$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$2,371.47 ) Week - 12 The Quarter Pole! Well this isn’t anything like they promised in the brochure… For the first time since starting this game, all twenty positions are in the negative! A hefty loss on the week overall as well. There was devastation, destruction, discontent, discord, disappointment, and woe! Oh the woe. Wow! The week wavered by almost $324. I’d have to check but...

I've greatly enjoyed another week of tremendous ABCTales writing, and this week's Picks are absolute stunners. Story of the Week is Mark Burrow's 'Council Estate Jesus'. Wonderful characters and dialogue that build tension so that the whole structure balances on a knife-edge. By the end, you feel you've glimpsed, and learned from, something very important: Council Estate Jesus | ABCtales Poem of the Week is Yutka's 'Impaired'. This finds beauty...

May flowers are blooming and the animals are coming out from the forest to enjoy the warmth of the sun. There was a beautiful rabbit in my yard chewing on the grass this morning and made my morning coffee all the more pleasurable to see it there. I know my husband wants to put back the fencing that was knocked down by the large tree that fell from the forested area behind out backyard, but I don’t want to. Since that fence fell, I have seen a...

$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$2,047.60 ) Week - 11 Fire! Our Window to the Past! I sat in the backyard with a beverage this past week. The wife and I are renovating a bedroom in our home. Took down a half ton of plaster from the walls, then began the process of removing the exposed wooden lath. Most of which will go out with the other trash later in the week. Some scraps however made for a cheery blaze and...

A KIND OF DROWNING The man standing at the funeral in bubble-gum pink hair is P.J. Crowe. His career as a detective is in tatters - he's facing dismissal, vilified by the press, and his wife's about to leave. Lying low in a small seaside town he spots a ‘Help Wanted’ ad in the kitchen of a local café. It offers him an escape from the public and his spiraling mental health - and it's where Thea Farrell worked – until she was found dead at sea...

I didn’t know Andrew O’Hagan had Scottish roots and writes about Scotland. That puts him in the fast-lane of must-read books. The plot for The Illuminations is simple. Anne, aged 82, is losing her marbles. She’s in a sheltered-housing complex in Saltcoats. Her neighbour Maureen, aged 68, keeps an eye out for her. They’re friends, but even Jackie, the warden admits there’s only so much they can do. They’ve taped off Anne’s cooker so she can’t use...

$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$2,095.63 ) Week - 10 Oh Huzzah! Up 92 and a qawrter… Say it with me now, and a Qawwwterrrr! An actual gain this week, not much but welcome. Driven mostly by nice gains in a couple of tickers I had as favorites to do well at the start. OZSC & MMEDF are both positions I hold IRL (in real life). I’m happy to hear that MIND MEDICINE is uplisting from the OTC market to the far more...

Two very differently styled pieces for our Picks this week. What they share is passion, conviction and, of course, brilliant writing. Story of the Week is TJW's 'Lap Dance'. This writer puts his heart, soul and pretty much all the rest of him into everything he writes. This is about someone trying to build a life after experiences that refuse to let him go: Lap Dance | ABCtales Poem of the Week is Di_Hard's 'just deserts'. The frustration of...

When people talk about literary merit, I wander away to the pub to have a pint. Since the pubs are closed, and I get smashed by a snifter of poitin , or indeed three pints, perhaps slightly more (when I’m watching Celtic) I’ll hang about. Literary merit is just a fancy way of asking if you liked the book. I don’t finish books I don’t like. Cold Is the Dawn is 427 pages. So you do the maths of how much I liked it. If like me, you have a...

$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$2,187.88 ) Week - 9 One is the Loneliest Number! Only one lonely positive symbol left… The only one to show a gain from last week too! 9 weeks into the game and rapidly approaching the half value loss mark. What’s going on? I should be picking out Italian marble for my villa in France by now. I tell you, this patience thing may turn out to be wildly overrated! Let’s just leave this...