Entries to the Daily Echo A City Mystery story competition have flooded in by post and e-mail after my special appeal in the Daily Echo.

After an excellent response to the initial launch of the competition, some entries went missing, and so I had to launch the competition again with a new closing date of yesterday.

I have spent the past two weeks collating and packaging up the entries to take to the judge, novelist Russell Celyn Jones, who said she was "delighted and relieved" that readers had responded so positively to the appeal.

Russell will be spending the next week reading and judging your entries, and the winning story will be printed in the forthcoming Creative Writing Special, to be published on June 8.

Russell said he was looking forward greatly to reading the stories.

"It's always very exciting to discover a new writer, and especially after all this suspense I am even more keen to get started," he added.

Winners of the story and poetry competition will receive a cash prize at a special award ceremony held at the Daily Echo, and runners-up will be published in the main paper with even more entries on the website.

The standard of the winning entries to the poetry competition were very high, but as judge Elizabeth Bewick noted, some entries did not tackle the theme properly or in some cases ignored it all together.

These poems couldn't win, but many were still entertaining pieces of writing which you will be able to read in the Daily Poem slot over the next few weeks.

I have also received some poems which tackle the subject of competitions directly, so while you bite your nails waiting for the short story results, we have featured two of those poems for you to enjoy (see left).

l If Mrs Trivett, author of the poem My Son, which appeared recently as Daily Poem in the Daily Echo is reading this, can she please get in touch with Bryan Spinney, editor of Grapevine Magazine?

He wrote to me at the Daily Echo saying how much he enjoyed the poem and asking to see more of her work for inclusion in the magazine.

Unfortunately, I no longer have Mrs Trivett's address to pass the message on.

Well done for an excellent poem - and it shows that getting your poem into print can be just a first step!

Grapevine can be contacted on 023 8086 8538 or by e-mail on grapevinemag@ukonline.co.uk