Christmas has become that time of year where I freak out; so much to get for so many people! Fortunately, it seems you can always rely on a book as a good present, and this year, what with the credit crunch affecting big booksellers as well as many of the rest of us, will the sale and purchase of this staple gift suffer? Or will it be embraced as a cheaper, more suitable alternative in these cash-strapped times?

Speaking from experience, I’ve found that younger people (particularly teenagers) who are not inclined to read books nor buy them have become fixated of late on the raft of celebrity autobiographies released every year; my sister showed interest in reading Sharon Osborne’s life story ‘Survivor’, despite not having any time for fictional books. With these cash-ins comes the inevitable boom in sales, and it seems that every year, a celebrity or eight release their autobiography to eager readers. Has our fascination with the cult of celebrity begun to influence our reading habits? Or has this same rabid need for knowledge of famous lives simply just brought non-readers out of their shells? The very fact that the celebs outsell fiction again this year, despite the financial climate, seems to suggest that the increase in reading has, and will not, abate as long as people can purchase their favourite celebrity’s autobiography. It’s sad to think that fiction suffers at the cost of these (financially-motivated?) tales of fame, and that in a time of financial crisis people will still be buying these highly-priced books. However, what must be remembered is that whilst the books may not be intellectually challenging, the very fact that people are eager to read something is something to be pleased about.

What do Jane Austen, Barack Obama and the BBC have in common? Although it may sound like the first line of a query letter for a time-travel-political-conspiracy-thriller, the real answer is Twitter, a microblogging service which users can update with entries up to 140 characters, sent from their mobiles or computers. Twitter enabled Obama supporters to keep up to date with the candidate on the election trail, lets “Auntie”http://twitter.com/BBCnews deliver headlines as they break, and helps readers to keep up with the latest serialised installments of Austen’s books.

Twitter is a great tool for writers, whether they want to keep in touch with their readers, or explore the new literary possibilities of 140 characters.

Publishing is very concerned with web 2.0, as everyone in Publishing is modishly calling it. Presses have websites, authors have blogs, people throw around names like LibraryThing and ReadySteadyBook and all the other exceptionally-well-known sites that make it into the Bookseller and the Guardian and places like that. So it was a little jarring, but really quite funny, to go to the SYP conference a few weekends ago and be told, very early on in the first panel by Mark Thwaite (of the aforementioned ReadySteadyBook), that most publishers’ websites are rubbish. And most authors only blog a couple of times before giving up. And, in a majority of cases, for all the talk, Publishing doesn’t know what to do with web 2.0.

Of course, there are some publishers who are doing interesting internet things- Penguin, for example, of We Tell Stories and The Shadow War – but a great deal of the very interesting things are happening on sites like CompletelyNovel. Site like CN are using the internet as a means to continue doing all sorts of things that people like to do already – reading books, writing books, hanging out with people who like books – but doing them better. CN is doing something particularly unique with its combination of reading and writing communities. My friends are, as Bill Hicks would have it, Readers, but I couldn’t have a conversation about first lines of great novels with them. My bookshelves in real life are not nearly so organised as they are on my CN profile, and I simply can’t get the hang of showing off my reading in such a stylish and natural way offline. And I certainly wouldn’t have come across a wonderful novel like Gateshead Grace anywhere but CN – I wouldn’t have picked it up without the reviews and recommendations of the people on the site, whose tastes I know are similar to mine because their profiles show me so.

All of which is a very long-winded answer to the question Anna suggested I write a blog entry about: why I was interested in doing work experience with CompletelyNovel.

Well, commencing my second week of commuting has certainly taken its toll on my general health, wellbeing and levels of exhaustion.
For the first time, I’ve found myself sleeping in the mornings on the way in to London. Falling asleep in the evenings is sort of common place, as it is a regular sight on the five thirty train to see swathes of middle-aged office workers fast asleep like babies; their heads lolling with the motion of the train.

However, my new-found napping in the mornings is slightly odd. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s my body telling me that at 8.20am I should still be tucked up in bed as opposed to competing for elbow room with the suited and booted I find myself surrounded by.

Once I’ve actually arrived here, the tiredness wears off and the real work begins. I’ve still found that the work load has been steady, and that my previous concerns regarding boredom are unfounded. I’ve managed to happily sit behind the laptop here for 6 hours a day and manage to occupy myself with work.

Typically, when you think of a student doing a work experience placement, your mind conjures up images of endless coffee making, stapling and hours spent doing the thankless task of filing. At other placements I have done in the past, some or all of the above have been applicable. I was therefore ever so slightly apprehensive about spending another two weeks of un-paid hard work in order to become a fully-fledged super-stapling maestro.
However, I needn’t have worried. As I come to finishing my first week at CompletelyNovel, I can safely say that I haven’t had a dull thing to do all week. Just some of the stuff I’ve been able to get stuck into includes writing articles for the website, compiling questions for the organiser of a book club and reading through submissions to CompletelyNovel’s short story competition. As you’ll probably agree, these are all really interesting tasks that you wouldn’t typically associate with someone doing work experience to be graced with.

After a month of everyone’s hard work, the CompletelyNovel short story competition drew to a close this week. We received over 60 short story submissions, and the standard proved to be very high indeed! These writers sent in their work from all corners of the globe, from Australia to India, Greece to America. Among the most popular subject matter chosen were relationships and personal strife. However, as always, there were those that broke from any sort of convention and chose to write about the mythical, the weird and the wonderful. Regardless of subject matter, the most frequent perspective written from was that of the first person. Also, unsurprisingly, the busiest period for submissions was the last four days of the competition, with around half of the total pieces being sent in during this time. However, now begins the tough task of finding the winners…

Short Story Season is upon us once again and CompletelyNovel are running their own FREE TO ENTER competition to celebrate their public launch in October. The theme is apt: change, innovation and imagination. CN has teamed up with the Society of Young Publishers to find the best up and coming writers and the winners will be chosen by the rising stars of the publishing industry.

Many a fine writer has cut their teeth, or sharpened their pencil if you will, with the short story. For writers such as Raymond Carver the short story was their métier; being able to distil emotion into fewer than ten thousand poetic words. The word limit for this competition however is two and a half thousand so will prove all the more challenging – but a challenge is what motivates us right?

My work experience at CN has involved spreading the word of the competition throughout Facebook and MySpace and I’ve found so many groups dedicated to writing, not to mention all the writing sites in existence on the good old internet- thingy, that it’s quite bewildering for an aspiring writer to find an audience. I dabble now and then with short story writing and have never been sure where to start with putting it online as there’s never any guarantee that someone will read it, let alone find it.

So what better way to raise your profile than by entering CompletelyNovel’s Short Story Competition? The winners will be published in the CompletelyNovel Launch Anthology as well as receiving editorial advice from the SYP and a free copy of the anthology. The top five favourites will be offered a CompletelyNovel assisted-publishing package for any other original manuscript they have produced.

They say you have to be in it to win it.

Oh and the deadline is 1st September so not long to go! Check here for further information.

After a long drought and near-extinction, the Short Story seems to be finally, slowly, clawing its way back into the popular literature market. But how did they become “the black sheep of the literary world” in the first place, and why is now the perfect time for their resurrection?

“Short stories are murder to get into the public arena—the printed media rarely review them and many bookshops are reluctant to stock them unless they have a local relevance or are written by a well-known novelist.” – Salt Publishing

Recently, the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award caused an outcry by bypassing the tradition of a short-list and announcing the outright winner as Jhumpa Lahiri, for her collection Unaccustomed Earth As a result, many in the publishing and literary world, (including the likes of Susan Hill and Elizabeth Bains), felt that, not only had the judges denied authors of their five (at least) minutes of fame, but had underestimated the importance of the short-list to the publicity of the genre in general.

“…writers, particularly writers of short stories, need all the help they can get.” -Nicholas Lezard (Guardian books blog)

In the Guardian Book Blog section of their website, the newspaper has just published an article concerning the ‘69’ theory, (no, not the one half of you are now imagining), the OTHER theory, created by Marshall McLuhan (the Canadian academic).

He said, the way to decide if a novel is any good and worth reading, is to read the 69th page. The Guardian author of this article set out to test this theory, reading books like Don Quixote and The Da Vinci Code. Their findings were varying with each text.

So, as a dedicated first page reader, this new concept intrigued me, and in the next few weeks I will be investigating this concept myself. I will read the 69th page of a variety of novels and report back whether, based on this one page, I would buy or bin this book (ok, not bin in, place it safely back on the self for someone else to purchase).

Let’s see if 69 will be my magic number!

Ok, this is my first attempt at a blog entry as the new work experience gal for CN…actually, my first attempt at a propr blog entry ever, for anything, so it may all end in disaster.

When I first heard what CN was all about, my first thought was how I could shower all my loved ones (mainly my parents) with a proper bound, real-life-looking published version of my very own writing…then I realised how narcissistic this sounded and decided that maybe my dad would just prefer a cd and a nice pepper grinder for his birthday.

So, instead I am testing out the website and bulking it up by adding things to my own profile (worringly- for my sanity, not CN’s popularity-doing this is a lot like updating your profile on Facebook), and writing reviews. This is something I haven’t done since secondary school, (and was probably much better at then than I am now). I feel like I am writing mini essays instead of smart, to the point, summaries that the Time Out guide would be happy to print, like I should be. (I apologise if anyone else reads these reviews and also feels like this!)

Also, to carry on another blog?/ post? (I still need to learn the correct blogging lingo), I read about the idea to ‘murder your darlings’ after seeing it on here, and I too find this an intriguing concept, as I am one of those many people who tend to read and re-read any of my own work I find particularly good; I keep it in a draw in my room and take it out if I’m feeling particualrly uninspired or just rubbish. So when I read this idea I imgained taking a lighted match to this draw of my precious precious work and watching all the years of past writing disappear… and realised I could never ‘murder my darlings,’ not entirely, not all of them, so I take off my literary hat to those who can and have.

That’s enough of my waffling blog entry for now then, I will get back to researching and image finding.

The advice to murder your darlings is perhaps one of the more useful pieces of advice I’ve received about writing, reminding the writer that just being the best piece of writing you’ve ever done doesn’t qualify anything for preservation if it’s not serving a useful purpose. However, during this week I’ve found that the advice from a creative writing tutor to stop listening to my Inner Editor has been far more useful.

Everyone has an Inner Editor. He, or she (or, indeed, it) is the ultimate pushy parent. Unlike your Inner Child, he (for the sake of argument, it’s gender-stabilised now) is very well-read, knows all about grammar and style and spelling, and has rules about all of them. He’s determined that every sentence you write must be an exact masterpiece, every preposition perfectly in place and every phrase intelligently rounded…

So, I’m here as the resident English and Creative Writing student, doing work experience at CompletelyNovel in order to investigate today’s publishing world, particularly that part of it that resides online.

Things That I Have Learned include:

There aren’t as many sites like CN as one might think. There are Print On Demand sites like Lulu.com, which allow you to publish a book but not to discuss it; there are writing sites like Authorsden.com, which allow you to discuss a book but not to publish it; there are reading sites like shelfari.com, which allow you to discuss previously-published books. To my surprise, I’ve been unable to find a single site which combines all three.

It rains a lot in London. This is probably invariably true whether or not one is working in the cause of publishing.

Self-publishing isn’t as silly an idea as I once thought. Since the chances of any writer being picked up by a publishing house is very low, the chances of that writer being you even lower, and the chances of your work being successful (regardless of merit) are even lower than that, why not give your friends, family and anyone interested in your writing something to read in the meantime, and without the effort, loss of control or demand to make a profit required in so-called “real” publishing?

There appears to be no index to the Internet as regards to writers. Every community appears to be small or unstructured, and will rarely have links to anywhere else. Perhaps CN can shake this up a bit…