Saturday was my daughter’s sixth birthday. I spent the day setting up a party and doing crafts with her school friends. Her big desire this year was a Hatchimal, she asked her friends to give her birthday money which they did and when it was all added up she had enough. In the late afternoon we went to the toy shop to buy the prized toy, and by evening we were settled in front of the TV watching her choice of film; something with cute kittens in it (Nine Lives).

At 7pm I plugged in my headphones and pulled up the awards page on Magic Oxygen, looking forward to a night of poetry before the result but…it was not to be. Due to a technical fault there was no live webcast of the event.

Results were posted via email, instead. My story didn’t make it into the top 5, and whilst (obviously) that would have been wonderful I’m still very proud to have made it to the shortlist at all. Magic Oxygen is an international competition, this was its third year and over 800 people entered for the first; I don’t know the number of entries this time around but I would imagine it was as many if not more. To get into the top ten of a field like that is something to be proud of, and I’m looking forward to getting my copy of the anthology so I can read the other entries which sound amazing. (You should buy one too, they plant a tree for every copy sold!)

Tylluan Valley is not my normal type of story. It’s a gothic inspired horror story, that stands alone in my work for the genre and the narrative voice. It’s a real one-off. I wrote it for the NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge in 2016; it was highly commended in the first heat but I didn’t make it further than that. I’ve revisited the story since then, tweaked it a bit (particularly the ending) and, while I like it a lot, it still doesn’t really feel mine. I don’t write ghost stories (although maybe I should because I won an award for one last year!)

I’m not sure what will happen to that story, next. I might revisit it, and enter it into something else. I might just let it sit in my ‘resting’ folder. Plenty of time to decide what to do with that in due course.

Right now, I’m hopeful that my entry for this years Short Story Challenge, Redshift, will get me into the second round but if not? Well, Tylluan Valley and Magic Oxygen have told me that all is not lost.