Isn’t technology brilliant?!

A long time ago, in a town far, far away, there was a kid who spent his days imagining worlds where monsters and people walked the same streets. His imagination was so fertile and his appetite for writing was so great that he began to write short-stories – dozens of them – on a bog-standard 086 IBM PC that his dad had bought for the family (this was the 1980’s so a PC back then was a big thing). There were stories such as Dare, The Vent, Night Eyes, The Twisted… and so many others, either hand written or in glorious Courier font.
Then came stories from his late teens - like Splinters and Across the Board - and finally short stories from the university days, including an anthology written for the 3rd year BA English course at Sheffield Hallam.
Eventually all the stories were stored, lovingly, on a new PC and printed into a folder called Tales from the Abyss...

That was in 2001.

In 2002, before I left for a six month jaunt around Australia and New Zealand, that new PC crashed and burned. All the writing I had stored on it was gone. I was lucky (and prudent) that I’d backed-up copies of all the old novels I wrote since I was 17 - but not so prudent to back-up the short stories that had now gone to cyber-heaven with everything else.
I was gutted. All the short stories I wrote since I was eleven years old existed now only as a single hard-copy in a dusty-looking file.

Until this week.

Yes, technology is brilliant. So brilliant that I have found a way of resurrecting the stories from the very printed pages of Tales from the Abyss. In the past it would have taken me months to type up those short stories, which I was always against doing (afterall, I would be losing valuable time that should be spent on new writing projects). But this is the future and now all it takes is a scanner and a nifty program called ReadIris – a tool that reads scanned written documents and converts them into word files that become fully editable, kinda like Adobe Acrobat.
So I’ve started scanning my collection of short stories, and while doing so I’ve promised myself to update them a little to make them accessible to an audience other than myself and my parents (who loved my stories, especially my dad).

Who knows, I might even publish a few on the new website if there is demand...