Our Picks this month have been made by Hudsonmoon and here they are: Of all the fine writes this merry month of March, these two hit home for me. Philip Sidney’s poem Bombinations reflected my experience as a boy living in New York City in 1965. Only, my characters had names like President Lyndon Johnson and Sister Rebecca. It gave me a chill to relive it once again. Running off with Robot and Billy from Lost in Space had crossed my mind once or...

There has been such a variety of great work to read on ABCTales this week. However, Story of the Week goes to Blackjack Davey for his unusual and beautifully composed ‘Cosmic Arboretum’ and Poem of the Week goes to maggyvaneijk for her stunningly emotive ‘Retrospective Drawings.’ Congratulations to you both. http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/retrospective-drawings http://www.abctales.com/story/blackjack-davey/cosmic-arboretum This week'...

There are those books that take you on a journey and whip your imagination into a creative passion. I love when I can forget I am turning pages…when words are no longer typed but are flowing to my brain with little concentration as my eyes move over them and images are formed… I am in the story seeing the characters, putting faces to descriptions and voices to dialogue. My hero is everything I want in a Hero and the Heroine is relatable to me-...

Thought I'd knock up some jottings on poems I happen across in an attempt to learn how to do it. At this point Noo may be thinking, oh yeah - you were supposed to be doing some collaborative writing and what happened to lust? I'm fickle - so this blog might not last too long...

Things That Are is the size of a prayer book. And you should have to put on those white gloves snooker referees wear when re-spotting a ball, when opening its pages. It should be treated with reverence and awe, because there is wisdom in these words. It should become a religion with worshipers meeting up to discuss sentence and phrases such as the introduction to ‘Silly Lilies’, 'Most plants bend over backwards to cooperate with reality’. This...

Find your way home? What does that mean? Find your way home in writing is being true to what you know. Even in non-fiction and fantasy fiction where you can pretty much create what you want…you have to believe it yourself or no one else will. I am having that kind of dilemma. “Antediluvian Trouble” is giving me all kinds of trouble. I can create the characters /personality and such, but the surroundings of Atlantis are causing havoc. I’ve posted...

I’ve tackled War and Peace a few times, but beat a hasty retreat. Initially the problem was the characters involved. I’m not the brightest. Easily confused. So having the patronymic and other names tacked on like stags antlers got a bit confusing. On the opening page, for example, we have Anna Pavlovna Scherer and she’s some kind of hanger on to Empress Marya Fedorovo, the Dowager Empress, and the former is at home having a soiree with the Abbe...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0755ms6/janis-joplin-little-girl-blue After the death of Johan Cruyff, I got talking and into one of those arguments about who was better Cruyff or Zinedine Zidane. I said it was close to call, but that Cruyff was just perhaps more elegant. ‘How can you get more elegant than Zidane?’ was the riposte. Fair point. Just my opinion. I’d seen both players in their prime, and love football. I was frequently number...

So much brilliant prose to choose from this week - however one had to be picked and I've gone for Noo's beautifully constructed suspense short 'Timestamp'. Poem of the week is Ewan's timely and excellent rant 'Boom!'. Congratulations to both. http://www.abctales.com/story/noo/timestamp http://www.abctales.com/story/ewan/boom The Inspiration Point, in honour of the clocks changing, is time flies. Good luck with that and I hope you all have a...

‘There was people waiting, families waiting to be evacuated…’ ‘I’m not sure how long we were away, although the house was damaged it was habitable…so we were in the back room with the windows boarded up because all the glass in the house was shattered, the blast had blown out all the windows…It was quite cosy. We had to cook on the fire.’ ‘I stood outside the burnt shell of what was my home with my children, all we had was what we stood in… how...