Blogs

Ewan Lawrie , a long-time editor on ABCtales, is two-thirds of the way to publishing his historical novel Gibbous House on Unbound. If you haven't already, have a look at the short movie and the excerpt of the book on his Unbound page . Gibbous House was written in serial form on ABCtales - and influenced by many of you. Ewan talked to us about that process, about intertextuality and the identity of the mysterious Moffat. 'Moffat is an imposter...

The first letter dated September 1982 is addressed to Dear Vic (that’s Nina’s sister) and she gives her address as 53 Gloucester Crescent London NW1. If you’ve got an NW1 address the Mosaic algorithm which credit companies favour and sorts postcodes into easy to read bundles, which brackets what kind of person you are, by where you live, and determines how much credit you can be pushed, would use terms for NW1ers as Cultural Leaders (or Global...

Prose with added line breaks? Once I got down to a careful read I decided Ruth's poetry has a poetic drive and flow. Often quietly fiery; '.....Fire the best servant and also the most dangerous.' (Fire). Personal and also far ranging poetry. There is a sequence of 19 sibyl poems: Delphic Sibyl, Shinto Sibyl, Blocked Sibyl, Hallucinating Sibyl... Each unit works as a stand-alone and she also captures the weirdness of the job; women kept in a cave...

Northanger Abbey isn’t so much a place as a time. In the introduction to Jane Austen’s (2000) Northanger Abbey the reader is informed it was written in 1897-8, but not in publication until 1803. So it’s a relatively old book, written in English, in a style of indirect free discourse (whatever that means) which Austen patented. It is also steeped in the sensibilities and, in particular, the Gothic literature of the time. The reader is addressed...

You see, being a fantasist can be a problem. Unless you write. In which case it can be a good thing. Maybe. It means you might not sleep too much. You might fall out with people who used to like you – before you started going crazy. You might have a little trouble holding down a job – although I still try. I’ve held down jobs through worse. And anyway, there’s always the outside chance you’ll get noticed and someone will start making some money...

Not sure what I am again. I often wonder what I’d be, if push came to shove. Is it out of date and old-fashioned to talk about class? About where I came from? Where I am now? Is it still class? I don’t know. Maybe it’s about education. Life-chances and all that. I look around here, at the people around the supermarket and see a lack of both. Are they working class? I don’t think they are anymore. And some of the people I deal with now. The other...

I’d this great idea for a film. Get Sir Sean Connery to play a hard-nosed cop, training an elite group to take down Al Capone. They’re set to get him on a technicality. Al Capone fails to pay his taxes. Prime Minister David Cameron phones Sir Sean. ‘We’re ready to cut a deal. We’ve put the frighteners on Al. He’s ready to play ball and cut a deal.’ ‘What’s he offering?’ asks Sir Sean. ‘A quarter bottle of Glenfiddich,’ says our Prime Minister. ‘...

ABCtaler John Giffard ( http://www.abctales.com/user/john-giffard ) has written one of the poems in this new anthology. Heroes, 100 Poems from the New Generation of War Poets. Edited by John Jeffries. This book is exactly as described in the title. It contained 100 poems covering various aspects of war. A large number of submissions were made in response to a call for poems for inclusion. A selection panel of 4, each individually rated all those...

Dear all, Last night my account clicked over 100,000 reads. My writing mate, D, and I have some passionate discussions about "reads", "hits " and the near-obsession that can develop - checking from the confines of Trap 1 in the toilet at work to keep up with developments. D's got a point I suppose. Maybe I'm comparing with a time when all my scribbles ended up going no further than a pile of old battered note books in a dusty pile under the bed...

As many of you know by now, Laurie Avadis (better known here as lavadis ) is one of three ABC authors currently crowdfunding the publication of a novel on Unbound. Unbound works by having readers put forward the capital for the books they want to read to fund their publication - and Ex is halfway to publication. But Laurie still needs a few more pledges to put the book he wrote here on ABCtales into bookshops and onto your bookcases - so we'd...