UPDATED New Manchester blog column

I’ve mentioned the possibility that we might get a new Manchester listings magazine in this blog before, and, lo and behold, it has actually come to pass. I had inside knowledge, though: I’m now the literature editor of The Mix, a fortnightly mag that’s available from today in newsagents around the city centre for a mere £1.50.

The literature section in every issue will feature a column called Bloggerel, which will shine a spotlight on the sadly-overlooked work of Manchester bloggers. Each Bloggerel will feature an excerpt from a recent blog post, drawn from the sites on the Manc blogroll at right. This isn’t an original idea: I stole it from The Vermont alt-weekly Seven Days and The Guardian does it as well, though their column features blog posts related to big news stories. My hope is that it will make more people want to read blogs.

The inaugural bloggerel is Bar Fiction from Bournemouth Runner’s blog The Art of Fiction.

I was also taken with this funny post from Kitchentable, about a serendipitous experience at Fopp.

If you think you’ve written something that could be in the column, or want to point out a great post on someone else’s blog, feel free to email your bloggerel nominations to themanchizzle at gmail dot com. I’m looking for excerpts or whole posts that are 500 words or less (SEE UPDATE BELOW), are well written, can stand alone in the magazine and will be of interest to pretty much any reader. Because it’s the literature section there may be a slight bias towards literary or “writerly” posts, but it’s open to any topic.

I’ll get in touch with people if I’m putting their post forward (though, unless you have creative commons or explicit copyright protection on your blog, I don’t think I’m required to.) If you want to remain an anonymous blogger, that’s fine – I’m really just going to use blog names/urls, not author names. And please note that there’s no pay involved, except the glow of pleasure that comes with a surge of extra traffic.

UPDATED: Because of space limitations the Bloggerel column will now be limited to excerpts of 200 words. Eeek. Keep 'em short n' sweet, then.