Something odd has been happening.

Elves have been taking the off-cuts from my novel and turning them into short stories.

The Elves and the Shoemaker: Lucy Crane’s illustration for the 1886 edition. I’m the one in the mob cap.

Short stories aren’t quite as useful as shoes, of course: nevertheless, I prefer them. Whether they’ll end up saleable is anyone’s guess. But that isn’t important. I woke up this morning to find that a story was writing itself in my head. It was all I could do to get up, have a wee, source some caffeine, and get myself back to the laptop in time to record it – like taking dictation – before it was gone.

It took less than an hour. For me, that’s unheard of. And yes, it was dreadfully written, with cliches and adverbs and notes to myself in the middle… but stories – whole stories – don’t land in my lap very often. I’ve waited my whole life long for my own little Ariel moment, when stories (or poems) fall out of the sky and you just have to catch them, and now (touching wood) here it is. Something pure, unselfconscious: not fussy, or tricksy, or technical. Nothing yet of the caliber of Tulips or The Moon and the Yew Tree or Lady Lazarus, but you know what they say about beggars and choosing.

So anyway, dear subconscious, I’m wearing a hard hat to bed tonight in case somehow, by magic, the rest of my novel falls out of the sky.