Update: Day of the Dead story collection
This is a quick message to thank the contributors to the Day of the Dead book for the many, many submissions you have made for us to consider.
We thought it best to let you know where we are with it now, and what we are intending to do next.
The stories we’ve received are of a high quality. Some will need some extra work to make them shine. The rewriting and editing required will extend our preparation time dangerously close to publication deadlines. The pressure of organising those rewrites, the typesetting, printing and publishing of the book, mean that we would be up against the clock in a way we didn’t consider best for quality. We don’t want to publish a book in a hurry, when a little more time will make the book much better.
The second reason is that although the stories and readings for the Day of the Dead evening are required to be around 1,000 words, for the book, the limit is around 5,000 words.
At the moment, we have a lot of short material, and not much longer writing. For the rhythm of the book to be satisfying for the reader, we’d like some longer pieces.
For that reason, I would like to push back the deadline for submission until the end of October. This will give you time to work on that longer story.
Scare us to death with something horror-filled.
Make us snort tea out of our noses with witty tales.
Make us weep inconsolably to the piquant narrative you devise.
We have therefore decided to aim for a Portsmouth Bookfest publication date. A night of horror and scariness in mid-February 2016 could be great fun, and will give us a chance to get publicity up for the book.
So, relax for now. Thank you so much for your submissions so far. Will and I will be getting back to you about them in the coming few weeks.
Please, do also remember, if you have that longer story that you want to hone – we are here to read it.
Thank you.
