If you’ve read the front page of this website, or if you found your way here from the Chicken House, you’ll know that I won this year’s competition with my novel Plumpscuttle’s Peculiars and the Case of the Mudlark Muncher.

I’m still not quite sure how it happened.  Part of me thinks there has been some mistake, or that it’s an elaborate wind up by some twisted evil genius whose cat I inadvertently ran over.  Or something like that.  I guess I’m going to feel that way until I’m actually holding a copy of it in my sweaty little hands.

I really, honestly had no conception that I might actually win the thing.  My cunning plan, after yet another rejection from an agent, was to enter and somehow scrape my way onto the longlist- or, by some miracle, the shortlist- so that when I sent it off again there would be something impressive to put on my covering letter.  (If you are in the process of sending work off to agents, then I cannot stress how important your covering letter is.  In fact, you’re probably better off spending more time writing that than the book itself).

So when I did make the longlist, and then the shortlist, I thought that was as far as it would go.  When Barry Cunningham phoned me after the judges had met, I was all prepared with my gracious ‘thanks for the opportunity’ speech.  When he told me I’d won, my entire nervous system almost imploded with shock.

Anyway, since then I’ve been trying to accept the reality that I’m actually going to have something published.  Like a proper, real, grown-up writer-type-person.  I also had a lovely lady called Amanda Craig from the Times phone me up for an interview.  And there was even a bit about me in the local paper.

Now it’s all gone a bit quiet- too quiet- as I wait for my first meeting with my editor next week.  I have a horrible feeling she’s going to ask me to rewrite the entire thing, starting from page one, and that I’m going to have to stay awake from now until next April to get it done, but we shall see…