Shorts (Not the ones you ware.)

Foreword:

 Me the author? Who am I and why do I do this? I love using my imagination and in a "daft" moment in the late seventies, I bought a portable typewriter. Why? Because I had been writing a story by hand and the larger it got the harder it was for me to read through it (you haven't seen my handwriting.)

When I think back to the typed pages, they were not much better. It was a start and gave me a way to get what was inside my head out (not that I was brave enough to let anyone see it.) I was 18 then, I‘m half past sixty now and thankfully word processing software now has the capacity to indicate when I have misspelt a word or when the syntax of the sentence is possibly not correct. I do have problems with homophones and the spellchecker will tell me the word is correctly spelled, but it won't tell me if it’s the right plane or plain.

 During that time, I have had several careers. I worked on farms as a tractor-man, I have worked in the building industry, labouring for bricklayers, plasterers and joiners. I moved on to driving backhoe diggers and small tracked shovels. I spent about fifteen years working for a plant hire company inside the Ravenscraig Steel Plant in Motherwell, Central Scotland. When the plant closed in the early nineties I moved over into engineering and began working with CAD/CAM systems. Since then, I have worked for both small and worldwide organisations.

 In the early years in agriculture and in the steelworks the nature of my work meant that I had a lot of free time to let my imagination build scenarios and fantasies that I later formed into working stories. Some I have developed and produced as novels and short stories which are available on the web.

 For the last four years, I have been working as an applications engineer (support.) For an international CAM organisation. I literally never know what the next support issue will be. So now I use this to wind down in the evenings and as a chill-out at weekends.

 As a child, I read many books, some of my favourites were Six Cousins at Mistletoe Farm,  Six Cousins Again, and the Famous Five novels by Enid Blyton, Moa Valley by Ann Deroo. Later I developed a love of science fiction, Asimov, Heinlein, Eric Von Danskin, EE Doc Smith, Anne McCaffrey, Arthur C. Clarke and many more classic writers. 

So is this science fiction? Well, it's set in a possible future, and it deals with technologies that are either under development or theoretically possible. But the true story is about the personalities and how their relationship develops as their time together progresses. How they face the challenges that fate has placed before them. There are elements of terror brought about by a deep-seated phobia. But enough of the spoilers.

 It is my intention to present this work in short bites 7-10 thousand words at a time. Each one is to be added 1-2 months apart. So here is the first one.

 Ronnie Smart (The author.)