Matt Gaw’s son mused that we spend 26 years of our life asleep, or if you’re my sister who is apt to like her long lies, 50 or her 60 years asleep. Gaw gives us a wake-up call in six chapters that begins in moonlight and ends in darkness. His family remain largely, unimpressed by his journey that takes him from his home in Bury St Edmonds, Thetford, the bright lights of London, Oban, and Isle of Coll, which is designated a Dark Sky Community. I...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00071xr/inside-the-bruderhof The end of the world is nigh. That’s not religious dogma, but the science of global warming. Hundreds of millions will die. Perhaps billions. The mass extinction of non-human species on land and sea has already begun. But Inside the Bruderhof is a joyous look at communal living in a religious community. But then again, I’m a big fan of utopia. The flip- side of Brave New World...

Lots of marvellous writing on the site again this week and, of course, our first Zoom reading event! Many, many thanks to all the wonderful writers who came to read and listen - the variety of voices and material was a complete joy. And a special thank-you to Mark Burrow, who organised it all and compered on the night. One comment referred to our Poem of the Week as 'stonkingly good', and I can think of no better way to describe 'Salamander' by...

Thanks to ABCtales, I've been able to try out my short stories about my two undertakers, Josiah Oakshott and Archibald Thurble, over the past few months. My thanks to all of you who have very kindly commented on the stories and have encouraged me to continue with them. As the stories I've published so far this year link together quite nicely, and make a nice 'narrative arc', I've decided to group them together in a book (see above). This will be...

When I was young, living in Manchester, my parents had an old valve radio. It was big, brown, and beige. It sat pride of place on the dresser in the living room of our house, shiny and smelling of furniture polish. The valves would hum and glow when you turned it on. Twisting the dial, the thin red line would slide along the station bandwidths, bringing the world in through the speakers. Everyday our home was filled with music, local news and...

I’m not sure when George was born, late ‘67, the year Celtic won the European Cup, or early ’68 when a storm lashed Scotland, taking many roofs off tenement buildings, 20 people were killed and many left homeless. I think there was a bit of both the glory and destruction in George. He’d once volunteered to play for the Dropp Inn when we were short of players and looking for bodies. I knew well he could play, having come up against him when he...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000lwld Droit du seigneur #MeToo in the Middle-Ages – A supposed legal right in medieval Europe, allowing feudal lords to have sex with subordinate women on their wedding night (or whenever). #MeToo in the twenty-first century, Scotland’s former First Minister Alex Salmond, March 2020, at the High Court in Edinburgh, was found not guilty of thirteen charges of sexual misconduct, including an attempted rape in...

This book is a bit of set-up for a debut thriller writer. The tag on the front cover tells the would-be reader, ‘Six Victims, One Brutal Killer, No Rhyme, No Reason, No Mercy’. The hard-sell for crime fans. And in smaller font it tells you this guy is like Mark Billingham and Val McDermid. Wow, I say, I’ll need to read this, it’s been lying on my shelf, getting dusty for two years and when I read the first chapter it might have been another ten...

We're having a heatwave - a tropical heatwave and it seems to be doing wonders for your writing if not the garden. Story of the week goes to a wonderfully wry, dry safety warning on modern living - Simon Barget's suitably hot: The Flames, The Flames: https://www.abctales.com/story/simon-barget/flames-flames Poem of the week goes to something more cooling, the gorgeous Departure of Nightjars by Onemorething: https://www.abctales.com/story/...

Young Stalin was winner of the 2007 Costa Biography Award. You can imagine historian Simon Sebag Montefiore after his acclaimed biography, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar , wondering what he would write next. Then hitting on the wheeze, I’ll write the same thing, but younger. It depends what you mean by young, of course. As Montefiore declares workers in the Baku oilfields, died around thirty-years old, on average. Young Stalin is around 39-...