Blogs

The seventh day of radiation proved to be informative. Maybe too informative, if ya know what I mean. The night before, I was up all night because of continual urination. I overslept after I finally fell asleep. When I woke up, I was late. I had to jump in the car and white knuckle it through a rainstorm and construction and past an accident to get to the hospital on time. You don't want to be late to radiate because there is a very tight...

Things That Are is the size of a prayer book. And you should have to put on those white gloves snooker referees wear when re-spotting a ball, when opening its pages. It should be treated with reverence and awe, because there is wisdom in these words. It should become a religion with worshipers meeting up to discuss sentence and phrases such as the introduction to ‘Silly Lilies’, 'Most plants bend over backwards to cooperate with reality’. This...

Let's take it back to the beginning oh yeah When there was no history and no mystery was death. What we now call sunset and dawn were as coincidental as breath. Then somebody figured out there was a pattern involving darkness and light. This pattern marked the beginning of time as night became day and dark became night. With each generation, the pattern not yet known as time, became ever more detailed. Soon someone stumbled upon the concept of...

Find your way home? What does that mean? Find your way home in writing is being true to what you know. Even in non-fiction and fantasy fiction where you can pretty much create what you want…you have to believe it yourself or no one else will. I am having that kind of dilemma. “Antediluvian Trouble” is giving me all kinds of trouble. I can create the characters /personality and such, but the surroundings of Atlantis are causing havoc. I’ve posted...

I’ve tackled War and Peace a few times, but beat a hasty retreat. Initially the problem was the characters involved. I’m not the brightest. Easily confused. So having the patronymic and other names tacked on like stags antlers got a bit confusing. On the opening page, for example, we have Anna Pavlovna Scherer and she’s some kind of hanger on to Empress Marya Fedorovo, the Dowager Empress, and the former is at home having a soiree with the Abbe...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0755ms6/janis-joplin-little-girl-blue After the death of Johan Cruyff, I got talking and into one of those arguments about who was better Cruyff or Zinedine Zidane. I said it was close to call, but that Cruyff was just perhaps more elegant. ‘How can you get more elegant than Zidane?’ was the riposte. Fair point. Just my opinion. I’d seen both players in their prime, and love football. I was frequently number...

So much brilliant prose to choose from this week - however one had to be picked and I've gone for Noo's beautifully constructed suspense short 'Timestamp'. Poem of the week is Ewan's timely and excellent rant 'Boom!'. Congratulations to both. http://www.abctales.com/story/noo/timestamp http://www.abctales.com/story/ewan/boom The Inspiration Point, in honour of the clocks changing, is time flies. Good luck with that and I hope you all have a...

Well the first difference is amount of readers. My last blog counted over 900 and is still growing. This brings up the eternal question, what is the purpose of writing? I have great admiration for the poets who write their poems on lotus flowers and then send them down the Nile. Art is all about the rush of creativity and catering to audience only diminishes its purity. Catering has its own artistry. You gotta give the people what they want. Of...

I probably am. Six months ago, I wouldn't have been writing a word about cancer in my facade of invulnerability. In January, cancer became a stunning personal reality. I wanted to keep a record of the proceedings and I wanted it to be anonymous because I didn't want to freak out acquaintances. I was/am aware that this battle makes a helluva story so as a writer, I needed to share it somewhere. This is how I discovered abctales and why I think/...

‘There was people waiting, families waiting to be evacuated…’ ‘I’m not sure how long we were away, although the house was damaged it was habitable…so we were in the back room with the windows boarded up because all the glass in the house was shattered, the blast had blown out all the windows…It was quite cosy. We had to cook on the fire.’ ‘I stood outside the burnt shell of what was my home with my children, all we had was what we stood in… how...