Let’s start at the beginning. I’m a reader who writes. You can’t be a writer who doesn’t read. Writing is secondary and often unnecessary, but I claim it as a calling of sorts. ‘I know no one wants to hear me say how hard writing is—quit while you can’. I liked Goldberg telling me that. Reminding me that. I’m pretty good at making starts. The equivalent of joining the gym on the New Year and promising to go swimming and sauna once a week too. I’...

Young Lovers Anna de Vos & Buster Brown ~ Mamma & Sons ~ Chintsa Camping ~ Tom PhD graduation Selby & Mother ~ Anna Brown Our Late Mother

So I was reading “The Hollow Men,” Eliot, and it broke on me, came to me, yes, it must be a hollow point bullet. A hollow point expands on impact, expands and stretches and transfers its damage. Expands. Stretches. Expands. Transfers. Expands. Like a starburst. Like fungus. That’s the way to do it. Expansion. Death by a bullet’s real estate. Amazing, really, the damage that a single caliber with a dipped tip causes. It shrooms. Mushrooms. Like a...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002mrgq/the-idea-of-you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_of_You Straightforward rom-com. What’s the hook? Solène Marchand uses the wrong toilet. I used to do it quite a lot. Pee up closes and against the side of the bus at football matches. But it has to be a lot classier. Cause Solene is really Anne Hathaway. It needs to be something better than that. You can’t just have Anne Hathaway peeing outside...

This Day Making sense of it all? The disappearance of the revenant from the ashes, you return, rise like curl. As smoke signals, from the day you left. Shedding skin like a broken leaf, softly the night fades. Departing, where do they go? On a long journey to nowhere, with those fleeting moments drawing memories that wisp alone, along the waterfront, images of tossed Ashes. Yet you rise like a moth to a flame close to me. When we once chased...

I read this essay because I was writing a vampire story called Rust and Dust. I might even finish it. Not with a stake through the heart, but a seat at the table and fingers hovering over the keyboard as Ben Mears, the protagonist does in Salem’s Lot , before his home town Jerusalem's Lot is invaded by a strange Eastern European man, who unleashes a holocaust of vampires. Mears through happenstance has to save his town and America from those...

Flash Mob Just over half way from Amlwch to our nearest ‘big’ town, Bangor, the coast road crosses the old branch railway to Red Wharf Bay. It was my father who pointed out to me, sometime in the mid-seventies, the flash and circle emblem painted on the dark red brickwork of the bridge parapet. I’d imagined it was some sort of warning about buried electric cables. As graffiti goes, it was quite neatly done, in white paint, and in the mid-1970s...

My current best Writers on AbcTales November 2025 5. celticman – Paul 4. rhiannonw – Rhiannon 3. Maxine Jasmin-Green 2. GlosKat 1. Turlough – Terence Mullan I wish all our members and readers a happy and peaceful festive season! Nolan & Do not drink and drive. “God bless us, every one!”

This is not a novel. It is a well-lit corridor in a collapsing institution.

I’m having a break from fiction writing. Maybe these random thoughts will serve as a substitute until – if - inspiration should return. Just tell me to stop, if I should …. There’s a column in the MetroTalk page of the Metro, the free newspaper given away on tubes and trains. It doesn’t have an actual headline, but it could I suppose be called ‘Brief Encounter’ or, more prosaically, the Letch Corner. Here are some typical entries from a few...