Our lovely media partners The Sentinel, have given us our own weekly blog. A new edition will go up every Friday on their website and will offer a behind the scenes look in to the planning and organisation of the event - warts and all! Below is the second edition and if you click here you can get the latest update.

Welcome to the Axis Festival blog - a brief insight into the inner workings of the Axis beast. This festival is for you - our community, our city - so it is only right that you know what we are up to every week.

As we move ever closer to the headline week of the festival, I'm starting to get those excitable butterflies in my stomach ? and my phone is now permanently attached to my ear.

Fellow festival organiser and Sugarmill owner Steve Tilley has been over in the U.S. this week, scouting for next year's headliners at the South By Southwest music conference. As soon as he lands, I'll be expecting the lowdown on what's hot and what's not in the music business.

Thanks to our super-patient designer Phil Rawle we have now completed the 2008 brochure and it looks fantastic. With a whole three pages of events, including the (very) last minute addition of a special Arnold Bennett archive collection being staged at the university, if it continues at this rate the 2010 brochure will be like War and Peace!

Thanks to our friends at Wood Mitchell Printers, 60,000 copies will be hitting the streets very soon ? and festival season will have landed.

I've had lots of fun playing with our new website as well this week. Sign up and you can add your own pictures to the website. I've been adding pics of all the organisers ? much to their disgust! Over the festival period, artist Anna Francis will be releasing lots of fridge magnets saying 'There is Beauty In The City' and we want you to take these magnets to your favourite beauty spot and take a photograph. Send them to us and we'll post them on the website. What is a beauty spot to one person may be an eyesore to another, so let's see.

With the booking of the Soothsayers for our Saturday night headline act, and the final agreement of the line up, the event now feels like a proper festival. The Soothsayers are a high energy Afro Dub band from London. They have had some brilliant reviews for not only their live work but also their studio albums. With the generous support of the city council, topped up with some local sponsorship, we can offer the night out for an amazing ?5 and we also intend to give some of the tickets away to the groups, schools and artists who have worked so hard on the One City project.

Performance poet Lemn Sissay will also make an appearance, as will two of our best local bands, Model Radio and Morning Sparks?in association with Love Music Hate Racism it's going to be a great night to celebrate diversity through music so bring your dancing shoes.

While I have been fiddling with websites and talking on my phone, Sarah Bonam, from Letting in the Light, has been working on the One City project and what a job she has done. With more than 1,000 people taking part and a score of follow-up projects planned, Sarah has taken this beyond our wildest expectations. I was lucky enough to go over to the Shine workshop last night. Shine are group of adults with special needs, who meet on a Monday at the Normacot Hotel and between pints of Guinness the group was starting to piece together a response to the memories for an installation on April 30 at the Victoria Hall. The workshop was being led by artist Denise O'Sullivan, who was zipping around the group busily cutting wire and handing out paper and paints.

It had been hard work getting the One City project off the ground. Lots of funding applications had to be filled in, and lots of people had to be convinced that this would be a good thing for the community and the festival. We'd always believed that the festival should go out of its way to be an event that reached out and engaged with local people. It shouldn't just be about putting on shows and selling tickets. It's about the collective celebration of Stoke-on-Trent; having fun, getting involved, feeling proud. Everyone at Shine knew about the festival and that they were part of it, and as we were leaving someone shouted, "Nice to meet you?.see you at the Axis Festival". I nearly cried.

If you'd like to join in the One City event, Denise will be staging an open workshop at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery on April 19, from noon onwards. All are welcome.

Well another week over, another step closer, and maybe this week more than most I have realised just how many people are working towards making the festival something truly amazing.

From my friends and co-organisers, to the artists and volunteers, there are literally hundreds of people involved and I'm thrilled that all of these people share our vision.

Have a great week.

Sara Austin