Blogs

Last week's Inspiration Point produced some wonderful work, and our Poem of the Week is one of those pieces. Jenny Skinner's 'Stone Loach' is a marvellous piece of nature writing, beautifully written and full of atmosphere: Stone Loach | ABCtales Story of the Week goes to Simon Barget's 'No. 782', which takes us to a place where we can reflect on where the time went and what it all means. It has a lot of humour, and much that pretty much all of...

I've tried multiple times over the past few days to upload a story but I keep getting the incomprehensible error message below. I've sent pleading messages via the Contact Us section of the web page but to no avail! I would really like to upload this story but may have to abandon the effort if this goes on :-( Any ideas? PDOException : SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1366 Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x9F\x98\x8A</...' for column 'body_value...

I'm very happy to announce that YOU (From Pissed to Publication) by ABCTales' very own Drew Gummerson is out now. You can buy it here: https://www.beardedbadgerpublishing.com/online-store/YOU-From-Pissed-to-... for the bargain price of £5 with free postage and I can say with 100% certainty that you will really really enjoy it - it's brilliant! Here's a review by Marandina: There are certain things everyone is supposed to do at least once in...

'Brave New World'

Many stories I read blend into one another. Some of them I can vaguely remember. They tend to be—by that measure—the best. I’m thinking here of George Mackay Brown, Celia , which is arguably the best short story in The Devil and the Giro , edited by Carl MacDougall. I met Carl a few times and he was great, but not great enough to get in the collection of the best of The Scottish Short Story . Bernard MacLaverty short story A Time To Dance is a...

$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$3,365.46 ) Week - 32 Go Birds - Dallas SUCKS! ------------- (I say again) EAGLES!!! EAGLES!!! EAGLES!!!!!! --------------------------------- Very disappointing outcome last week as a winnable contest slipped through the fingers of an inexperienced coach. All will be forgiven with a quality win on Monday night against the hated, despised, despicable… Cowboys (Ssshhhkk.. Ptooo..!) In...

Happy Friday to all! As always, it's very hard to pick just one poem or story - there is always such a variety of wonderful writing to choose from. Poem of the Week, this week, is hoalarg1's Beyond Reflection. A beautiful poem, tragic too, it stays with you. A very skilfully written poem. You can read it here: https://www.abctales.com/story/hoalarg1/beyond-reflection But please have a read of these poems if you haven't already from Rhiannon,...

I hoped to get 200 cherrys by the time I posted 900 stories. I got my 200th yesterday which is a relief because I'd been in a cherry slump for a couple of weeks at 198. I'm gonna take some time to celebrate and be grateful for my readers and ABC tales. Ice

When you are asked to review books, a number of prompts are translated into numbers. For example, you are asked to award a mark out of ten for literary merit. I often cheat here. If I like a book, it gets nearer ten than one. After all, even the ingredients on the label of a brown sauce bottle have enough literary merit to get five. Ingenious Pain gets a ten, because his sentences sing and you can get your teeth into them. His characters have a...