I'M BEGINNING this post with a taste of the absurb because it feels on this dreary Thursday afternoon that we could do with some. First up, I received a little book of Edward Lear poetry through the post. It's been self-published by London-based cartoonist Zhenia Vasiliev - the text is out of copyright - and is really lovely. I was originally speaking to Zhenia about running some of his cartoons as a picture gallery for LiveRead - given Lear's links with Merseyside (he was employed by Knowsley Hall to draw Lord Derby's menagerie) - but they weren't ready in time. Perhaps we'll be able to do something with them next year instead but for now here is a suitably ridiculous limerick:

LIVEREAD, the Liverpool Daily Post & Echo's online literature festival, starts tomorrow and ironically it's been so busy that I haven't had time to read any books lately. I found the same thing when I was studying for my MA in art history and working full time so barely had a spare moment to visit a gallery (obviously I wasn't doing this job then).

But I tend to think that some things are worth putting yourself out for, and fortunately so does the newspapers' web team who have spent the past few weeks filming author readings, interviews with curators and creating picture galleries while I've been working on the rest of the festival.

LAST year I was honoured to be asked to judge a heat of Writing on the Wall's Pulp Idol competition, the result of which has just been published in a book - Pulp Idol Firsts.

Competitors had to read out the first chapter of their novel - some completed, others still only a single chapter - and then answer the judges questions. Two writers from each heat went forward to the grand final.

Pulp Idol Firsts is an anthology of the finalists' first chapters so is a really good mixture of genres, subjects, characters, voices. The only drawback is it makes you want to read on but the rest of each book isn't available. We'll have to hope that the authors all win publishing contracts so we can find out what happens next.