I suffer from occasional attacks of chutzpah.

Back in the mid-eighties, London Magazine, the grand, the venerable, had been in more-or-less constant publication for SEVERAL CENTURIES. It had a Reputation. It had a Renown.

I was in my early-to-mid-twenties at the time it and I crossed paths. It was edited by Alan Ross, who had been at the helm for decades, who was synonymous with the magazine at this point in time. So we had a daunting double barrier here – a famous literary magazine which would have no real reason to deal with a wet-behind-the-ears newbie because big names were piling at their doors like driftwood and they could pick and choose from those, and a venerable editor who’d seen plenty of knucklehead wannabes like me before and would have no reason to be anything but brusquely dismissive of them. If he ever saw their pathetic efforts at all, himself, without their being culled out by underlings whose sole task in life it was to do just this unpalatable task.

Of course, it was the obvious thing for me to do to pack up a short story of which I was inordinately proud of at the time, and send it in for consideration – HERE. Of all places, here.

Alan Ross had a fairly odd way of responding to submissions. No rote responses for himl no circular letters. Every submission received a personal response … on a quirky vintage postcard. I received one such card as a reply to my story submission. It bore, in HANDWRITING, only a few words as a response: “Like it, but not enough background. Alan Ross”

Kids, don’t try this at home – but I was deep in the throes of that chutzpah attack. I replied, “What kind of background would you like? I can put more of it in.”

Back came another postcard in return.

“We’ll take it. Alan Ross”

London Magazine was going to publish my story.

Not too long after that, another card came to query if I minded (!) if they put the story, not in the magazine itself, but in a hardcover anthology they were preparing to celebrate LM’s 30th anniversary. Head spinning still harder, I acquiesced to this. The book, called “Signals”, was published in the UK in 1991.

I met up with the editor of that anthology, on a visit to London not too long after the book’s publication. I recall being taken out to lunch, and then, on the way out, losing the combs from my hair in the process, and crawling around for one of them while being handed the other by the laughing editor in question. It’s a tiny little disembodied gem of a memory, connecting with nothing at all, and yet somehow treasured as an instant of innocence and pure glowing joy. This anthology editor never bought anything more from me – but he introduced me to an agent in London, who became my first agent, who sold “Dolphin’s Daughters” for me to Longman in 1995, and that is a slim little book which was reprinted NINE TIMES and still brings in a trickle of royalties every so often.

I met Alan at London Magazine’s offices in South Kensington sometime in the early nineties. I still remember – you rang an unobtrusive little bell by the front door of an unobtrusive London townhouse; the door let you into a corridor; the corridor led you out into a back courtyard overgrown with things that really looked like they needed a careful gardener’s hand to guide them but hadn’t seen one for at least a brace of years; you went down a curved flight of stairs with an iron balustrade into a tiny paved area from which a door opened into what turned out to be a cluttered room with high and stuffed bookshelves, two desks wedged in in a manner which promised grievous difficulty if EITHER was ever to be removed from there ever again and overflowing with papers (manuscripts, artwork, galleys), and a couple of typewriters. No computers for Alan – not then, not, I suspect, EVER. Not by choice, anyway. He belonged to a different age, a slower age, a