Luca E

At the risk of being called a sycophant @Myr's SA contribution marked him out as a great author for me. I guess that is the huge success of the competition, you discover new authors and it's often surprising!

No. I had to make a difficult choice between two stories I found equally good. You can only vote for one. The deciding factor was one was inspired by a real event and used this as the theme the other was entirely imagined by the author. I thought that better reasoning than simply tossing a coin. I also thought the one had potential to be a book, the other did not. But then again they could all have been created by fairies and magic glitter!

For me it was a choice between two stories Emptying the Library and No Official Reason, I voted for No Official Reason because we have one vote and the story was entirely created by the imagination of the author and with the potential for a book (I hope!).

Definitely the top story so far, well constructed, engaging, emotional, and dramatic. This story exactly fitted the theme and is strongly recommended. Two lives separated by seventy years, two different relationships, an interconnection which is set in a believable historic context. Dramatic and well worth reading.

Totally agree with @Cane23. The interconnection of the two storylines seventy years apart was very well done. The historical perspective well researched. Engaging and dramatic. Well done!

A story for carnivores which mixes the esoteric with culinary invention. It's kind of weird and maybe not to everyone's taste, but I think there's romance in there somewhere!

A story for carnivores, well written and entertaining, but I couldn't stop myself from picturing hundreds of wingless chickens, kind of like frogs legs and all those hundreds of frogs who can't jump. I guess I preferred discovering Kai's saga of hollow souls and an explanation of the afterlife. Where will this lead? A relationship? But there's hardly a hint. Maybe a foodtruck, then restaurant, selling chicken wings. Honestly, I prefer a baraque a frite, pizza truck, or 'Spud-u-like.' Still, a nice story (if I could just get the chicken wings out of my imagination).

A very engaging story. The author carries forward the plot through dialogue, there is little description of places, but it's a choice that works, because it focuses on the two central characters, develops their growing relationship and highlights the obstacles in their path. An excellent story, the best so far of those I've read (more than half), I have no idea who the author is, except they're American and older (as pointed out by someone's comment on the map thing) which I'd never heard of and didn't find on Google. Well done!

The first real story so far. Lots of nice little short tales, lots with twists, but this was engaging. I sincerely hope it has more chapters to come. Well done!

A (light)house visit to solve a mystery with a metal detector that was almost instantly achieved. You can read it, it will only take a few minutes, it's not very substantial, you might conclude there's almost nothing in it, except the discovery of a tobacco tin which 125 years later still carries a faint odour, a bit like the tale that's been told!

for me a very short story which didn't say much. A bit of a who done it, Colonel Mustard in the library with the...

A nice children's story that would make any kid want to play at detective or try to teach their pet!

Seems like dogs and cats are the stars in more than one story!

You can't get inside the head of a personal story written about someone you don't know at all, and the references are lost. Did something happen in Montpellier? Whatever the story it's sad and conveys a sense of never having found what the writer was looking for.

It's painful, reads like a life that's been missed, difficult to understand exactly what happened.