Legend Press

Christmas Day - Advent book of the Day!

Each day of advent we have been profiling a different Legend Press book on our blog! The best selling book will be at the top of our Christmas tree on the blog on 25th December.

If you haven't guessed from the picture already the book at the top of our Christmas tree is 8 Rooms! The book was the 4th collection in our Short Story Re-Invented series.

I hope everyone enjoyed the daily pictures and hope they all bought you some festive cheer. I hope you all have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Tom, Lucy and Lauren

8 Rooms in Borders Leeds

Above is a video of Andrew Kirby and Miranda Winram's reading event at Borders Leeds the other week. The authors were reading their own short stories from current short story collection 8 Rooms, which if you haven't brought a copy yet, has a great mix of stories from eight talented authors.

If you can't see the video above click here!

Just as a quick reminder submissions for our 2010 collection are now currently open, see link on the right for further submission details. We are hoping for a record number of submissions this year and we are looking forward to discovering new writing talent as well as promoting the writing of existing published authors.

Lucy

Successful 8 Rooms signing in York!

On Saturday three authors from our fantastic short story collection 8 Room were at Waterstone's in York promoting the book and selling lots of signed copies! The authors Andrew Kirby, Miranda Winram and Guy Mankowski all have local links to the area and it was great to have an event that included so many authors. The event was a great success, out-selling the last event in Leeds and we look forward to lots more events across the country to promote this brilliant collection.

Lucy

8 Rooms event in Devon

Emma Seaman's book signing at Waterstone's Newton Abbot was featured in the Mid Devon Advertiser last week. Along with a great chance to get a signed copy of our latest short story collection 8 Rooms the event featured a masseuse giving free hand massages. To see the article click the link below: 

Mid Devon Advertiser - 29th May

The event reflected the subject of Emma's story, which is the 5th in the collection. Emma's story follows a character called John who whilst havinig his back massaged reflects on his life and fantasises about his beautiful Polish masseuse, Hana.

Lucy

Order your copy of 8 Rooms now - £7.99 

8 Rooms launched!

8 Rooms the fantastic short story collection was officially released on Saturday. The collection, which is the fourth in our critically acclaimed Short Story Re-invented Series brings together the work of 8 talented authors: Mark Kotting, Emma Seaman, Caroline Carver, Miranda Winram, A J Kirby, Rebecca Strong, Guy Mankowski and D E Rhylis.

At the launch last Thursday at the Phoenix Artist Club it was great to hear all the authors speak about how their stories were inspired: Caroline's from her trip to China, Rebecca's from her experience of being pregnant for example.

It is brilliant to see 8 quite different authors bought together in one collection, with all stories thought-provoking and powerful in their own particular way. We look forward to the collection being a great success, with various events and coverage planned.

Lucy

Order your copy now - £7.99 

Emma Seaman new website

Legend author Emma Seaman has a double celebration this week - as well as her inclusion in our fantastic new 'Eight Rooms' anthology, she also launches her new website - find her at www.emmaseaman.co.uk.

The website is designed to showcase Emma's writing, but she also hopes to offer a service, via her blog, for fledgling writers.

"I'm going to offer tips and ideas, as well as details of any interesting short story submission opportunities that I come across, " she says. "I figure that the more good short story writers there are submitting to publishers, the better it is for all of us... I want to continue the good work Legend have done in revitalising the short story anthology for a modern readership, and hope that I can help other writers on their path to publication."

Emma's work has been widely published and she's also the only author to be included in all four of Legend Press's 'The Short Story Re-invented' series of anthologies.

Lucy

Pre-order your copy now - £7.99 

Author Post: Rebecca Strong

A long-time dream came true when my first novel, Here or There, was published by Legend Press in 2007. It's fair to say that at the time it was my 'baby', written in a year and lovingly nurtured into existence, with the help of Tom and others at Legend Press (we could call Tom the 'sperm donor' to my novel but that might be taking it a bit far!) I devoted as much time as possible to it, pre- and post-publication, and enjoyed every minute. However, just over six months later, a new 'baby' entered my life: I was pregnant with my first child, and writing promptly took a backseat.

I started my maternity leave from a full-time job a month before my baby was due, and found it was the perfect opportunity to write one last story before all my time would be dedicated to him. And when I heard the theme for Legend Press's latest short story collection - a story set in one room - I realised that my pregnancy provided the perfect premise. I was very excited when it was chosen for the collection - not least because it somewhat justified me putting my profession down as 'Writer' on my son's birth certificate!

Becoming a parent is one of those all-consuming experiences that changes the whole meaning of your life. Feeling a new human being growing inside you is nothing less than amazing. But on the flip side, I am intrigued by the fact that none of us can remember life in the womb. Science can only take us so far: who really knows just how much a baby absorbs, and is aware of, before it is born? They say an unborn baby is affected by its mother's emotions, that it can recognise voices and pieces of music, and, once born, is comforted by the bond it formed in this protective chamber.

My story, Expecting, explores the thoughts and feelings of a fictional, unborn child and examines just how much parental responsibility begins at the moment of conception, rather than birth.

If you'd like more information on my writing, please take a look at www.rebeccastrong.co.uk, and I hope you enjoy reading all the stories in 8 Rooms.

Rebecca

8 Rooms is published this Saturday and is the fourth collection in the Short Story Re-invented series.

Pre-order your copy now - £7.99 

Author blog - Miranda Winram

A Room of My Own (one story in the upcoming book ‘8 Rooms’) is scraped together unmercifully from fragments of my own experience. I’d recently embarrassed myself by lighting a bonfire carelessly and had had petrol explode in my face. Followed by several weeks avoiding anyone who might look at me and require an explanation of my stupidity. It seems that even my mother, not known for getting her hands dirty, knows that you use paraffin not petrol to light a fire. Well I do too now.

           So Farah was born, not (like me) stupid, but constrained by her circumstances, and ending up in the same place, a hospital burns unit. And, as I started writing, I recalled the reports of sutee in The Hindistan Times, and the stories of help unstintingly given that I’d been told in a women’s refuge in Sheffield. And the children’s jingle - I’ve no idea where that came from but it was there from the moment I started this story.

            A Room of My Own is a story about needing space to think, and about the fellowship of strangers. We all need that from time to time.

I hope that you like them, Deepa and Jena and Sarah and Farah.

Pre-order your copy now - £7.99 

Lucy

A Blog from 8 Rooms author Emma Seaman

25 Random facts about ‘Intimacy’… by Emma Seaman

In the spirit of the internet meme that is currently flying around on Facebook and elsewhere, here are 25 semi-random things about writing my short story Intimacy, which is included in the latest Legend Press collection, ‘Eight Rooms’. Read it, tag it on to 25 friends, then make up your own 25 random facts about something you love…

1. The story is alternately narrated by John (receiving a massage) and his therapist, Hana (giving the massage). They would both be very surprised to learn what the other is thinking.…

2. I love the challenge of writing stories with multiple points of view.

3. The story was originally called He said / She said.

4. This is my fourth appearance with Legend Press, making me their only writer to grace every anthology so far. I feel very lucky and really appreciate these guys!

5. A beauty therapist suggested last year that I write a story set in a salon. So here you are, Debbie!

6. I guess I subconsciously got the germ of the idea when I heard another beautician calling her male clients ‘Johns’.

7. I want to offer free hand massages at the March book signing for ‘Eight Rooms’ but am struggling to find a masseuse who doesn’t think it's a wind-up!

8. I submitted two stories to Legend for this anthology but this was the one they liked.

9. I adore massages.

10. I frequently have to jump out of bed to write down ideas that form as I’m drifting off to sleep.

11. My husband is a very patient man who is now used to me getting distracted by these ‘writing voices’...

12. Hana’s Polish phrases were translated via the Polish Culture website.

13. Seeing an adder crawling across a pathway is one of my childhood memories, but it seemed suitably phallic for John in his reverie.

14. I’d love to be a man for a day to understand what it is really like…

15. My stories are getting longer, which gives me hope that I’m gaining the stamina to finish my novels.

16. I love writing as it gives me the chance to explore other lives.

17. I really enjoyed the research for this story and almost subscribed to a ‘deep tissue massage therapist’ magazine.

18. I believe in serendipity – just after I started this story, I happened across useful newspaper and radio articles about therapies and Polish ex-pats.

19. ‘Smyngus Dingus’ is a real Polish Easter celebration. Honestly.

20. Though I imagine other nationalities find some of our traditions equally amusing. Hot cross buns anyone?

21. My parents don’t appreciate the (fairly moderate) sexual content of my stories.

22. My father-in-law has never read anything I have had published as he says he likes me too much to want to be disillusioned.

23. I love the way that you can now get Polish foods in the supermarket, especially cherry juice and gingerbread.

24. John is an amalgam of several annoying men I have known, with some extra kinks and twists that are all his own.

25. I’m on a deadline today, but feel guilty for sticking my children in front of Cbeebies while I finish this…

Emma

Pre-order your copy now - £7.99 

8 Rooms author - Guy Mankowski

When I wrote ‘A Body of Strangers’ I was living a slightly bizarre double life. By day I was working as an Assistant Psychologist in a private hospital in London, with some of England’s most unusual patients. But each night I was moonlighting with ‘a glam, Dickensian pop band’ in London’s sleaziest (and this often just meant dirtiest) music venues. At five o clock on the dot my cheap suit would be shed, and I’d find myself donning a range of (what we tended to call) ‘street urchin chic’, to take to the stage in. When I say ‘take to the stage’ I actually mean something far less glamorous than this implies. Nine times out of ten this would be a deserted venue, perhaps with a smattering of disinterested scenesters in attendance, somewhere in the grimmest parts of the East End. We might be on before a jazz band – we might have kidded promoters we were the jazz band. I would usually have sneaked into the hospital that morning with an oversized hold all (invariably containing a velvet coat, some cheap cosmetics, a pair of pointy shoes and possibly at least one dodgy hat), while fellow psychologists went for the slightly more typical three-books-under-the-arm-look. I’d leave at quarter to five, and start gradually getting changed on the District Line, in order to make sound check on time. After meeting my band mates and finding a cheap place to eat, (usually a noodle van in Camden, offering Chicken Chow Mein for £2.75), we’d play the gig, and afterwards pawn cds, mingle with strangers, and just see where we ended up. This existence seemed strange enough, with me trying to hold down a respectable job on four hours sleep a night, but one day it sank in just how ridiculous it was. One of the patients I worked with was a recently reformed violent criminal, and part of my job was to help him reintegrate himself with the community. I don’t mind admitting that I was scared of him. But I became even more scared, when having only had time for a quick shower to wash off the previous nights gig, he one day turned to me and said ‘Tell me the truth. Have you been wearing glitter?’ That kind of conversation was becoming less and less unusual. On a Monday morning my boss would typically ask what I’d got up to over the weekend, and I would almost always feel stumped for an honest response. This man was going to write me a reference one day. It never seemed right to say ‘I did a gig on the circle line, and ended up sleeping on a roof garden in Bethnal Green’. I’d usually plump for ‘I had a quiet one’, and hope he didn’t use Google.

I enjoyed working at that hospital, and the work I did there inspired me to write again for the first time since school. What interested me most was the one-on-one sessions I had with patients. I was always intrigued to learn about the strange worlds some of them had created in their own minds. One patient was sure he had played a major role in the Spanish Armada, and he would only drink coconut milk. Another frequently interrupted sessions to let the ‘three blue men’ behind him have a say in matters. But what seemed apparent to me was that, to a greater or lesser extent, many of us have created fantasy worlds we can’t quite tear ourselves from. And also, far from them being something we need to be ‘rehabilitated’ from, they can be our lifeblood. In ‘A Body of Strangers’ my narrator has a delusional, dangerous way of looking at the world, and also for conducting his personal life. But because of his success (he is a well-known translator) such delusions can be upheld in the eyes of the world. ‘Fantasy worlds’, and to an extent delusions too, seem validated if they become useful or ‘art’ – but not if they become dysfunctional. With my story I wanted to question whether the line we draw between ‘okay fantasy worlds’ and ‘not okay fantasy worlds’ is quite as concrete as we like to imagine. There were other issues I wanted to address with it too, issues I feel perhaps more strongly about, but I’d like to leave it to the reader to interpret the piece how they see fit. I’m pleased to be part of the ‘8 Rooms’ Collection. I think short stories are a unique way to express your imagination, and I’m sure collections like these will give people an opportunity to connect with this often overlooked but nonetheless exciting medium.

Guy Mankowski

Pre-order your copy now - £7.99 

8 Rooms authors - A.J. Kirby

 

People are scared of all kinds of things; spiders, jelly (jello for our American cousins), heights or the Chuckle Brothers. I’m scared of the email message beep which tells me that important mail has arrived.

Have you ever been scared to open an email? It might be one from a prospective partner or from the recruitment department of a company you’ve applied to work for. Or it might be from Legend Press; the much anticipated correspondence which will inform me whether my submission for the new anthology, 8 Rooms, has been successful.

Use of email has made the submission process for aspiring authors much easier. But when an email bounces back, you generally have absolutely no idea of its contents. In the olden days when people still used the postal system for this type of thing, you could still make a qualified guess as to the response by judging the weight of the envelope and whether the publishing company in question had simply sent the whole story back, probably unread.

So, the email from Legend Press sat in my inbox for a solid four hours before I dared to open it. By which time I’d driven myself mad by trying to second guess its contents. You see, writing something which would be published by Legend Press has been an ambition of mine for some time now. I’ve watched their growth as a company which publishes the kind of stuff I want to write… and read. In 2008, my novel, When Elephants walk through the Gorbals was third place winner in the 2008 Luke Bitmead Writers' Bursary competition which was run by Legend Press. The prize was publication.

To come so close was a blow, but my attendance at the prize-giving evening, where I met Lucy and Tom, as well as Luke’s family, spurred me on to try even harder. It was with these people in mind that I finally opened the email and read that my story had been accepted… And then I read it again, having decided that my eyes had been playing tricks with me.

They hadn’t. My story, ‘A Galaxy far, far away’ will appear in the forthcoming anthology, and I can’t tell you how delighted I am. I’ve had fridge magnets printed up featuring the book’s cover and I’ve distributed them amongst everyone I know… What can I learn from the whole episode? I suppose I’ve learned that I‘m a wimp at heart. But this avoidance of ‘moments of truth’ is the only real similarity between my main character and I, despite the first person narration in my story. It’s fiction, people, please! And what’s it about? Well, I can sum it up in one, rather wordy, over-punctuated sentence:

When a baby enters Mark’s carefully-constructed world of convenience, he finds his boundaries re-drawn; everything that was once a certainty is now shown to be built on fragile foundations; they are as much fictions as the fabled ‘galaxy far, far away’ in his beloved Star Wars.

Andrew Kirby

Pre-order your copy of 8 Rooms now - £7.99 

8 Rooms authors announced

 We are pleased to announce the 8 authors chosen to be part of the new short story re-invented collection '8 Rooms' are:

D.E. Rhylis - The Photo on the Bookcase

Emma Seaman - Intimacy

Rebecca Strong - Expecting

Guy Mankowski - A Body of Strangers

Andrew Kirby - A Galaxy far far away

C. J. Carver - Prisoner 83217-3601

Mark Kotting - The Dream Catcher

Miranda Winram - A Room of My Own

Thank you to everyone who submitted stories for the collection, we received hundreds of submissions and we have really enjoyed reading and discussing them over the last few months. The standard was extremely high and we are delighted to be publishing these 8 talented authors.

Lucy, Lauren and Tom

8 Rooms cover

Here is the cover for the 2009 short story collection '8 Rooms' which is published at the end of March. We have been busy choosing the eight stories over Christmas and have enjoyed reading all the entries we have been sent. This year we received hundreds of interesting stories and we will be contacting all the authors with the final decision at the start of next week. 

Thank you to everyone that submitted stories and we look forward to publishing a brilliant and varied collection in March!

Lucy, Lauren and Tom.