About

There is a particular evening this was built for. You are tired, the day is finally over, and you have twenty minutes before you fall asleep. You want something that is actually for you - not a chapter of a book you have to keep hold of, not a series you have to commit to. One story. A beginning, a middle, and the ending you were hoping for.

So that is what this is. Short romance, three to ten minutes, written to what a reader asked for: what is between them, where it happens, what he is like, how much heat she wanted in it. Or none of that - she said it in her own words and we read them.

This started because we went looking for a story engine good enough to read and could not find one. We tried the ones that exist, side by side, on the same briefs. They were competent and they were all the same: one shape, one set of favourite sentences, the same evening every time. The ones trained hardest on romance were the worst of them - a house voice baked so deep they could not get out of it.

So we did the opposite. We took a model with none of that in it and built the craft around it ourselves: the choices each story draws from, so no two are the same shape; how a scene is actually built, beat by beat, instead of summarised; and a memory of the last twenty stories, so it cannot reach for its own favourite phrase twice. Every story is made to order, start to finish, for the person who asked for it.

Which does mean the plain thing, and we would rather say it than have you work it out. Nobody sits down and types these. No story in the collection carries an author's name, because there isn't one. We say so the way a publisher tells you who printed a book - it is not the interesting part, and hiding it would be the one thing that made this not worth doing. The interesting part is whether the story is any good. That is what we would like to be judged on.

What we do fuss over is the reading. Proper type, four papers, your own size and spacing, because a story read on a phone in the dark deserves the same care as one on paper. Nothing flashes. Nothing plays. Nothing interrupts you two minutes from the end to ask you to sign up. One tap puts it away, and the tab only ever says our name - which is nobody's business but yours.

And every story is checked before it is written and checked again before it reaches the collection. Everyone in them is an adult. Everything in them is wanted by both of them. If you ever find something here that should not be, there is a report link at the bottom of every story, and a person reads what comes in.