Blogs

Story and Poem of the Week and Inspiration Point

It’s getting ever closer to winter and our Poem of the Week is a beautiful reminder of the season to come - Thoughts of an Oak Tree’s Spirit by skinner_jennifer. You can read it here: https://www.abctales.com/story/skinnerjennifer/thoughts-oak-trees-spirit Story of the Week is the very powerful and brilliantly written story, Wednesday Club, by celticman. You can read it here: https://www.abctales.com/story/celticman/wednesday-club This week’s...

ABCtales Critiquing Service - good reports!

Over the years many of you have asked for a critiquing service and it has taken a long time to find (a) someone good enough to do it well and (b) someone who will charge what we regard as a reasonable fee. Finally, we've done it! Lorraine Mace is a freelance writer, columnist and tutor for the Writers Bureau. Winner of the Petra Kenney International Poetry Competition (comic verse category), Lorraine's fiction, features and humour have appeared...

Meliysa Euyoboglu (2015) The Image of the Vampire in ‘Interview With a Vampire’ and ‘Salem’s Lot’.

I read this essay because I was writing a vampire story called Rust and Dust. I might even finish it. Not with a stake through the heart, but a seat at the table and fingers hovering over the keyboard as Ben Mears, the protagonist does in Salem’s Lot , before his home town Jerusalem's Lot is invaded by a strange Eastern European man, who unleashes a holocaust of vampires. Mears through happenstance has to save his town and America from those...

Flash Mob

Flash Mob Just over half way from Amlwch to our nearest ‘big’ town, Bangor, the coast road crosses the old branch railway to Red Wharf Bay. It was my father who pointed out to me, sometime in the mid-seventies, the flash and circle emblem painted on the dark red brickwork of the bridge parapet. I’d imagined it was some sort of warning about buried electric cables. As graffiti goes, it was quite neatly done, in white paint, and in the mid-1970s...

MY BEST 5 WRITERS NOV '25

My current best Writers on AbcTales November 2025 5. celticman – Paul 4. rhiannonw – Rhiannon 3. Maxine Jasmin-Green 2. GlosKat 1. Turlough – Terence Mullan I wish all our members and readers a happy and peaceful festive season! Nolan & Do not drink and drive. “God bless us, every one!”

FRQNTZ Book Review: “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” by Kiran Desai

This is not a novel. It is a well-lit corridor in a collapsing institution.

Story and Poem of the Week and Inspiration Point

Posted by airyfairy. Thank you, everyone for some amazing stuff this week! Story of the Week goes to SoulFire77's opening part of 'Lily'. It brilliantly manages the complex and difficult task of being ever so quietly very disturbing.. You'll be glad to know, once you've been completely drawn into the story and you're hooked, that there are more parts posted on the site, and the promise of more to come! Lily (A Prologue) | ABCtales Poem of the...

Old Git on the Northern Line, Wednesday evening

I’m having a break from fiction writing. Maybe these random thoughts will serve as a substitute until – if - inspiration should return. Just tell me to stop, if I should …. There’s a column in the MetroTalk page of the Metro, the free newspaper given away on tubes and trains. It doesn’t have an actual headline, but it could I suppose be called ‘Brief Encounter’ or, more prosaically, the Letch Corner. Here are some typical entries from a few...

Letters to the Earth (2019) Introduced by Emma Thompson and illustrated by Jackie Morris.

‘Drill baby drill’. That’s been the response of the moron’s moron Trump and his followers. It makes meetings of heads of states COP 25, COP 26…meaningless. Short-term thinking. Extinction Rebellion has lost its lustre. All around the world, eco activists have been reclassified as terrorists. Chief Seattle, ‘The Earth is our mother. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself’...

The Story Behind The Payout Game - The Man from Malta and combing through the ashes

This book almost didn’t happen. I could put it down to writer’s block or in the words of John Lennon: ‘Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans’ , but by March this year, the book was stalled. Frozen. Part of the problem I realised was the journals and notebooks were becoming an albatross around my neck. Instead of them being a map or a guide, they became a convenient go-to crutch. I had two notebooks filled with notes,...

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