ABCtales late April Newsletter - new competition announced!

Dear ABCtalers,

Another newsletter quite so quickly? Well, exciting things are afoot in ABCland and I want to keep you fully abreast of them.

Our new baby, www.ABCtalesradio.com is going well. Felicity Shakespeare and Ewan Lawrie have new pieces up – and very good they are too. I do hope you can give them a listen as soon as possible.

And please, please, do think about putting your own stories up in this way. We thought long and hard before offering this new service and we decided to do so because we strongly believe that thinking about your writing in this way – what it sounds like - can help enormously in your efforts towards improvement. And there is big demand out there for spoken stories – so you will also be reaching out to an additional audience.

I and my colleague at ABCtales, David Keighley - along with Ian Skillicorn at Short Story Radio – have been working to make the new service more well known, and this week, we are distributing a press release to a wide number of those interested in creative writing in newspapers, magazines and online as well as to broadcasters.

Fingers crossed that it gets written about! Please help in any way you can and spread the word among your friends.

I am also pleased to announce a new competition which could get you noticed by a leading publisher who is keenly interested in developing new talent. The winners of both the prose and poetry sections will have their pieces read by a well known actor and put on www.ABCtalesradio.com. Entry is £5. Word limits are 2,000 for prose and 500 for poetry. Each entry must contain the phrases ‘red dress’ and ‘park bench’ but they need not be central to the piece. Full rules and details on how to enter can be found on www.abctales.com, www.abctalesradio.com and www.shortstoryradio.com.

The judge – whom we know well - is Trevor Dolby, Senior Editor at Preface Publishing. Closing date is Wednesday 27th May 2009. Good luck!

ABCtales evenings are becoming increasingly popular. Next month, we are mounting one as part of the Brighton Festival. It’s on Friday 8th May at a great venue - the Iron Duke on Waterloo Street in Hove and runs from 7pm to 8 pm. Readers are David Floyd (bukharinwasmyfavouritecommunist) Annika Sommerville (niki72), Richard Aronowitz-Mercer (aronowitz) as well as our former Editor and now prolific author, Emily Dubberley and me! Entrance is £5. It’s a great time to visit Brighton – the Festival is in full swing and details of all Festival and Fringe Festival events can be found at http://www.brightonfestival.org/ and http://www.brightonfestivalfringe.org.uk/ . It’s the biggest arts Festival outside of Edinburgh in the UK and well worth a visit. I do hope to see you there.

A quick note of amazement and congratulations for one of our most prolific writers – Biggus. He has now clocked up over one million reads for this work – why not add a few more by going to his home page and reading some of his ditties: http://www.abctales.com/user/biggus

Please take a look at the home page where Barnado’s are asking for assistance from ABCtales writers. It’s a great chance to get published and do some good at the same time. More details here: http://www.abctales.com/node/582112

You should also check out one of our newest writers – batteriesfeelincluded. He began adding his work to ABCtales in the past week or so and there’s some real gems in there. I commend them to you: http://www.abctales.com/user/batteriesfeelincluded

As many of you will be aware ABCtales only runs on your donations. I take jobs from time to time to keep the wolf from the door and to keep things ticking over. One of the companies I work for is the Blue Rocket/Green Rocket PR group. As an old journalist, PR companies are often regarded as the bane of my life but I really enjoy working for this lot. They are young, bright, efficient and very, very good at what they do because they take a journalistic approach and actually understand what’s needed at the other end. If you have the responsibility for marketing or PR in your working life then I genuinely recommend that you take a look at them. They can be found at: http://www.bluerocketgroup.com/ and http://www.greenrocketgroup.com/

A final word on one of our longest standing and most loved members – Sooz. Sue Simpson’s corruscatingly honest diaries have kept many of us on the edges of our seats over the years. Her love of reptiles is well documented and now she’s started her own zoo in Barrow in Furness. If any of you are in the area then do drop in and say ‘hi’. It’s an extraordinary venture by an extraordinary woman. For more details go to: http://www.abctales.com/forum/2009/04/08/sooz-has-got-zoo

I do hope that you will enter the competition, listen to the new pieces on ABCtales Radio and come along on May 8th in Brighton.

Don’t forget to click the Google Ads on the site – they help to pay our way!

All the very best to you all,
Tony Cook and the ABCtales.com team