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.

Martin Conway was born and raised in North London. After more than two years of compulsory military service, he started a working life in insurance broking, married and raised a family. His innate creative flair was not given free rein until retirement when he became a self-taught sculptor. At the age of 86, he rekindled a passion for writing that he had had as a young man, and he set himself the task of writing at least 50 short stories.