Early in my writing career, I produced a number of short stories. The ideas I came up with were mostly romantic in tone, leading me gently into writing romantic novels. None of the stories sold, not surprisingly, as I failed to do the necessary research to find out what sort of stories magazines wanted.

At that time, though, I didn’t find the short story at all satisfying. I wanted to delve more deeply into the development of the romance, and all my stories were far too long for their intended market. Once I had explored the medium of the novel, I was hooked on it and short stories fell away.

A few years back, however, as I was reluctantly dragged out of the dark ages and introduced to the internet, I rediscovered short stories when I had the idea for an unusual story website.

One of the basics of the craft of storytelling is an understanding that the reader identifies with the main protagonist. In the case of my historical romances, this is the heroine.

What if, I thought one day, the reader could actually become the heroine?

More than that, what if she could choose the man of her dreams, her ideal, and have an imaginary romance with him?

At this point, my own imagination went wild. What if our heroine was able to take that hero, that imaginary lover she had dreamed up, and put him into a whole new world of her own choice? A world of the future or the past, a world built entirely of dreams?

All of which gave birth to the idea of Dream Lover Fantasies, where you can select your Perfect Dream Lover and have him written up in your very own story. You also get to choose the setting of time, location and the style of the story.

And as a taster, there are the pre-written stories featuring you, the reader, as the Mystery Heroine, in a romance with a hero to die for.

It was these Mystery Heroine stories that revived my interest in short story writing, and you will find samples from my stories on the website at www.dream-lover.com.