Blogs

I read this essay because I was writing a vampire story called Rust and Dust. I might even finish it. Not with a stake through the heart, but a seat at the table and fingers hovering over the keyboard as Ben Mears, the protagonist does in Salem’s Lot , before his home town Jerusalem's Lot is invaded by a strange Eastern European man, who unleashes a holocaust of vampires. Mears through happenstance has to save his town and America from those...

Flash Mob Just over half way from Amlwch to our nearest ‘big’ town, Bangor, the coast road crosses the old branch railway to Red Wharf Bay. It was my father who pointed out to me, sometime in the mid-seventies, the flash and circle emblem painted on the dark red brickwork of the bridge parapet. I’d imagined it was some sort of warning about buried electric cables. As graffiti goes, it was quite neatly done, in white paint, and in the mid-1970s...

My current best Writers on AbcTales November 2025 5. celticman – Paul 4. rhiannonw – Rhiannon 3. Maxine Jasmin-Green 2. GlosKat 1. Turlough – Terence Mullan I wish all our members and readers a happy and peaceful festive season! Nolan & Do not drink and drive. “God bless us, every one!”

This is not a novel. It is a well-lit corridor in a collapsing institution.

I’m having a break from fiction writing. Maybe these random thoughts will serve as a substitute until – if - inspiration should return. Just tell me to stop, if I should …. There’s a column in the MetroTalk page of the Metro, the free newspaper given away on tubes and trains. It doesn’t have an actual headline, but it could I suppose be called ‘Brief Encounter’ or, more prosaically, the Letch Corner. Here are some typical entries from a few...

‘Drill baby drill’. That’s been the response of the moron’s moron Trump and his followers. It makes meetings of heads of states COP 25, COP 26…meaningless. Short-term thinking. Extinction Rebellion has lost its lustre. All around the world, eco activists have been reclassified as terrorists. Chief Seattle, ‘The Earth is our mother. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself’...

This book almost didn’t happen. I could put it down to writer’s block or in the words of John Lennon: ‘Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans’ , but by March this year, the book was stalled. Frozen. Part of the problem I realised was the journals and notebooks were becoming an albatross around my neck. Instead of them being a map or a guide, they became a convenient go-to crutch. I had two notebooks filled with notes,...

The Bible tells us not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought to. Romans 12:3-8. There is nothing we can do to impress God. Anything good that we have in ourselves has come from him. If I am a good writer or a good preacher I must realise that God has given me those abilities. I may say that writing Christian articles on websites and preaching is my ministry but I must remember that all Christians have a ministry. The Bible says that we...

Release date 01.24.26 The Payout Game is an Irish crime thriller featuring Garda Inspector P.J. Crowe — a flawed but dediicated detective living in the small coastal town of Roscarrig that keeps giving him big-city problems. Crowe is hoping for a quiet Christmas in Roscarrig, but during a charity regatta, a body washes up on the rocks beneath a lighthouse — a man known across Ireland: a celebrity bookmaker with deep connections to high-stakes...