Hello, I'm Tom.
In May 2020, still in the early days of lockdown but far enough in for the pandemic to have started to feel slightly less apocalyptic, my good friend Rick told me that he had started a project, in which he would be writing a new story of exactly 100 words' length every day for the entire month. "That's a nice idea," I thought. "I'm stealing it." So for 30 days, we exchanged screenshots of our little fictions via messaging services.
As someone who lives alone, I was struggling a little with the lack of structure and certainty that came as part of the whole horrible Covid-19 package, and this fleeting means of applying focus and careful thought to a subject helped me a lot. And as an aspiring author without the patience, discipline, or attention-span to commit to writing anything longer, these things were a perfect creative outlet.
Then, at the end of May, we just stopped and I forgot the whole thing. Through a combination of multiple changes of phone and poor back-up etiquette I lost the screen grabs I'd sent, and due to a lack of understanding of cloud-based storage, thought I'd lost the original drafts too. Happily though, while configuring yet another new phone, I came across a OneDrive folder I didn't know I had, and the stories were all there. Not wanting to run the risk of a similar "loss" in future, I've decided to add those stories from 2020 here (well, not all of them - some were pretty awful), along with a few thoughts on each. I've written a few more since, and will also be adding new ones as and when they spring to mind.
For the most part it doesn't really matter in which order things get read, but a bottom up approach will give a sense of the chronology of the thing if that appeals.
I'm assuming only a few people will ever access this site, but hope those few enjoy what they find.
Everything on this site that Herman didn't do is © Thomas Hurles