I read the review of Bloody February in The Observer and it’s like deja-fuck-you, somebody had wrote the song that you wrote and sings it better. Set in Glasgow, in the 1970s. My turf and my time and my subject matter. This book fucking scared me big time. I was scared this book would be everything I was not. Leading writers of Scottish noir praise Bloody January on the cover. Ian Rankin, Alex Gray, Peter May and Louise Welsh, ‘Bloody and...

I had a walk out today, after a week nearly of anti-biotics and rest, my legs are weak, and ache. Yet Spring is on the way, and the weather struck me as more temperate than usual and I ventured out in a linen jacket, a long (on me) gor-ray skirt, and a blue satin blouse. I finished the outfit with a blue leather bag, and a pair of blue, very feminine, court style, extra width shoes from Lotus. The Norwich store was busy, in each department, and...

Difficult as ever to choose, but in the end Story of the Week is mikesize1's 'Elephant Nest: Chapter One'. It made me laugh, it made me flinch, it made me wonder what was coming next: https://www.abctales.com/story/mikesize1/elephant-nest-chapter-one Poem of the Week was even harder. Eventually I went for Di_Hard's 'driverless', but with a more than honourable mention for the poem that inspired it, Jane Hyphen's 'Drivers'. Please do read both:...

I have taken the very difficult step of sending my work out to publishers – a big change for me…and now I am playing the waiting game…and I realized...although I am usually very optimistic in much of my life I'm not very optimistic in this part of me. I do love to write…and I will always love to write but to think it could be published??? Not sure about that…and now I wonder…should I have sent my story in at all? Was it ready? Maybe I should...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m0002j52 This four-part Australian drama is a big budget production. A morality play, a kind of J.B. Priestly An Inspector Calls set in Brisbane and the Timor Sea. There’s lots of angst and gnashing of teeth. In An Inspector Calls class is the card played. Here it’s class and race, and religion in a toxic mix, as wealthy westerners in a yacht meet immigrants in a sinking ship on the Timor sea. Safe Harbour...

Let’s start at the end: In the morning and I was still alive. Maybe, I’ll write a novel, I thought. And then I did. The largely autobiographical novel Charles Bukowski wrote in 1969 was a short book, Post Office, which sold over one million copies and gives all us other fifty-year-old bums that do a bit of writing a bit of hope. Somebody took a chance on Bukowski and it’s the classic rags-to-riches story, which is so fucking depressing, because...

Oh it's been hard to choose! There's so much good writing on the site this week. In the end I've gone with my heart. Story of the week is Jane Hyphen's Brooksy; a low-key piece of heartbreak that echoes with the thrum of those classic chords from Dire Straits. https://www.abctales.com/story/jane-hyphen/brooksy JupiterMoon's, imbolc, is Poem of the week. Jack Frost and the Green Man meet in this quiet medative piece. https://www.abctales.com/...

There’s an old joke I tell about Brian when we get talking about fitba, and it’s Wilma was a better player than him. What I don’t tell anybody was that she once gave me a dunt and doing for being cheeky. A few of us were playing near the Gilmore’s that day. We rolled about for a bit, on the slope of grass, near the wall on Shakespeare Avenue. I let her win, of course, because I didn’t hit girls. She wasn't a better player than me. But I did let...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00029kr/son-of-saul Son of Saul BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, directed by László Nemes and written by Clara Royer. This is a straightforward narrative. A Hungarian man finds the body of a young boy, he thinks is his son and he wants to give him a proper Jewish burial. To do so he needs to find a Rabbi willing to perform Mourner’s Kaddish. Transpose that scene to an unnamed Nazi death camp, (Auschwitz), running at...

The latest release by Cerasus Press - ' I Dreamt I Wrote Another Me' by Alex Smith has just been published. You can order your copy here: https://cerasuspoetry.com/i-dreamt-i-wrote-another-me/ or from Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/yb5gy6m4 'Alex Smith grew up a Catholic boy in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, under the threat of the bomb and the gun and sectarian violence, beside a hard border and even harder men. His poetry takes...