https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B0B8M3WD4S/ref=atv_mv_hom_c_9U9jIg_brws_1_46?jic=8%7CEgRzdm9k Mariel (Karla Souza) is almost thirty. She’s been a fixture in Mexican diving team since she was fourteen, winning a bronze medal at the Olympics. But she’s never fulfilled her potential, never got that elusive gold. Never come close. She always seems to fuck up. Self-sabotage as her diving guru Brualio (Hernán Mendoza) puts it. ‘He saw me,’...

Thanks again to everyone for another week of most enjoyable reading. Our Poem of the Week is skinner_jennifer's beautiful 'Miracle of Spring On Gossamer Wings'. Spring/early summer has yet to get going where I live, so it was lovely to lose myself in this meditation on each year's renewal of life: Miracle Of Spring On Gossamer Wings | ABCtales Story of the Week is 'Lucifer - What's good for the saucy gander', Jane Hyphen's sharp and funny...

Evicted, Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize winning study of the American housing market was personal. He lived the life. A cri de couer . Poverty by America is a step away from that immiserating experience. His gut was telling him it was wrong. He wasn’t a cultural tourist. This is a more cognitive and rational approach to explain why so many people in America are poor and likely to remain so. His solution seems pretty straightforward. Stop...

I was looking for a book called Save the Cat . I don’t really need to find it, because anybody that has ever read any of my stories knows plot isn’t my strong point. Spoiler, when I’m writing The Cat Dies, but it’s unintentional. I’ve no idea what I’m doing, and neither has has my loyal band of fellow writers. And I blame the devil. Amazon are pushing Mindcage , which is why algorithms rule the world. It has a zillion great reviews and yet it’s...

Everything Everywhere All at Once won a stack of awards. Let’s start with the multiverse. Everything that could possibly happen does in an array of parallel realties. Nothing and nobody is ever lost, even if they are. Overworked and overwrought, Evelyn Quan Wang (Michelle Yeoh) a Chinese-American immigrant, who owns a laundry, while being audited by the IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdr (Jamie Lee Curtis), discovers that she is the multiverse...

Dwellers Of The New World took me many years to write, and set me out on a great adventure which proceeded the first story: The Chosen Ones. I tried to create a fiction that would take the reader into another realm of existence, leaving behind the reality of our world. I wanted to embark on a journey into the unknown, taking my characters with me and leaving the reader mesmerized. There was never going to be a chance of getting this story...

A while back, I put a chapter or so of the very old Smokescreen on ABCTales. It started out as a Nanowrimo attempt sometime before 2009 (I can't even remember which year, it was so long ago). Anyway, after Nano, I tidied it up a bit and printed it via Bubok.es, as I was living in Spain at the time. It was a first effort at self-pubbing, when it was only just a thing, really. As for Bubok.es, think KDP (Amazon's Publishing Arm) but without any of...

John Gribbin writes about physics. In modern parlance, he popularises science. As a starting point, he quotes Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’. He offers some parameters: Our Universe about 13.8 billion years old (Milky Way galaxy a little younger). Solar System and Earth 4.5 billion years old Formation of single-cell, eukaryotic, life on...

I loved Tiffany McDaniel’s recent novel Betty . The Summer That Melted Everything was her debut novel. Poets make the best novelists, her words sing. She uses John Milton’s Paradise Lost as a framing device for each chapter. The first paragraph forewarns what has to come. Beautifully done. ‘The heat came with the devil. It was the summer of 1984, and while the devil had been invited, the heat had not. It should have been expected, though… ‘It...

As always there were hard choices to make. Story of the Week Story of the week is Marandina’s not-quite-Shaggy Dog Story, Holodog . In three parts, it is a fine example of near future sci-fi. Do use these links to read the first two parts if you haven’t already. Pt I Pt II Honourable mentions go to: Mark Burrow’s Doolally , with its teenaged narrator showing us the view from the bottom. Celticman’s Goatie 5 , another surreally funny slice of...