Launched on 4th May 2019, this is the first issue of Postbox; Scotland’s international short story magazine, published by Red Squirrel Press/Postbox Press.

We announced it late last year, and requested submissions with an end January deadline. I received over 100 submissions, and the overall standard was very high indeed. I narrowed it down, and sent my initial suggestions to Red Squirrel’s publisher, Sheila Wakefield. Looking at the total word count of the fifteen selected stories suggested they could all be published in an attractive format, and we agreed on those stories. After that I came up with a sequence which made sense to me, and then I got down to copy editing. To be honest, there wasn’t much to do there – no obvious errors or typos, and most of them very clean.

I’m a ‘light touch’ editor. I try not to change things unless I know I…