Blogs

A Subsequent Engagement by Philip Whiteland. Available to Pre-order Now!

Posted by Insertponceyfrenchnamehere on Sun, 14 Jan 2024

If you, like me, are a fan of Phil Whiteland's very funny Bring Out Your Dead stories, you'll also be very pleased to hear that he's publishing another collection. Here's what he says: Welcome, once more, to the rather odd world of Josiah Oakshott and Archibald Thurble, respectively owner and employee of Oakshott and Underwood, ‘understanding and sympathy at your time of need’. If you’re new to these two characters, where have you been? Their...

If not now, when? - some thoughts on my 10th release - MALIGN INTENT

Posted by Robert Craven on Sat, 13 Jan 2024

If not now, when? To borrow Shane Horgan’s comment on the Ireland v NZ All-blacks quarter final match in the Rugby World Cup 23 (and with a nod to Primo Levi), If not now, when? Is the constant thought of an indie author. When? MALIGN INTENT is my tenth novel and the follow up to A Kind of Drowning , a second crime thriller featuring Garda Inspector P. J. Crowe. MALIGN INTENT will be released on Amazon KDP on January 27th 2024. It has taken two...

Saltburn (2023) written, directed, and co-produced by Emerald Fennell.

Posted by celticman on Fri, 12 Jan 2024

Saltburn wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Upstairs Downstairs, Brideshead Revisited, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Murder on the Dance Floor can go and take a good fuck to themselves as far as I’m concerned. What did you think? Notes. It’s a bit of a mishmash. Plot (2008 Film) for example follows Charles Ryder's relationship with the Flyte family, particularly his close friendship with the charismatic but troubled Sebastian Flyte, and the...

Story and Poem of the Week and Inspiration Point

Posted by Insertponceyfrenchnamehere on Fri, 12 Jan 2024

Posted by onemorething: Thanks to all, as always, for providing such a rich and varied wealth of writing. And whilst choosing Picks of the Week is never easy: This week's Poem of the Week is Rhiannon's wonderful and clever, riddle-like poem, Autobiography. https://www.abctales.com/story/rhiannonw/autobiography-not-mine This week's Story of the Week is Terrence Oblong's Austere Planet which is both brilliant and hilarious. https://www.abctales...

Help!

Posted by Tom Brown on Thu, 11 Jan 2024

Does anyone know how you can move a story from one set to another?

John Vaillant (2010) The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival.

Posted by celticman on Mon, 08 Jan 2024

I’m going to read John Valliant’s latest book, Fireweather an account of how we’re destroying our planet. Before going forward, I looked backward to Valliant’s account of how an Amur tiger, sometimes known as a Siberian tiger, killed and ate a hunter Dmitri Markov in the Primorye territory in Russia’s Far East, near the Chinese border were temperatures plummeted to 40-below zero Centigrade during the winter of December 1997. Few or any of us...

Story and Poem of the Month

Posted by Insertponceyfrenchnamehere on Sun, 07 Jan 2024

Our Story and Poem for December, very kindly chosen by Drew Gummerson: It’s always an honour to do this, to choose the Story and Poem of the Month. I’ve been looking over the past few days at December’s entries and once again I’m impressed by the quality and range of writing on the site. Story of Month First some notable mentions. It wouldn’t be December if I didn’t flag a Christmas story and Mac_Ashton’s Yuletide Loops is a brilliant one. A...

Nomadland (2020), Channel 4, Film 4, written, produced, edited and directed by Chloé Zhao. Based on the 2017 nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder.

Posted by celticman on Sun, 07 Jan 2024

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/nomadland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomadland https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/02/nomadland-living-in-cars-working-amazon ‘I’m not homeless, I’m houseless,’ Fern (Frances McDormand) corrects a young girl she’d tutored after a chance meeting in a superstore, who’d heard she was homeless. In other words, Fern had gone from being one of us to one of them. A person to be feared and derided. ‘...

Carl MacDougall (2023) Already, Too Late.

Posted by celticman on Fri, 05 Jan 2024

I read all of Carl MacDougall’s books apart from his short-story collection Elvis is Dead . Reading is what I do. But I had ulterior motives. I was sponsored by Scottish Book Trust and mentored by Carl MacDougall for an unpublished novel The Cruelty Man 2018, which belatedly is being published by Spellbound Books as Beastie in 2024. I wanted to meet the man on the page before meeting the actual man. I knew far more about him than he knew about...

Pages