Someone asked me recently why I had set up Sparkbright magazine.

I turned round and told her that it was because I wanted somewhere that people could showcase quality short fiction and poetry. She seemed puzzled by this, and went on to ask me why I felt that I had the right to choose one piece over another, without any sort of formal editorial training and nothing to qualify me to work in such a position.

And I thought about it for a little while, and I could see where she was coming from. Sparkbright’s first issue came out in 2008, when I was only 18. We are now looking for work for our fifth issue, and I am now 20 years old. I feel much more confident as an editor (and as a person) than I did when we started out two and a bit years ago. And looking at our back issues, I can definitely see progress, both in the visual quality of how the magazine is put together, and in the quality of submissions we have included. That’s not to say that everything in the first issue was rubbish. It just means that as we’ve gone on, we’ve been able to develop a keener sense of exactly what it is that we like.

I suppose that we are very subjective with our tastes. I am fortunate that Ami has similar literary tastes to me, so that we rarely disagree as to whether or not a piece should be included. A lot of our decision-making is based on the quality of the piece of creative writing. We are unlikely to want a piece that is filled with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. We are also unlikely to want a piece that doesn’t flow. We don’t want to have to drag ourselves from one sentence to the next, we want the words to carry us along and wrap us up in their awesomeness. (Yes, OK, we want AWESOMENESS. Is that too much to ask?)

So, while I was sat there trying to figure out what it is that gave me the right to do something like this, I realised that it was because I loved what I was doing. I love that I am giving people a chance to showcase their poetry and fiction for free, that I am responsible for some happy people in various countries across the world, opening an email that says YES PLEASE WE WOULD LIKE TO PUBLISH YOUR PIECE OF WRITING. I remember the very first acceptance letter I received, and just how happy that made me.

And if I can make people happy in the same way… well, that might just be why I set up Sparkbright magazine in the first place.