I’ve spent a lot of time with these babies. All of the women writers who are featured - and there are ten of them here - have been story or poem of the week on ABCtales a couple of times. There are other women writers that are not featured. It’s a difficult one. We’ve all got our own preferences, whether it’s prose or poetry. Maggy van Eijk, for example, is a strange beast. ‘This is the part where a Dutch girl/ loses herself in smoke only/to...

Started writing this 6 years ago. Anyone familiar with, or starting the process of, putting words down on paper or screen will know (or find) the story may not even have a title. The heroes and villains have different names; perhaps culled from a phone directory. They may even be real people who've annoyed you in the past. Or now. Give that one up now. The effort of diguising just to avoid the litigation dilutes the venom you feel . Blank piece...

This was for a 1960's theme party. Them shoes nearly cripppled me. I thought I would have a go at writing a blog. No idea what to say or what I am doing but I've got to do something to pass the time. I got up at half past one and have actually managed to type some comments on competition entries as well as being able to read them so that was a great way to pass a couple of hours. Very enjoyable! Signing off now as it's light and my eyes are...

I sat down to write a blog last week in Tunisia, under the creaking ceiling fan hung over my hotel’s solitary computer terminal (wifi has yet to take off in North Africa), and though I baffled my way through the Arabic keyboard the internet flickered off just as I hit post, a setback redoubled by the autonomous reboot of the system and a user-lockout, which left me sitting there scratching my head. And now that I’m back in the land of the...

New things come like a changeling wind. You never quite know what they carry, they could bring in their wake a poisonus fume that will infect and kill everything or a sweet summer breeze that will remind you in a moment of complete clarity how blessed you are to still be breathing at all. My changeling wind found me in a place of transition. I had begun to move after many years of stagnaton. There was very little development, physically or...

Last week, Blinding Books (run by ABC's very own Richard Penny, aka Blighter's Rock ) published an anthology by ten excellent women writers, many of them from ABC, called My Baby Shot Me Down . It's quite easily the ABC publishing event of the year. No breakfast nook, den or garden is worth sitting in without a copy in your hands. You'll find a lot of familiar names inside - the book features Clarissa Angus, Katherine Black, Maggy van Eijk,...

Frances Murdoch died two days ago. You don’t know her. She wasn’t a celebrity, born in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression. She would have been too young to know anything about depression and she was always a cheery soul. She would become a teenager during the Second World War. Postwar-prosperity, full employment and the creation of the Welfare State would mark the beginnings of her working life. I don’t know what she worked as, or what...

'What this country wants is nostalgia, they want to look back even if it's only as far as last week..looking to the closest thing we can find to John Wayne..show me a time when heroes weren't zeroes...selective amnesia. America, the Reagan era. Gil's smart words orchestrated to take the mood down lower jazz, his cool dude stage presence gets to the point. The point being the wholesale trickery of politicians, the way they pitch an image...

Here Elena describes her mother: ‘Born three years before Russia turned into the Soviet Union, my mother became the mirror image of my motherland: overbearing, protective, difficult to leave…A survivor of the famine, Stalin’s terror and the Great Patriotic War…’. Food features heavily in the account. They have a Dacha thirty miles from Leningrad. A property owner in a property-less state with no such thing as privacy. Her father had a chauffeur...

Excursion Down under April 2014 Wed. Mar. 26th, 2014- Bonita Springs, Florida We were up at 3:30 A.M to make final preparations for leaving. Our 4 A.M. taxi arrived promptly and we were off for the Southwest Florida International Airport. It was only 5 A.M. but there were already a goodly amount of people walking the airport concourses. We checked our bags into the U.S. Air counter and walked through the security gates without incident. A brief...