Blogs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_John Between 22 February 1968 – 31 October 1969, three Glasgow women that attended the dancing at the Barrowland Ballroom never made it home. Patricia Docker, Jemima MacDonald and Helen Puttock were raped and murdered. We’ve become attuned to the nuances of serial killers through thousands of stories, books programmes and podcasts. This is the shortened version, originally shown in September 2011. David Hayman...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_Lives https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thirteen-Lives-Viggo-Mortensen/dp/B09ZSJ8QN4/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1L041PIUBBOXF&keywords=thirteen&qid=1684779761&s=instant-video&sprefix=thirteen%2Cinstant-video%2C93&sr=1-2 Like me, you may vaguely remember this, 23rd June 2018. 12 boys from Thailand (and their soccer coach) = 13, trapped in an underground cave (Tham Luang) and being rescued. We know there is a...

I hadn’t heard of the not too lauded Scottish novelist Agnes Ownes, from Balloch. She was born in 1926, and most of her longer, short stories—novellas—were published in the 1980s. Five of them have been brought together. Like Birds in the Wilderness, A Working Mother, For the Love of Willie, Bad Attitudes and Jen’s Party . What they have in common is stories mirror a working-class view of the world. Dialect isn’t dialect. Just the way people...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B0B8M3WD4S/ref=atv_mv_hom_c_9U9jIg_brws_1_46?jic=8%7CEgRzdm9k Mariel (Karla Souza) is almost thirty. She’s been a fixture in Mexican diving team since she was fourteen, winning a bronze medal at the Olympics. But she’s never fulfilled her potential, never got that elusive gold. Never come close. She always seems to fuck up. Self-sabotage as her diving guru Brualio (Hernán Mendoza) puts it. ‘He saw me,’...

Thanks again to everyone for another week of most enjoyable reading. Our Poem of the Week is skinner_jennifer's beautiful 'Miracle of Spring On Gossamer Wings'. Spring/early summer has yet to get going where I live, so it was lovely to lose myself in this meditation on each year's renewal of life: Miracle Of Spring On Gossamer Wings | ABCtales Story of the Week is 'Lucifer - What's good for the saucy gander', Jane Hyphen's sharp and funny...

Evicted, Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize winning study of the American housing market was personal. He lived the life. A cri de couer . Poverty by America is a step away from that immiserating experience. His gut was telling him it was wrong. He wasn’t a cultural tourist. This is a more cognitive and rational approach to explain why so many people in America are poor and likely to remain so. His solution seems pretty straightforward. Stop...

I was looking for a book called Save the Cat . I don’t really need to find it, because anybody that has ever read any of my stories knows plot isn’t my strong point. Spoiler, when I’m writing The Cat Dies, but it’s unintentional. I’ve no idea what I’m doing, and neither has has my loyal band of fellow writers. And I blame the devil. Amazon are pushing Mindcage , which is why algorithms rule the world. It has a zillion great reviews and yet it’s...

Everything Everywhere All at Once won a stack of awards. Let’s start with the multiverse. Everything that could possibly happen does in an array of parallel realties. Nothing and nobody is ever lost, even if they are. Overworked and overwrought, Evelyn Quan Wang (Michelle Yeoh) a Chinese-American immigrant, who owns a laundry, while being audited by the IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdr (Jamie Lee Curtis), discovers that she is the multiverse...

Dwellers Of The New World took me many years to write, and set me out on a great adventure which proceeded the first story: The Chosen Ones. I tried to create a fiction that would take the reader into another realm of existence, leaving behind the reality of our world. I wanted to embark on a journey into the unknown, taking my characters with me and leaving the reader mesmerized. There was never going to be a chance of getting this story...