This was the last week before college bites — back to that other grindstone. So I locked the front door, ignored the phone and worked flat out. As usual I didn’t get as far as I thought I would. However, Rose Cook’s everyday festival has gone to Robert and Liz at Dolphin Press, and so has Alison Brackenbury’s Shadow ( a collection of animal poems).
The PoemCards are into their final stage: Robert can print them for me but I’ll have to fold by hand and of course match to envelope and acetate sleeve, which is time-consuming. Hm. I can print them myself but my printer is a little bit erratic and it doesn’t really like 160g card. He’ll do it better, I think, and cleaner and more neatly cut. Anyway, I really like these cards. If someone else made them, I would buy them, and I think I can price them very reasonably. (I was not put into this world to make money: the Dragons’ Den would demolish me).
Sally Festing’s Salaams should go to print towards the end of next week too. The flyers for that are done, as for the other two. Mark Halliday’s mock-up is somewhere in the post between here and the States. His cover isn’t done yet but it will be soon — oh and his title has changed: it is now No Panic Here.
Sphinx 11 is well underway, and so is part of 12. Desperately need to get these publications moving now. Being a perfectionist is such Doom: you never get things perfect anyway and it makes you so slow.
The STORY competition closed last Sunday. There were slightly more entries than the first year but substantially fewer than last year. This is probably connected with the recession, which has affected lots of competitions, and perhaps also to changing the date. It means (sadly) less income for the press but also fewer stories to read this year: we’ll get to the long list more quickly I think. And we will have covered the costs and made something towards pamphlet production. More on that soon.
And it’s raining. Again!
