In school I filled maths books with a spoof version of the film Aliens, which featured my schoolmates. Why would I fill maths books with maths? What a waste!

I know I loved writing before then. In primary school I remember having a wallpaper-backed book (remember when teachers asked you to do that?) which were used to write stories. Most kids seemed to write “what I did in the summer holidays”. I explored la-la-land and wrote pages and pages of made-up stuff, typically kids’ adventures inspired by Enid Blyton.

I probably only started taking writing seriously as I left school. Back then it was BBC computers and dot matrix printers. Remember that screechy-scratchy sound they made? Music to a writers’ ears – it meant I was producing something! Sadly that’s the time when other things intrude in life, too, so writing took a back burner.

Probably the other sorry thing to note is that sadness prompted me to start writing again. A lot of my short stories are hopeful. There’s no doubting there’s a lot of personal feeling in all of them. I’ve had a few published by Bridge House and Wyvern Publishing in anthologies, and that’s as far as I’ve tried in terms of third-party publishing.

Everything you read here is unpublished – if that’s not a contradiction.

I hope you like just one of them. I hope just one resonates with you in some way. See, I told you I feel hopeful.

And the “novel” tab – currently blank – is something I really have to work on.

Phil Thomas, January 2015