Every so often, something lands in your inbox that makes you blink at the screen and reread it, just in case it’s the riotous imagination rather than reality on the screen.

This week it was an email beginning with Congratulations! your short story has been chosen for publication, which had me checking that the email was actually addressed to me.

One of my stories has been chosen by a well-known author and her team to be published on their Substack later this year and possibly, I hope, in a book to raise money for a charity. It’s not my place to say the who, the where, the when just yet, but suffice it to say I’ve spent the last 48 hours alternating between delight and mild existential panic.

I’d been aware of the competition for a while and life had been trotting away merrily without ideas or time to think of them. But I was having a moment outside the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh with just two weeks until the submission date and it all fell into place in my imagination. Though The Royal Mile may have had to stretch a wee bit to contain my story.

I’m delighted and it feel extra special because hers in a world I love to inhabit in my leisure reading so it was fun to dabble at the edges of her ideas with the eccentricity of my own. I can’t wait to see it on screen.