I was out at the pub watching a Champions League match. (I won’t be saying that for a while.) Punters were crowding round the bar and the barmaid was looking through me as if I was made of glass. I bumped into Tam-who-will-remain nameless. ‘You’ll never believe it,’ he said. ‘Somebody’s put a video of somebody that looks like you up selling something?’ ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘But it’s really funny.’ Neither of us laughed. ‘You...

What you see is what you don’t get is a wysiwyg clause I rarely use in normal conversation. I was out last night to meet my adoring public. It was Saturday night and it was the Drop Inn so you can guarantee a crowd of at least four people and Wullie Dalziel. There’s a rule that nobody can kiss at the bar, unless it’s Brian Thompson, and he’s had a bit much and he hears some song on the Jukebox and wants to do his wee Indian dance and wants to...

http://unbound.co.uk/books/lily-poole I used to think that writers were two exotic beasts joined by a furrowed brow -- the person that writes and the person that edits. The taxonomy has changed. Upon closer examination I recognised a third diablo poking out between the bones of the writer, clinging to the person and their reality and claiming to be an independent personality, the writer’s real self and willing to sell their souls for the quick...

The second of our books on Unbound is now available to support. Ewan's Gibbous House is described as 'Victorian Psycho'. It owes a lot to Edgar Allen Poe, Dickens and a host of other great writers - but Ewan's knowledge and skill takes the genre on to new places. It is vital to the development of ABCtales that these books get your support. If we are successful with these two, and one more yet to come, then we will be in a position to get many of...

Great to see Harry back - and on fine form with this one: http://www.abctales.com/story/harry-buschman/man-i-was-0 and from elsie katz, one of her finest ever: http://www.abctales.com/story/elsie-katz/journal-wanton-wanting I forgot the Inspiration Point last week so here's a format from way back when. Just use these two phrases in your story or poem. They can be integral to the piece or purely incidental: the black boots looked fine smiling...

James Leslie Mtichell took the pseudonym of Lewis Grassic Gibbon and was author of the classic A Scots Quair, the best known (and best liked) being Sunset Song . I can't say I know a lot about the man. He died young, in his early thirties in the 1930s. He was a Socialist that lived in Aberdeen and like his heroine Chris Guthrie had a strong link with the Cloud of the Howe land and a calling to be educated with a love of books and learning...

Well, I've plastered it all over Facebook and Twitter and pestered friends by e-mail. What's left? A heads-up to any ABCTalers who still remember me? Or a message in a bottle? These may be the same thing. ABC's next joint venture with Unbound is a historical novel with a difference. A strombolian mash-up of gothic tropes and a sardonic, if not always entirely self aware narrator. By the way, he murders people - and we're not really sure who he...

Scratch’s ‘Daniel’ series of stories on ABCtales is coming to a conclusion. I’ve been having flashbacks, images of long black frocks and oversized crucifixes, the parish priest Canon Mallon and my teacher Mrs Boyle standing next to him, but with a slightly smaller crucifix. Little did I know that I was involved in a cruel experiment and like many others I’m ready to sue and seek therapeutic help by getting it down on paper. There are others like...

The man's life is his own ballad.Woody, named after the President Woodrow Wilson was born in Okemah in Oklahoma, a town that experienced the crazy short-term prosperity and subsequent slow death and ecological devastion of the oil boom. His father sold real-estate, an occupation that led to physical battles and broken hands. Everyone craved work and jumped trains to seek it. This was extremely hazardous, a person could freeze to death in in ice-...