Turns out it did. I was on edge most of the weekend, I hardly slept last night and I was a complete wreck this morning. I kept checking the RSS feed to see if there were any new entries on the Salt blog and every time there was (and there were two false alarms: the Crashaw announcement and a piece about David Rose, who’s just got a new novel out) I hardly dared look.

And then this appeared. With my name in the right place, alongside Facebook/Twitter chum Andrea Ashworth and new Facebook chum Cassandra Parkin. I still can’t really believe it. I actually have TWO books coming out this year. A comic sci-fi romp and a book of pukka literary short stories. What an extraordinary year it’s turning out to be.

So, as one of the top ten poems in the competition, “Cyprus Delight” will now receive the ultimate accolade of print publication. Which is all rather exciting.

I still find poetry completely baffling. I dabble in it (I hate that phrase, but it’s true) because I enjoy it and I like to think that my experiments in the discipline with choosing the right word and getting the rhythm right etc. inform my fiction writing. But despite clocking up a few moderate successes like this one, I still feel a total fraud because I read very little poetry – partly because there’s very little that I feel completely comfortable with, but mostly because I’m lazy and ignorant. Actually, I could probably do with some pointers as to who I should read, and any suggestions would be most welcome.

In other news, my interview with Vanessa Gebbie went live on Salt Publishing’s blog yesterday. I hope I managed to do her justice, despite me not having much of a clue about interviewing. It was fun to do, though.

And I had a very swift acceptance yesterday from Escape Velocity for my piece “Symbiosis”, a tender story about the love of a young girl for her medicinal parasitic tapeworm. This will appear in their forthcoming anthology.

Finally … just take a look at the cover for Murky Depths 16. And then take a look at the wonderful artwork for my story, “Teamwork”, by Caroline Parkinson. And then go and place your order …

Amazing how things change. When I submitted my manuscript for “Dot(.), Dash(-)” back in October, I had all but given up on finding a publisher for Mrs Darcy, so I’d shifted my focus back to short stories. The following month, Proxima picked up Mrs Darcy, so everything changed again. The other weekend at Get Writing, with Mrs Darcy safely in the can, I found myself pitching a long-cherished non-fiction project.

So what kind of writer am I? Which project do I really want to succeed?

Daft question. You might as well ask me which of my kids I prefer …

I was particularly pleased about this because I have considerable respect for the judge, Nik Perring; his book of short stories, “Not So Perfect” was one of the highlights of the year for me. I was also pleased because the half-dozen pieces that I came up over the twelve weeks of the competition were the first short stories I’d written for quite some time and they turned out to be a bit different from my previous work.

Paradoxically, what I’m really, really pleased about is that I managed to get that place with some stories that are actually quite flawed, but which can be fixed (thanks mainly to Nik’s critique). So I’m looking forward to seeing them all get out there into the big wide world in 2011.

I also took part in the poetry section, and although I ended up somewhat lower down the order, I’ve got some pieces that I can work with there as well (thanks again to the critiques of the judge, Mandy Pannett). I’ve said it before, but you really can’t beat competitions like this one and the Whittaker to force you to produce new work.

And in case you’re wondering what the Great God Dan is doing there, for the purposes of the competition I went under the pseudonym BrownDan and I borrowed this rather splendid caricature from Slate magazine as my avatar. I’m finding it quite hard to say goodbye to him now. I’m sure his eyes are following me around the room …

This year, for the hell of it, I sent in a couple of entries for the poetry prize for the first time. And today I heard that one of them, “Choking Hazard – Small Parts”, wasn’t in the prizes but had made the shortlist. I know from looking at previous years that it’s probably quite a long shortlist, but I am still pretty gobsmacked by this. And also, I have to say, really rather chuffed, because one of my writing goals for this year was to get on a Bridport shortlist. I just hadn’t expected it to be with a poem.

Today was one of those days when you can believe that almost anything can happen.

I already knew that I hadn’t made it any further than the shortlist, but had been sworn to secrecy – which made it a little bit odd when everyone was wishing me luck for the next stage. However, I’m extremely happy to be there (and described as “Highly Commended”, too), especially having seen some of the other names there and on the longlist.

Incidentally, I should perhaps add that my wife, ever the pragmatist, responded to my cry of “Hey, I”m on another shortlist” with “When are you actually going to win something, then?” I can sort of see her point, because this year I’ve made it onto the shortlist of three significant short story competitions (the Fish, the Bristol and this one) without actually winning anything.

However, having read this piece the other day by the judge of the Wells Short Story competition (and I’m now rather sorry that I didn’t have anything available to send them), I think that maybe getting on a shortlist may be enough after all. The prize money would of course be nice, but it’s a longer game I’m playing here.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it, anyway.

The piece itself had a curious genesis. I originally wrote it for the last round of the poetry section of this year’s Whittaker Prize. Whilst I was writing it, it struck me that there was no obvious need for it to actually be a poem – a comment echoed by the judge, Cathy Edmunds. So I turned it into prose, smoothed down the edges and sent it in with a couple of days to go.

Must say it’s rather cool to be sitting there as one of just four five representatives from the UK in the shortlist of 22 (out of 849 original entrants apparently), alongside the likes of established authors such as Elizabeth Baines. It’s also nice to see Nora Nadjarian, who I know slightly from Twitter, and Claire King, who I met a few weeks back when we were both on the Bristol Short Story Prize shortlist.

I have to admit that I was in two minds whether or not to stay in this contest after it was announced that there weren’t enough entrants to fund the prize money – and in fact my initial reaction was to withdraw. But then I felt bad because both judges agreed to stay on anyway and I was also impressed by the way that the entry fees were refunded immediately so I decided to stay in. And I’m now glad that I did.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should also say that I failed to make the shortlist in the fiction section altogether. But that’s the way it goes with competitions; to paraphrase the excellent words of the judge, Sally Quilford: you win some, you lose some. Huge congrats to everyone who made it, though.

It’s also nice to see a few Twitter chums in there as well: Claire King, Valerie O’Riordan and Clare Wallace. The prizegiving and announcement of the winners is on July 17th and I’m really looking forward to being there. The nailbiting starts now.

Yes, that is indeed me. This is in fact the second longlist that this particular story has made it onto – the first one being the Fish earlier on this year. However, the longlist for this one is a little tighter than the Fish – only 40 entries out of nearly 1500 – and I have to say that I am seriously chuffed to be sitting there alongside the likes of Elizabeth Baines.

The shortlist is announced on June 7th, so I may be a little twitchy around then. The longlist was in fact as far as I got in the Fish, although I have tweaked the ending a bit since then (which was always the weakest part of the story). The question is: have I tweaked it enough? Watch this space …

[EDIT: Just realised that it was in fact the Fish shortlist that the story got onto, not the longlist. Although, weirdly, that shortlist was around three times the size of the Bristol longlist, for roughly the same number of original entries. *scratches head*]