Tolkien Competition

I am rather excited to be able to announce our latest competition! HarperCollins have just relaunched their official Tolkien Store, which includes some rather special offers.

One of these exclusive deals is a hardback copy of ‘Tales from the Perilous Realm‘…

This de luxe collector’s edition includes the first edition text and features an exclusive colour frontispiece illustration on a fold-out sheet. The book is quarterbound, with a specially commissioned motif stamped in three foils on the front board, and is presented in a matching slipcase. SIGNED BY ALAN LEE.

For full details of how to enter, please see the thread on the forum.

Server down!

It would appear that the whole server has gone down, and unfortunately the person who can look into it is at work.

Sorry to keep you all away from your favourite forum.. hopefully you can all do lots of reading instead – which you can tell us all about when we’re back!

Update (13:50) – Everything is back up and running! :0)

Calling All Writers – Your Messages!

Our visiting Featured Author at the moment is Lynne Rees, who came to my attention when I read Messages, one of my favourite books of the year. Following on from that came Your Messages, an online writing project. It’s now in it’s second year, and it’s something I’m enjoying reading every day.

In the words of Lynne..

Thanks for mentioning this, Michelle. Your Messages was a writing project, devised to co-incide with the new edition of Messages, that Sarah and I ran online in November last year. Each day we posted a 300 word prompt from the book and anyone could respond with their own original 300 word piece, before 8am GMT the next morning. At the end of the month we chose a selection of the strongest pieces and these were published in an anthology, Your Messages, which was launched at The Poetry Cafe in London in February this year.

We were stunned by the high quality of writing and by the enthusiasm of so many writers, some of whom responded every day of November, and by the support of so many of them at the launch – we had writers from Texas and Austria and from all over the UK too.

I don’t think we’d really forseen how successful the project could be though, because at the end of the month we found ourselves reading through the equivalent of two copies of War and Peace to make our selections! But it was very much worth the time and effort because we met up with a wonderful community of writers and stayed in touch… so much so that the demand was still there for a similar project this year. You can check on either of the following links for details (they both take you through to the same page):

www.yourmessages.org
http://writeyourmessages.blogspot.com/