NFFD Bulletin – 23/05/12

Well, can you believe that a week has already come and gone since National Flash-Fiction Day? How time flies!

I thought I would send out this bulletin to bring you up to date, let you know what happened, what's happening, and what's going to happen, and generally set you on your way.

First, though, I need to send out another thank you to everyone who took part in events on the day. I need to make special mention of the following:

Gavin Inglis for the Edinburgh event, Brindley Hallam Dennis for Carlisle, Wes Brown for Leeds and Denise Sparrowhawk for Hartlepool. Thanks also to all of #FlashTag - Sarah-Clare Conlon, Fat Roland, Dave Hartley, Tom Mason and Benjamin Judge - for flash-bombing the whole of Manchester, and to Dan Carpenter, Nici West and Joe Daly of Bad Language for the Manchester evening event, as well as Jane Bradley at For Books' Sake for the workshop run there.

I must also thank Mike Morris for Liverpool's End of the World event, Carole Burns for organising the Cardiff event and Emma Corfield-Waters from Book-ish for the Abergavenney one; Pauline Fisk and The Shrewsbury CoffeeHouse for the Tuesday event which started everything off, Dan Holloway for the Oxford Slam, and also Grit Lit in Brighton for linking their event up with us.

Thanks also to Valerie O'Riordan, Emma J Lannie and Josephine Corcoran for running flash-workshops on and around the day, and many thanks to Angela Hicken from Winchester Discovery Centre and Allison Kirby from Southampton Central Library for their help with the workshop and reading/launch that I organised down here, as well as to everyone who came and read, wrote or listened. 

Thanks to Rebecca Emin, Ian Hawley, Dan Holloway (again), Kirsty Logan, Helena Mallett, Marc Nash, Alison Wells and (eventually!) Simon Sylvester for making their e-books free for us to give away. 

And also thanks to Rachel Carter, Bad Language (again), 4.33", Book-ish (again), Antonia Bell, Sarah Hilary, Jane Brunning, Natalie Bowers, Vic Errington, Susi Holliday and Anna Meade for running such wonderful competitions in the run up to the day, and producing, in some cases, such beautiful anthologies, and of course thanks to Valerie O'Riordan (again) and her partner Andy Broadey for helping to put Jawbreakerstogether and make it look so darned good!

And (nearly done...) to Alex Thornber, Rachel Dunlop and Emily Cleaver for running http://nffdflashpoints.blogspot.co.uk/ and to Susi (again), Shirley Golden, Nettie Thomson, Cassandra Parkin, Susan Howe and Caroline Kelly for helping me to run http://flashfloodjournal.blogspot.co.uk/. 

And a personal thank you to Kath Lloyd who kept me (reasonably) sane through the mammoth process of running the day and did a lot of behind the scenes work. 

I know I've left loads of people out, but in lots of cases I don't know your names! So a huge, huge thank you to everyone who wrote something, read something, listened to something, came along to something, passed the word about something, or just generally sat at home with a cup of tea and supported the efforts of National Flash-Fiction Day!

Okay, Oscar-acceptance speech over, onto the nitty gritty!

• First up, just to let you know that there are still competitions on the Competitions page and events on the Events page of the website (including my own appearance at the Worcestershire Lit Fest, do come along), so don't forget about those. And, if new 'flash' events or competitions come your way, do send them over. The website is not going to just disappear now the day is over, it will change a bit and we will not be updating quite so often, but we'll still be here and still doing our thing, so don't forget us.

• Next, I want to mention the free e-books that we gave away. Apologies, first, for those of you who tried to download Simon Sylvester's 140 Characters only to find it wasn't free. Apparently there had been a glitch somewhere in the process and a switch didn't get thrown. I did try to let people know through the Facebook page, but only had limited internet access so couldn't get to the web-page to alter it. The book was listed as free the next day, so hopefully some of you caught it then. On the subject of the books, however, it appears that around 150 people downloaded each of the books, which is wonderful, but the giveaway only works to support the writers if you spread the word. So, if you have read the books and you enjoyed them, please do go back to the Amazon pages and click on the 'Like' button up near the top, and also please leave a review to tell other people why they should buy copies with real money. Also, if you run a blog or website, please do consider writing reviews of the books there, or putting up a link to the books, or similar. One of the best ways to support a writer is to recommend their work. Thanks.

• A quick mention, as well, for the mooted anthology collecting together the winning entries from the various competitions. This is still on the cards and will be called 'I Can Show You The World and other stories' and will be out soon. It will be a free e-book available (probably) from Smashwords, so stay tuned for that. 

• Having mentioned books, I should mention Jawbreakers. The e-book is now available on Kindle at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jawbreakers-ebook/dp/B0083BRYKW/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1337333761&sr=1-1 for you to download and enjoy immediately! Or you can still order real, physical, paper copies from us here at NFFD via http://www.nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/anthology.html. If neither of those take your fancy, there are copies for sale in Brighton's Waterstones (it would be great if they could sell out...) or you can come along to one of the launches we're organising for the book. We only have a confirmed date for one so far, but it is at Blackwell's in Manchester (by the university) on Friday 8th June at 6.30pm, so do please come along. More details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/429476600404131/. We are also now working on a Bristol launch, a Brighton one, and a London one, and if you'd like us to come to your area, do drop us a line.

• And so, onto the future. As you might have noticed above, I already alluded to the fact that the website will be continuing, so you have probably guessed that so will National Flash-Fiction Day. It's true. It went too well to give up. So plans are already being made for NFFD2013. But... we're not going to start just yet. Personally, I need a bit of downtime after all that hard work and excitement, plus I have lots of my own writing to do and - oh yes - I'm getting married in less than 6 weeks! So, the website will be tidied up, sales, events and launches for Jawbreakers will continue, and the occasional bulletin will trickle out, but I think we should all take a breather now until about September, at which point we'll pull the tarp off, put the key in the ignition and get the engine ticking over once more. Thank you for all your hard work, take a well earned break, but start thinking about what you'd like to do for next year, because that was just a trial run, next time we do it even bigger and better!!

All the best, thank you again, and have a great summer.