Tile Tales

When young I often wrote stories, either to fulfil the requirements of school or for my own pleasure. At one point I joined a circle of budding writers; we never met but circulated our tales by post. This was a short-lived experience. The rather harsh criticisms dampened my enthusiasm, it would appear. Thereafter, a working life and family needs pushed the idea of writing largely out of my mind, until that light-bulb moment arrived. Like so many others, I had been playing the popular word game, Scrabble, with family and friends over many years, and more recently a similar internet-based game using a tablet. I decided that, by keeping note of the final medley of words from each game, it might be possible to write a short story utilising some of these words, which might trigger in my mind a setting, a plot or characters of a short tale. One more constraint I imposed was that each story should be no longer than one printed page. So, this I set out to do, and while not every game produced words that fired my imagination, many did. This collection of short stories is the result.