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There's something exciting and satisfying about collecting the year's work, alongside the best from our excellent young bloggers, into one fat tome. Alone, each issue seems small. Together, they are big enough to be a doorstop. You can think of the making of the Stone Soup Annual as being a little like making a pot of stone soup in the kitchen. Each issue, online book review, and blog post are the ingredients. It isn't until we bring all the issues and a selection of online material into the Annual that we can fully see what the whole year's Stone Soup turned out to be.

While it's exciting to hold the year's material all together in one's hands and see what a massive body of work it is, what excites us the most about this year's Annual is the variety and power of what our authors and artists created. There are one-page stories that evoke what we call a "sense of place," there are long stories that explore what it means to move house and to lose a friend, to bully and to be bullied. There are small poems that take on the meaning of the world, and long poems that describe a single thing. There are contemporary fairytales, and stories that attempt to up-end our idea of the "fairytale." There are photographs, pastel drawings, paintings, collages, and watercolors. There is a screenplay, a movie review, a couple of self-portraits. From our bloggers, there are book reviews, musical compositions, comics, and essays on a range of subjects.

We hope this book inspires all of you out there--no matter how old you are --as each piece in it inspired all of us at Stone Soup in 2018.