just to be letting you know, anyone who from this point onwards does not specify their free book or books when entering competitions online will not be contacted to discover which book they would actually like. They'll be sent a random one picked by ourselves. This is not because we wish to be mean and undemocratic but more because it makes things sadly confusing when we have to wait for people to get back to us with their selections, and then we forget who's been sent what and when and it's all a bit unhappy. So we're quite sorry about that.

Matt smells massively of Lockets.

Sam.

The wrong 650 words.

There was going to be... an intention existed... this was the plan... that the blog post of the day... was going to be 650 words in length and planted amongst the blog posts at that 'History Matters day' collection of other blog posts with a view to elucidating the reading public of the year 2347 about the daily ongoings of a small and unfunded and strangely noble but not entirely hapless publishing company. But I just ambled over there and it turned out to be mostly schoolchildren talking about breakfast cereal, and I'm not entirely sure that's what the reading public of the year 2347 are going to be interested in reading. Or maybe the schoolchildren know better than me, but either way we're scuppered, because our working day simply did not involve breakfast cereal. A flapjack came into play at one point. A flapjack with seven unique e-numbers and a flapjack the consumption of which I would have no willing part in. But not breakfast cereal. Though I could, as it happens, seriously demolish some cornflakes.

Mostly we databased, in the new office to which we have recently repaired. I am still settling into the new office, personally, having spent a week at home coughing and inhaling lemsip. We live in a partitioned-off section at the end of a biggish suite. We are quite cut off. We can observe the enemy through cleverly positioned holes in the partition. Really there is no enemy, but pretending so makes the afternoons pass more swiftly. I mean the afternoons when we're databasing. Not when we're reading your delightful work. I'm not being sarcastic. I actually mean that. No, I mean that bit too. Everything looks so sarcastic without exclamation marks, and so cheap with them. What to do?

I wish I had a bassoon. I was thinking what fun it would be to sit behind the partition and randomly blow through a bassoon, and no-one on the other side would have the faintest idea what I'd done. They'd think I have magic lungs.

We get the proofs for the poetry book ('Razzamatazz and Other Poems') back tomorrow, with any luck. And we're currently in the process of sculpting the Short Short Story Competition Anthology (which is to be called 'The Final Theory and Other Short Short Stories'). I'm not sure if the two Others should be capitalised or not. Bear with me. And we databased like woah. We printed off envelopes, and sometimes we printed them the right way up. A special bonus prize to anyone who receives an upside down envelope from us will not actually be offered, because I don't think I have that kind of jurisdiction. But still, it's a nice idea.

And like I say, we didn't eat much in the way of cereal. Tomorrow I'm going to have crumpets for breakfast. Still nothing will be solved.

I hope posterity gets something out of it all the same.

Sam.

Staples.

From our submission guidelines...

4. Please number pages and staple them together. Do not put staples through cheques.

My thanks are this morning extended to whoever ignored that. There is now indeed a diminutive hole in my left forefinger and I've bled a little bit on my t-shirt which yes, is black, but probably isn't much to do with the point.

Matt.

All Change. Next Stop...

Without much fanfare or razzamatazz Leaf Books has moved offices this week. The only thing that's changed to the outside world is that we have a new phone number and we'll be able to get our post a little bit quicker.

Sam has a cold, which means she's missed the move. I think we've moved all her stuff. Yeah, I'm sure we did.

Leaf are off to coast tomorrow morning to say hello to the folks at the Welsh Books Council. I haven't been to Aberystwyth in years and I'm determined to have chips on the front. Though this will depend on the weather; nostagia is nice but not worth getting soaked for.

Speaking of Razzamatazz, the new format A5 Leaf Books Poetry Anthology (containing the winning entries to the short poetry competition) has just been sent on CD to the lovely people at the printers. So that should be on sale shortly.

Next stop... Christmas.

Gav.

I think the new books deserve two entirely similar blog posts.

This must be more or less how Amundsen and that lot felt after they did the equivalent of finally getting their books back from the printers. Do I mean Amundsen? Shall we assume I do?

There's really no means of adequately conveying how stunning these tree-derived beasts are. Mostly we're terrifically excited about the spines, and the colours and also the lack of staples.

I think you people should be buying them. Hugely. I did, and I work here, which is a bit like laughing at your own jokes. Oh they ARE so great.

Great like flying ponies.

Sam.