Luke Neima's blog

This Wednesday we had one of the liveliest ABCtales get-togethers I’ve ever been to. From prison-narratives to eerie accordion-accompanied poetry to a stunning set from a handful of My Baby Shot Me Down authors it was ABCtales at its best, and I’d like to thank everyone who came out and took part. One of the things that I was most impressed by was the sheer variety of the work read. From an utterly impressive stream-of-conscious narrative by...

Next Wednesday is our London get-together - and I hope a lot of you will come out. It's shaping up to be one of the best we’ve had in a long while. There's nothing like long summer nights mixed with good literature, and on Wednesday we'll be featuring a long list of some of the best authors on the site – as well as a reading from Shaun Attwood , the very engaging (and entertaining) author of the books Party Time and Prison Time. We’ll also be...

Our next ABCtales get-together is almost upon us - we'll be meeting next Wednesday , June 18th upstairs at the Wheatsheaf pub in Bloomsbury (25 Rathbone Place, W1T 1JB) from 7pm . The writers we'll be featuring this month include Grover, John Shade, RJF, MJG and Peter Kennedy - along with several of the authors included in My Baby Shot Me Down - the recent all-women collection of ABCtales writers out now with Blinding Books. We'll take a moment...

I’ve had my knuckles down and writing all week this week – and while making some progress on the novel I’ve also made a parallel effort to optimise my working conditions (mostly as an exercise in procrastination – and a very effective one). I’ve let it get to a slightly obsessive state – everything is considered, from the location of the chair relative to the window (light coming in but no opportunity to look out), to the position of the two...

This week we spoke with Cristina Henriquez, a brilliant American novelist who’s been called one of "Fiction's New Luminaries" by the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Glimmer Train, and Ploughshares, and her second novel (her first in the UK), The Book of Unknown Americans , publishes this Thursday, the 5th of June, with Canongate. It’s a deeply moving tale of one family’s determination to cope...

Writing a novel: it can feel like tackling an old jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing, or building a spider-web backwards, with an eye to making yourself the biggest knot possible.

This week I thought I’d share an addictive little competition being hosted by The César Egido Serrano Foundation. The Spanish Museum of Words is offering 20,000$ to the best 100 word story on any subject. The best part is there’s no fee to enter – so if you took a cue from last week and have been practicing writing cell phone novels, this should be no problem. Have a look and give it a shot! I also stumbled upon the British Library’s new online...

I came across a few interesting things in my reading this week – not least of which was an article in the Huffington post this week exploring a new reading phenomenon in Japan – Cell Phone Novels . Sound weird? They certainly are – they sit somewhere between the poetic concision of a haiku and the manic social gracelessness of a tweet – but that said the most popular text novel, It's Your Fault ( Kimi no Sei ) by Sakura Imo, has been read 17...

Last week I had the good fortune to speak with Julian Jordan, the co-founder of Write Out Loud , a grassroots organisation dedicated to encouraging poetry in the UK – mainly through a very extensive and very user-friendly gig guide, though they also host their own events and feature reviews, poet profiles and literary news. They’re the UK’s largest live poetry resource, and if you’ve any interest in poetry at all, the site is very worth...

I sat down to write a blog last week in Tunisia, under the creaking ceiling fan hung over my hotel’s solitary computer terminal (wifi has yet to take off in North Africa), and though I baffled my way through the Arabic keyboard the internet flickered off just as I hit post, a setback redoubled by the autonomous reboot of the system and a user-lockout, which left me sitting there scratching my head. And now that I’m back in the land of the...