Blogs

For January, very kindly chosen by Fatboy74: I think January is a Marmite month. For many it's the time for a fresh start, new beginnings and a chance to wipe the slate clean. For others, January's one redeeming feature, is that it's not quite as bad as November, which is universally accepted as being the worst month of the year. Whatever your feelings about January, ABCtalers have been prolific and have produced an awful lot of excellent...

“I pursued a married man. I even slept with him. Oh, and his wife hired me; she kind of knew about it. And by the way, I think one or both of them might be involved with this other girl’s suicide... But her love for (him) is as twisted as everything else about her: It’s all-consuming and toxic and dangerous.” In my own words I guess, Your protagonist Jessica. If any of you are familiar with the Lifetime/ Netflix series You, and you love it, then...

Oh it's been hard to choose! There's so much good writing on the site this week. In the end I've gone with my heart. Story of the week is Jane Hyphen's Brooksy; a low-key piece of heartbreak that echoes with the thrum of those classic chords from Dire Straits. https://www.abctales.com/story/jane-hyphen/brooksy JupiterMoon's, imbolc, is Poem of the week. Jack Frost and the Green Man meet in this quiet medative piece. https://www.abctales.com/...

Waiting For Another Velvet Morning

There’s an old joke I tell about Brian when we get talking about fitba, and it’s Wilma was a better player than him. What I don’t tell anybody was that she once gave me a dunt and doing for being cheeky. A few of us were playing near the Gilmore’s that day. We rolled about for a bit, on the slope of grass, near the wall on Shakespeare Avenue. I let her win, of course, because I didn’t hit girls. She wasn't a better player than me. But I did let...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00029kr/son-of-saul Son of Saul BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, directed by László Nemes and written by Clara Royer. This is a straightforward narrative. A Hungarian man finds the body of a young boy, he thinks is his son and he wants to give him a proper Jewish burial. To do so he needs to find a Rabbi willing to perform Mourner’s Kaddish. Transpose that scene to an unnamed Nazi death camp, (Auschwitz), running at...

The latest release by Cerasus Press - ' I Dreamt I Wrote Another Me' by Alex Smith has just been published. You can order your copy here: https://cerasuspoetry.com/i-dreamt-i-wrote-another-me/ or from Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/yb5gy6m4 'Alex Smith grew up a Catholic boy in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, under the threat of the bomb and the gun and sectarian violence, beside a hard border and even harder men. His poetry takes...

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