Blogs

Yeh, I know, it’s that time of year when they show old films and wheel out stories about the Angel of Mons, and of our boys in the trenches singing Kristlenacht with the Huns and kicking a ball about no man’s land. Or that old Capra favourite It’s A Wonderful Life in which George Bailey (Henry Ford) wishes he’d never been born. I’m from Clydebank, so I know how he feels. One of the key scenes which establishes George Bailey’s creditability is...

[Vintage] Raymond Carver (2009 [1993] will you please be quiet? (2009 [1993]) what we talk about when we talk about love . I’ve read some of these stories before. From the latter collection, for example, Why Don’t You Dance? This has everything you need in a short story and the premise is simple enough to make sense and complex enough to leave the reader asking questions. Simply put, you don’t have to eat a whole orange to know it’s an orange...

Two wonderful Picks of the Week today. Story of the Week goes to Noo's beautiful piece inspired by Iggy Pop and love_writing's stunning Black Fog was a no-brainer for Poem of the Week: http://www.abctales.com/story/noo/skylines-and-angels http://www.abctales.com/story/lovewriting/black-fog For this week's Inspiration Point I am nicking the idea from Noo. Take a song and go from there - anyway you fancy. Good luck!

Command forms in writing are written with an exclamation mark. Keep out the boozer! Old dogs bite too! Carpe diem! Fuck there’s old Pat Powell! Drop dead! Yes, he did the last of these yesterday. My brother Bod phoned to tell me. He was going to go up and see him, but like many other things in life something else came up. Old Pat would have understood. They say when people stop eating that’s their time’s up. In old Pat’s case it was probably...

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The evidence is meticulously laid out here. Piketty is saying quite simply, prove me wrong. He asks for transparency of sources and is quite willing to give it for his own work. He is also saying that this trend which can be traced to the laissez-faire policies of Thatcher and Reaganites, in particular, have led to an increasing concentration of wealth that undermines any idea of...

The Ghosh family live in, I'm guessing here, a typical middle-class house in Calcuta, West Bengal. It's 1967. There are seventeen of them plus the servants who occasionally get involved in a good way, one kind soul risks the sack by giving Purba a sneaky stash of Vim. Purba, who is from a poor family and has become a widow with two small children after her husband, the youngest son of the clan, went to the country with his pals and raped a...

Think of the number of times you’ve said: I just can’t do that! Really, I can’t. You’d expect a Noel Edmonds-like figure to pop up on your shoulder, although perhaps not with a gingery beard, to tell you off for being negative. Give some advice about having the right mindset and some superbabble about if you want something enough the universe will provide it. I love that kinda crap. In the nineteen-century novel such dreams are anchored in...

Big congratulations this week to Linda Wigzell Cress for her three-part biography of her grandmother - a fascinating insight into early twentieth century Bermondsey, and again with London as a theme, but definitely another time and another place, john_silver's wonderfully bitter Poem in a Nice Suit: http://www.abctales.com/story/linda-wigzell-cress/bermondsey-girls-eliza... http://www.abctales.com/story/linda-wigzell-cress/bermondsey-girls-eliza...

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-paedophile-next-door/on-demand/57601-001 Historian Steve Humphries narrates and produced this programme. Going back thirty years to a conversation I had with a girl named Joyce who had big tits, I was quite keen on that kind of thing in those days, long eyelashes which she batted at me when she spoke, and she was now I come to think of it, more and more, quite pretty, but we never actually did it, not that...

Anybody that knows me should by now know I’m under contract to UNITED AUTHORS PUBLISHING LIMITED trading as UNBOUND . I’ve agreed to deliver a novel currently entitled Lily Poole and it will be around 72 000 words (ahem, 84 000, but that’s word inflation for you). The Deliver Date will be 1st October 2014 or a later date agreed between the two parties, or in more simple terms – whenever. The production costs currently stand around £5 100 and I’m...