Last week I became a dragon, for an event called Dragons' Pen, a literary version of Dragons' Den. Ideas pitched to my fellow dragons (Francis Bickmore, senior editor at Canongate publishers, and the literary agent Lucy Luck) and me included a gothic graphic novel set in Edinburgh, its heroine the wonderfully named Penny Dreadful, and a tartan-tinged adventure story described as "The Da Vinci Code meets Monarch of the Glen". Our winner by a whisker, who gets to have her entire manuscript read by Luck, was Anna Stewart, with a vivid, captivating story called Pleasureland, set at a Dundonian funfair. More important than winning or losing, though, was the fact that the Edinburgh book festival's spiegeltent was packed out with an enthuastically cheering crowd (except when they were booing, and that was only at the dragons) who'd come to hear not a lineup of famous names, but nine unheard-of, emerging authors. And, as Bickmore pointed out, "only one of them went home in tears".