Ghosts in the Bookshop – a foray into fiction writing

This evening, in an event at Petersfield Bookshop in Hampshire, a short story authored by me will be read out as one of three runners up in a ghost story writing competition to celebrate the bookshop’s centenary. The competition, which was won by James Kingston, called for ghost stories set mainly in a bookshop and received over 300 entries. The winning entries were selected by Michelle Magorian. It came as something of a surprise to me to discover I had won a prize of £100 worth of books for the story I submitted, entitled ‘This Is My Book’, since my decision to enter the competition was a rather whimsical one. Although I wrote a great deal of fiction in my teens and twenties, including several full-length novels, I never made any attempt to enter any creative writing competitions or get my writing published, and I have written no fiction at all for almost a decade. Perhaps the fact that the judges liked my short story is an indication that writing nonfiction improves one’s fiction-writing skills in subtle ways.

Unfortunately I am unable to attend the reading of ‘This Is My Book’, but I hope the audience enjoys it and experiences a subtle thrill of horror…