I enjoyed this collection of six short stories from Alan Warner and Brian Hamill. If we went at this alphabetically, it would be BH and AW, but get real. Alan Warner writes an introduction, waxes nostalgically about the time he used to send manuscripts by post! That was before he became an internationally acclaimed writing superstar. He felt sorry for would-be writers like Brian Hamill, whose writing he enjoyed reading, but with nowhere much to...

I've been trying to expand my sight – my writer’s sight that is- I've always leaned fully into the romance genre and the magical adventure story and I do add touches of science, so I’ve begun to wonder if I have it in me to write a straight science fiction. The plot isn't the issue, I love science, but the characters are challenging. I bend towards highlighting the attraction between characters...so to a true write science fiction adventure, I’d...

Bit of a damp squid. Hosted by Darrell Currie, with Johan Mjallby, Chris Sutton and Celtic manager, Neil Lennon, on split screen, it was three-quarter hours of not very much. Adverts took about 15 minutes. So there was around a half-hour of chat. Neil Lennon being congratulated (and so he should be) and fielding some not very difficult question. Sutton for example, asking Lennon if he thought he’d still be in a job if he hadn’t won a trophy in...

Kilmarnock was Scottish League Champions in 1965. Celtic won the Scottish Cup that year. In 1966 Celtic won the first of their nine-in-a-row league titles. Rangers won the Scottish Cup. 1967, and Celtic won everything, including the European Cup, with a team of players that lived within a twelve miles radius of Parkhead. Bobby Lennox was the furthest away from Paradise, one of three players, with ‘Caesar’, Billy McNeil, and to have played in all...

Have you been zooming/Teaming and all of those other virtual methods of communicating? Remember those luxurious days of careless touch and wandering? Although our day to day lives are curtailed, there's time to travel to the past and capture moments from memories and share them here. Our two picks of the week are fabulous examples of this. Poem of the week goes to Socialeaf with a blending of love - human or machine? https://www.abctales.com/...

A writer knows when a character has taken full form. They become real to them. The dialogue flows like true conversations and the next line writes itself, because the character's personality dictates it. That’s when a writer will tell you, they are in the zone. The story is practically writing itself. The words are images of movement and you know immediately when a line is not right, it doesn’t fit the character, it wouldn’t be what they’d say...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000j457/dana-the-original-derry-girl https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08cf503 I can’t remember watching Dana (Rosemary Scallon) winning the Eurovision Song Contest in 1970, singing All Kinds of Everything, but I was only seven or eight. I would have married her, Catholic, and cute as a button. She was eighteen and sitting her A-levels and became Ireland’s first Euro winner. Instant celebrity, the...

I’m a fan of Bernard MacLaverty’s writing. He makes it seem so simple (try it at home) which is the mark of a craftsman. I was well into this book before I realised I’d read it before. There’s no harm in reading a good book again. It’s a coming-of-age drama. The narrator, Martin Brennan is still at St Colum’s school in Derry. Londonderry if you’re a Prod. It’s set just as the troubles in Northern Ireland were kicking off. He has to re-sit...

Simon Sebag Monefiore won the British history book of the year with his portrait of Stalin and his followers. They were always one step away from being shot, tortured in the Lubianka, and beaten to death. Their families facing the same fate, or being sent away to the gulags. Stalin only wanted true believers in Stalinism, in Marxism, in Leninism, in his leadership to a mythical Bolshevik and true socialist revolution. Self-taught, a voracious...

The golden sunshine gleams off the cars ahead of me as brave birds dart across my line of vision flying from stoplight pole to tree limb. It’s a perfect day outside. I lower my visor to block the glare as I keep the required car lengths/per mph distance behind the car in front of mine. This has become the new way I take a walk, using my car and, with the amount of traffic increasing everyday, I must not be alone in this change of walking mode. I...