It's been wonderful to see so many new writers on ABC Tales, and so many regulars posting really fantastic stuff. It makes choosing these Picks all the harder, but it's a hugely enjoyable task. Story of the Week is Beekery's 'An Open Letter To Perpetual Sadness'. It's about living with cancer, and it's funny, angry, wise and very, very readable. Do please have a look if you haven't already: https://www.abctales.com/story/beekery/open-letter-...

For our purposes there is actually nothing so special about the Moon and the Earth. They are only names and for convenience, the situation holds just the same for any two orbiting bodies: Moon-Earth; moon-planet; planet-Sun; binary stars or a pair of black holes etc. The model should work better with large masses, close proximity and fast rotation but not to extremes because you will have relativistic influence, and the bodies should be...

I consume these books like sweets. A guilty secret. Guilt is always bad for you. You know how it goes. Anita Moorjani died then she has a choice whether she wanted to come back to this world, or stay where she was, heaven. Heaven is not a place with celestial gates and angels strumming harps, rather it is a state of bliss. Since there is no such thing as time, it could be said to be eternal. We know she came back, because here she is telling the...

FREE Poetry Sampler.

Serhii Plokhy’s history of Chernobyl won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2018. He tells us what happened when reactor No 4 in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant, named after Vladimir Lenin, exploded after what should have been a routine maintenance test on 26 th April 1986. First to arrive where firemen, who hooked up their hoses and treated it as a routine fire, no immediate threat to the around 5000 workers and their families living...

It's been a brilliant week on ABC. Not only have we had some wonderful work, but in response to the IP writers have been reading out their work either on their own Soundcloud or on the ABC Soundcloud account. Please keep doing it! Our Story of the Week is insertponceyfrenchnamehere's lovely 'Katy, A Ghost Story'. Insert is usually to be found commenting on other people's work and providing invaluable assistance to our new and existing members on...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0007mxm/when-bridges-collapse-the... Forty-three people died, scores more were injured and 600 people lost their home when the Polcevera Bridge in Genoa collapsed on 14th August 2018. One survivor described how the road disappeared before him and it was like being in a cartoon. It was Italy’s worst ever road-bridge disaster. A design fault that allowed water to pool and steel cables to fray was blamed, but...

I’ve read this book before, but didn’t remember until I started reading it again. My memories like that, full of wormwood and dark holes. Most folks are that’s why we use terms like short-term and long-term and even working–memory and other types of memory that often doesn’t work. Types I’ve instantly forgotten, but no matter. We usually judge ourselves to be reliable narrators of our own lives, able to judge what is and what is not with...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0006wg1/the-bleeder Sometimes you just hit upon a movie you know you’re going to love. Here it is. As surely as any movie written or starring Simon Pegg (or even an actor that looks like Pegg) is going to be a going to be a stinker, The Bleeder is a knock-out. I’m not a big boxing fan. Yeh, sure I remember the Rumble in the Jungle and Ali v’s Frazier. I watched them on BBC in the same way that I later...

Dusk is setting in and the low light of sunset is blanketing the grass with shadows and patches of last light…Day is ending and night is falling and in this moment between light and dark…I sit in quiet contemplation… reflecting on all the issues of my day….but I don’t battle the problems…I let them simmer…pausing to see what answers may come. I have always been a night bird…the pace of morning exhausts me with rush hour and work day demands and...