Finally... I can tell you!

OK, so you know how it is when you submit something to a short story competition, and you wait and wait for the date they said they'd announce the winners, and then on that day they kindly let you know that you have to wait another month because they had so many entries, so you wait another month and then they send an email saying they had almost 1000 entries and they would be letting the honorees know within the next 24 hours and you think, 1000, blimey, no way I've made the last 50 and you cross it off your very organised Submissions spreadsheet thingy .......

......and then.

.......then you get an email from the competition organisers. They tell you.

That's you've won. The Grand Prize. The Grand Prize in the Binnacle Sixth Ultra Short Story Competition.

Then you faint (almost). And your heart starts pounding. And you keep thinking, Oh come on, that's just silly.

And then you wait some more. And finally, finally, today, three weeks' later, they put up the results! So it is real. Grinning. Much grinning.

I am in the most wonderful company: my great friend Vanessa Gebbie is the Editor's Choice in Prose, and there are my other wonderful writer friends in the honorees list: Vicky Grut, Ruth Almon, Oonah V Joslin, Nora Nadjarian, Nik Perring and Anne Brooke. Congratulations to all! Much grinning all round.