Find your way home? What does that mean? Find your way home in writing is being true to what you know. Even in non-fiction and fantasy fiction where you can pretty much create what you want…you have to believe it yourself or no one else will. I am having that kind of dilemma. “Antediluvian Trouble” is giving me all kinds of trouble. I can create the characters /personality and such, but the surroundings of Atlantis are causing havoc. I’ve posted...

I’ve tackled War and Peace a few times, but beat a hasty retreat. Initially the problem was the characters involved. I’m not the brightest. Easily confused. So having the patronymic and other names tacked on like stags antlers got a bit confusing. On the opening page, for example, we have Anna Pavlovna Scherer and she’s some kind of hanger on to Empress Marya Fedorovo, the Dowager Empress, and the former is at home having a soiree with the Abbe...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0755ms6/janis-joplin-little-girl-blue After the death of Johan Cruyff, I got talking and into one of those arguments about who was better Cruyff or Zinedine Zidane. I said it was close to call, but that Cruyff was just perhaps more elegant. ‘How can you get more elegant than Zidane?’ was the riposte. Fair point. Just my opinion. I’d seen both players in their prime, and love football. I was frequently number...

So much brilliant prose to choose from this week - however one had to be picked and I've gone for Noo's beautifully constructed suspense short 'Timestamp'. Poem of the week is Ewan's timely and excellent rant 'Boom!'. Congratulations to both. http://www.abctales.com/story/noo/timestamp http://www.abctales.com/story/ewan/boom The Inspiration Point, in honour of the clocks changing, is time flies. Good luck with that and I hope you all have a...

‘There was people waiting, families waiting to be evacuated…’ ‘I’m not sure how long we were away, although the house was damaged it was habitable…so we were in the back room with the windows boarded up because all the glass in the house was shattered, the blast had blown out all the windows…It was quite cosy. We had to cook on the fire.’ ‘I stood outside the burnt shell of what was my home with my children, all we had was what we stood in… how...

As a story teller, with Leicester City at the top of the Premier League it’s been the year of the underdog, and I’ve been following the Iain Duncan Smith, or the IDS narrative, with interest. He resigned from the Cabinet because ‘I am unable to watch passively whilst certain policies are enacted in order to meet the fiscal self-imposed restraints that are more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national interest…[I]...

The choice of story is controversial - but it's the quality of the writing I admire rather than the philosophical drift of the piece. The IP should give you some fun! Congrats to all. http://www.abctales.com/story/michael-s-r-valentine/im-king-portobello http://www.abctales.com/story/tjw/one-night-between http://www.abctales.com/inspiration-point-ip

Alone in Berlin is full of cartoon characters! And exclamation marks! And the third-person omniscient narrator who sees all and feels all, on behalf of his audience, suddenly comes clean about his omnipotent powers and directly addresses the reader and insists on a happy ending! Fuck that! But as we fall back into history and look at Boris Johnson and George Osborne vying with each other to think of new ways to beat the poor down and, on the...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07472y8 This is a programme about domestic violence. Violence against women. It follows Thames Valley’s domestic abuse unit, over a twelve month period, as its police officers go about the business of support Jemma, Helen and Sabrina and gaining a conviction against their attackers. The evidence seems straightforward. Helen’s dad, Russell, puts it this way, ‘I feel gutted. You never know what happens behind...

I am not a pilgrim. I am pillock. I read 84 pages, or section one, of 700 pages. I didn’t stick with it to find out how former FBI agent Jude Garret published in-house, as a front for the FBI, a book that he didn’t expect anyone to read about forensics; how this related to the pathology of crime and how what goes around comes around. A feeling I know well. But guess what? On page one, someone has read that book by Jude Garret, and it’s a woman...