Pinocchio will be a real boy!

Okayokayokay - the news is kind of leaking out drip by drop and, as has been pointed out to me, it now appears in my author's bio over at Nth Position - so I may as well say here, too, that my manuscript has gone down a light summer storm over at Salt Publishing, and they have accepted it, so I am now a Salt Poet-in-waiting.

This is great news, of course, for a variety of reasons, not least is that I think Salt is a fabulous press, which is doing fabulous things at the moment and shaking poetry publishing up a little bit. They have a great attitude to poetry: it can be sort of summed up, as a riposte to those who feel that a preoccupation with filthy lucre might taint their Art, thus: "You're not going to be doing much service to Poetry if people aren't buying the books."

Salt poets to take note of include (off the top of my head) Tamar Yoseloff, Isobel Dixon (forthcoming), Jane Holland, Valeria Melchioretto (forthcoming) and Tobias Hill.* Watch this space.

Salt director Chris Hamilton-Emery's** book 101 Ways to Make Poems Sell is also a great resource - the 'submission do's and don't's' that make up much of its beginning have long been legendary on the Salt website. In fact, combined with a certain aforementioned person's hectoring and my redundancy last summer, you could say this book is one-third of the reason I even have a blog.

No title as yet, though a shortlist is forming. Right now we're kind of letting my medical issues resolve themselves before we plough too deeply into it all. But he said yes! (He also says there is no way he'd have said otherwise.) (Yay!)

* I will also point out that Baroque reader Elizabeth Baines has got a book of short stories coming out with Salt - Balancing on the Edge of the World will be published on October 1st.

** also a poet - I've been reading Radio Nostalgia this week.