Blogs

Christmas! Wonder of Wonders & Miracle of Miracles God bless us all, each one!

The Big Nowhere comes at the end of James Ellroy’s take on 1950s Los Angeles. Angels in The City of Angels are in short supply. Every crummy cop is on the take and it works all the way up the ladder to the city bosses and studio heads such as Howard Hughes. In walkies and talkies only money matters. Hughes can fill his studios with starlets and have apartment’s at ready to be filled with the fifteen-year-old farm girls with big knockers that he...

Does God have a plan for our lives? What about times of disaster? If there is a God and he has a perfect plan for our lives, why do things sometimes go horribly wrong? God is still there pulling the threads together into what will eventually be a beautiful pattern, even though everything is entangled and it may seem like a complete mess. God looked after Elijah during a famine. Elijah declared to King Ahab that there would be no rain for 3 years...

One of the more unexpected joys (& Unknown pleasures) of writing a series is discovering the small quiks and traits that stay with a character — the details that aren’t about plot or bodies or evidence, but about who they are when no one’s watching; how they spend their downtime. For P.J. Crowe, that detail is music. Across the three books, Crowe’s musical tastes surface in fragments — in the background of scenes, in late-night moments, in...

William Blake Says: Every Thing That Lives is Holy. ‘Long live the Earth, deeper than all our thinking we have done enough killing’. Mass murder, displacement, famine. Blake was wrong. We can never get enough killing. W.H. Auden, Epitaph On A Tyrant , got it. ‘When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laugher, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.’ It’s personal for Mohammed Moussa. His mother, his sisters their...

These are the final Picks of the Week before Christmas so I've put some lights up to make things a bit festive! I'd also like to wish you a happy Christmas and to say a very big thank you to all ABCTalers, especially the lovely editors for giving up their time to help make ABCTales what it is. We have had such a wonderful selection of prose this week it's been exceptionally hard to choose one in particular. I have two honourable mentions:...

Cogito ergo sum . The starting point of a million essays on philosophy. The duality of mind-body. Professor Guy Leschziner suggests it’s more complex, with what we think and who we are based on our sense of self is fallible and inconsistent based on a reality that isn’t really real, but a projection based on our internalised perceptions. Phew. Take a breather. He’s a neurologist—he gets angry at ‘these morons, those who are anti-vaxxers and anti...

Who are you? What are you? For a memoir a bit of backstory is needed. Try and fit ‘patriot’ into a single sentence in as many forms as you can manage. It’s on the book cover. The man who resigned because of a government cover-up. A smearing campaign against a patriotic whistle blower. I made notes and watched a documentary on Prime. If the world has a cancerous growth called global warming, wouldn’t it want to know? Eh, nope. Many of the tactics...