This is where we’ll put all of our news about story updates, Manchester literature events - including our forthcoming writing workshops - and related projects. You can stay fully tuned by joining our Facebook group or subscribing to Rainy City Stories via RSS, email or Twitter.

December 1, 2008 - It’s been a busy month here at the site.  November brought cracking new short stories from Emma J. Lannie, Neil Campbell, Lee Ashworth,  and Anne Beswick, and a new poem from Trevor Barnett. You can check out all of these by visiting our archive section, which is handily arranged by date.

We’ve received a flurry of new submissions following an outing to the live literature night No Point in Not Being Friends. So many thanks to all those who have submitted their work; please help us keep the site brimming with fresh content by harassing your writerly friends and relations to send us stuff. If you really want to get out there and help us spread the good word of Rainy City Stories, there are pdfs of posters, flyers and press releases we can send you.  Just get in touch and we’ll load you up with all you need for some serious prosteletyzing.  Hallelujah!

October 30, 2008 - Four spooky new things up on the site this week. We’ve got something of a night bus horror story from Jenn Ashworth, who also happens to be the winner of this year’s Manchester Blog Award for best writing (check out her blog Every Day I Lie a Little.)  Also: a poem by Richard Barrett about a missed meeting at a city centre bar, Socrates Adams-Florou’s riff on Chinatown, and Ailsa Cox’s, Doors of Tunis, a cinematic story of a relationship ending on Oxford Road.

Submissions are still coming in, but they have slowed from the veritable flood of writing we had immediately following our launch. So if you’ve been dithering about whether or not to send us your story, don’t dither.  We can’t wait to read it.

How’s our map looking? Well, the city centre and neighbourhoods to the south are filling up nicely, but the Northern area of the map remains blank. No Rainy City clouds in Prestwich, Failsworth or Crumpsall… not to mention Irlams O’ Th’ Height.  Just putting that out there.

We’re also going to start sending out monthly Storygrams, which will feature a selection of recently published stories and news about the project. If you want to get these, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed or add yourself to our email list. Happy haunting.

October 20, 2008 - This evening we published our first three public-submitted stories - in fact, two short stories and a poem. The poem’s by Jon Atkin, who helps run the Manchester Literature Festival - it’s very bittersweet, as you can read.

The longest story namechecks a Smiths song - Rusholme Ruffians - and is written by Matthew David Scott, who has one book published and another due in May 2009. The other, Thin Air, is written by Elinor Taylor, an English and creative writing student at Salford University. It’s based in Ancoats.

October 9, 2008 - The site has now launched! Thanks for all the feedback so far, and for the submissions we’ve already received. Rainy City Stories was mentioned in Metro and on the MEN’s The Mancunian Way blog - and there have also been over a dozen mentions on other blogs.