Luke Neima's blog

Our story of the week comes from In The Day , the utterly incredible novel from Kevin Marman, a.k.a Stan, which is now available from Longmarsh Press and soon from Waterstones and independent booksellers around the UK. If you’re interested, find out how to get a copy and read a full review of the book, here: http://www.abctales.com/blog/luke-neima/stan%E2%80%99s-novel-%E2%80%93-d... . But if you’re not convinced, have a read of ‘Thursday’, our...

I’ve been meaning to write about In the Day for a while now. When Stan (Kevin Marman) first sent me his novel in December, I thought I’d read it quickly over the holidays and put something up by the end of the month. But I wasn’t quite prepared for what the book actually is. And what it is, is excellent. In every respect. And like any other excellent novel In the Day is one you have to read slowly – because there’s so much you need to pause and...

It’s been an exciting week here at ABC – we’ve had two big announcements, our Picks of the Year from 2013 (which you can read more about here: http://www.abctales.com/blog/luke-neima/picks-year-2013 ) as well as the results from our Winter competition (which you can find, along with honourable mentions, here: http://www.abctales.com/blog/luke-neima/results-abc%E2%80%99s-winter-competition ). All of which makes for some excellent reading (for...

The results are in! But first a big thanks to all of you who participated. We had a great turnout, with forty submissions, and we managed to raise almost £200 – which means two cash prizes of £50 to each of our winners. But the competition was very fierce. In our reading we saw every aspect of Winterness adapted, remembered, parodied, pastiched and perfected, which made for fascinating few weeks of reading and some very difficult judging. But...

Tony and I have spent the past few weeks reading and rereading the best content from 2013 — trawling through the awards and the pieces we had squirreled away on folders on our desktop. It’s been a fabulous year in more ways than one, but the thing that is most astonishing to me, as a new member of the ABC community, is the quantity of truly excellent work on the site. Over and over again I’ve come across poems that have stopped me in my tracks,...

Hi all, Tony and I have been hard at work reading competition entries this week (as well as whittling down a shortlist for Picks of the Year, 2013), so look forward to a few big announcements very soon. And though so much time and talent went into writing for the competition, there were still plenty of fantastic pieces on the site this week. One of those is our poem of the week, Hoalarg's Night Piece, a simple, evocative poem that captures that...

This is the final call for submissions to our Winter competition! All entries must be in by midnight Greenwich Mean Time on this coming Monday, January the sixth. So if you’ve registered but haven’t submitted your story yet, get writing , and if you haven’t registered, sign up via Paypal below! Rules: The theme of the competition is loosely based around ‘Winter,’ but feel free to incorporate the theme as much or as little as you’d like. This is...

Happy New Year to you all! It's been a year of substantial changes for ABC, ranging from a new website design to a host of outstanding new members, and we've come out of 2013 stronger and with more energy than ever before. We'll be continuing to build and promoting the website into the new year—but thanks are due to you all, because its you and your writing that makes ABCtales what it is! At the cusp of the new year we have a couple outstanding...

I hope everyone has passed a Merry Christmas. I've certainly been enjoying the fruits of the holiday season on ABC—in the past few weeks I've read some of the best Christmas writing I've ever come across, and in quantity. More than a few of this week's stories and poems I paused over, and I couldn't help but read a couple out over the fire on Christmas. There's just over a week left for submissions to our Winter competition. Entry is only £5...

Happy Christmas, one and all. I'm home in Canada for the holidays - so apologies for the late update this week. The sun is just up and doing it's best to get through the snow out here on the West coast. It's frightful weather, but inside the fire is nearing delightful, though we may need to ladle on a bit more coal before we're ready to let it snow. We've nowhere else to go. So the thing to do is hole up in front of the Christmas tree and read!...