A few things

It's been a while since I posted here, life has been so sad with the loss of my beautiful Zachary cat, it's difficult to do the blogging thing. It's getting a little easier each day, sort of, ups and downs, downs and ups. So I am distracting myself here by talking about other stuff.

Firstly, this year has been good to my stories, as well as prizes in the Fiction Desk and Salt flash fiction competitions, I found out last week that I won 3rd prize in the New Writer's microfiction prize. Congratulations to all the winners, especially my mates Rachael Dunlop, Dan Purdue, Pete Domican, Valerie Sirr, Danielle McLaughlin,  and Melissa Lee-Houghton. I am happy that my story has found a good home, and suffice it to say I already spent my prize money (all of it) on something rather nice while I was in America last week.

I love to present prizes too, and will be doing that next Tuesday in London at the Writers & Artists Yearbook short story competition awards ceremony, in conjunction with Liars League, whose actors will read the winning story and two runners-up, which I have just chosen from the shortlist. I too will be reading something, probably something very very short, I imagine. Do come along and celebrate with us! Details here.

Finally, I was asked to do something really interesting a few months ago: Faith Gardner at StorySwap asked me to video myself reading one of Norwegian writer Berit Ellingsen's short short stories and asked Berit to video herself reading one of mine. Despite the fact that I'm not keen on myself on video, I rather love the result, love hearing Berit read my story, and enjoyed reading hers. Watch our story swap here. What a brilliant idea.