I'm very pleased to announce that J. Oliver Padgett who writes on ABCTales as SoulFire77 has a new book coming out.

I’m not young. Many, or most, wouldn’t consider me a writer. Certainly John Gardner wouldn’t. For Gardner good writing, ‘creates a vivid and continuous dream’. Everything else follows. Look, for example, at the brouhaha involving Sir Christopher Nolan's latest film, The Odyssey . As most of us would expect, rave reviews followed the money. But I loved the dissenting voice of Emily Wilson. Her 2017 translation of Homer's Odyssey was cited by the...

What if sleekit was sent as a supernatural helper. This is such a stretch, there is nothing less magical or mythical to me than sleekit, the little shit, however, I am hellbent on exercising my imagination in order to grow new synaptic connections and not get any dottier, if I can help it. So, sleekit as supernatural helper delivering a message, to be ignored at my peril. Lesson one; buy more mouse traps, the good ones with poison in them, and...

After a long time in the drawer, my novel Son of September is out. It's available now on Amazon for Kindle, with a paperback to follow. The summer of 1991, two foster children in South Florida start hearing a voice through equipment that should be dead. It tells them what's coming, and the day it arrives, and that they're the only two placed to stop it. What follows is nine years of getting them ready — and the slow question of who they become...

Robert Goddard has written a stack of books. None of which I’ve read or been aware of. He’s a bit hitter. Stephen King and Lee Child are among is fans. The Fine Art of Uncanny Predictions has multiple timelines, many characters and complicated plots. But we know as a reader it will be resolved and the world set to right. The What If of fiction is topical. What if Himeko Sato, a childminder and domestic service, known as the Kobe Sensitive,...

Just when you admit to costly and embarrassing dopamine-hitting behaviours, the gods of the underworld ( Algo and Rhythm ) send you a messenger; Dan. Affirming that sad vindication, narcissistic behaviour was not ‘all in your mind’. (Just tried to find Dan using AI. AI is rubbish, we have absolutely no worries about it taking over the planet. On the other hand, if AI is learning by copying humans, it is currently focussing on some real dolts...

Free Course available through Open University – What is Poetry? Have you ever wondered what poetry actually is? No? Well why would you? But if you have ever pondered this in a sudden rush of existentialist angst, then the good news is that there is a free course available via the Open University that will attempt to answer the question. Whilst there, there is also the opportunity to get an overview of techniques built into the formation and...

You never know what will motivate you in this life, quite often it’s vengeance and murderous rage. This was the case when I came downstairs from my sick bed to find sleekit (a mouse of ill-repute) had shit on my velvet sofa. Well, on the Ikean rug charmingly draped over velvet sofa. Hoovered the top of both rug and sofa in stupefied disgust, lifted off all the cushions and rugs, including the main seat cushions, and saw in the seams of the sofa...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent They sent me into the mountains above San José de Purúa in the spring of 1948 to find a man who had spent twenty years making sure no one could. His name, on the books, was B. Traven. He had written The Death Ship and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and ten other novels that sold in the millions across a dozen languages, and nobody who published him or paid him could tell you who he was. He...

DK is one of the big four (or five) publishers. A division of Penguin Random House. You can be sure they’ll bring together experts to produce a visual feast. 350-plus images, artwork, artifacts in a hardback. I was interested in the Fox sisters and Spiritualism. I was already acquainted with the bones of their story (terrible pun). ‘In 1888, Maggie (Fox) who had left the movement earlier, revealed that the ‘rappings’ were a hoax created using...