News and Features

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...

Last week, Blinding Books (run by ABC's very own Richard Penny, aka Blighter's Rock ) published an anthology by ten excellent women writers, many of them from ABC, called My Baby Shot Me Down . It's quite easily the ABC publishing event of the year. No breakfast nook, den or garden is worth sitting in without a copy in your hands. You'll find a lot of familiar names inside - the book features Clarissa Angus, Katherine Black, Maggy van Eijk,...

Happy Easter, all. I hope you’ve been enjoying the sun and a little extra time to your own devices. I’ve taken a few kilos of writing up into the Cumbrian hills with me, and have been alternating between editing other people’s work and trying to get my own notes and jottings and half-formed scenes into some kind of order. It’s a good weekend for resurrections. Michelangelo's take on an age-old theme If you haven’t heard the news, we’ve just made...

This week I’m glad to announce a new feature on ABCtales – which is the option to make pieces accessible only to other logged-in members of ABCtales. We’ve had a lot of discussions about what counts as digital publishing in the past, and how that works with ABC. Many users have asked me how they could avoid getting notes saying there work was already published on ABC when submission time rolls around. Having a piece available to ABC members only...