Rainy City Stories

I'm really delighted to announce the launch of a project that Chris (Mancubist) and I have been cooking up on the sly for some time now:

Rainy City Stories is a website that publishes new writing set in Manchester. It uses a Google map of the city to organise stories or poetry linked to particular places. Readers can click on a place marked by the little cloud icon to read a piece of writing associated with that spot.

Who can write for this site? Anybody can. We're open to all submissions of unpublished work. To get things rolling, we've commissioned pieces from four outstanding Mancunian writers: Jackie Kay, Mike Duff, Nicholas Royle and Rajeev Balasubramanyam. They're up now - go take a look.

But now we want YOU to send us your stories, poems or bits of memoir. If we like them, we'll put them on the map.

We've got big plans for the future, too.

We'll be publishing more commissioned writing in 2009, and expanding our site to include photography, graphics, and audio and video readings to accompany the words. A series of related writing workshops and a live literature event featuring some of the Rainy City Stories writers will be part of the 2009 Manchester Literature Festival. And we're investigating a fantastically exciting new possibility that would involve some of the best writing from the website, but we can't say much more about that yet.

Erm, what else should we tell you? The project is part of the Manchester Literature Festival's Freeplay programme, and it's funded by the good people of Arts Council England. Chris designed the site on Wordpress and is in charge of the techy stuff. I'll be doing the editing. No ferrets were harmed in the making of this website.

I'd love to hear what people think about the site so far - if you have some thoughts, leave a comment or email me at themanchizzle AT gmail DOT com.

Another Manchester blogger lands book deal

And we're back. I went by the ice rink in Piccadilly yesterday afternoon, which wasn't so festive. A few people were skating (and falling) through puddles in the rain, but the big screen made it all look very Blade Runner.

Some exciting news to report: Manchester freelance writer Maria Roberts, who (until now) has been anonymously writing Single Mother on the Verge, has just landed a deal with Penguin for a book based on her wry and funny semi-confessional blog. Maria has published several short stories and is a former City Life hack who has recently been working with Literature North West, and it's nice to see her hard work paying off.

And you may note that Maria is the second of this year's crop of Manchester Blog Award winners to get a book deal.(Not that the award had anything to do with Chris Killen's, but still.) Maria credits the award with raising her blog's profile and boosting her own confidence in her writing, both of which helped her land the publishing deal. And I've heard something about a third blog award winner being commissioned to write a blog-inspired column in one of the nationals... sheesh. Do we know how to pick 'em?

Santa's sack is bulging with new blogs for me to add to the blogroll, so stay tuned.