Home of author Miranda Kate and M K Boers, and #MidWeekFlash - A place to find clarity through words
Friday 28 April 2023
Review: The Very Secrety Society of Irregular Witches, by Sangu Mandanna
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was a read for my bookclub, and I thought it might be a bit too 'soft' for my taste, being that all the reviews and marketing call it a 'cosy romance', but it has swearing in it, and a detailed sex scene towards the end which I didn't think was standard for anything 'cosy' books.
The writing itself flowed really well and I was drawn into the story within the first few paragraphs. The only other witchy books I have read are from Terry Pratchett's discworld, and I will say I found them compariable in some places, as it was light and engaging, especially with the opening scene as we observe a witch gathering from the main character's point of view.
There is a romance in this book, (obviously as there is a sex scene) but it wasn't the main focus. The main focus was the story of tutoring three witches and joining a family and the main character finally finding somewhere she belonged. It was an easy to engage with all the characters and care about them. I look forward to discussing it at my book club.
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Thursday 27 April 2023
Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 292
This week's picture prompt is by Colbriere A., Hong Kong, Thailand based photographer. This picture is taken at Lake Baikal, Russia back in 2015. They take amazing photos, and especially on their Facebook page which is more up-to-date with pictures. Loads of inspiration.
A bit of a climate dystopian tale this week.
The General Guidelines can be found here.
How to create a clickable link in Blogger comments can be found on lasts week's post here.
There is also a Facebook group for Mid-Week Flash, if you fancy getting the prompt there.
Bright sunlight glowed through the ice and
I shuffled myself closer to the opening of the cave to get a better view. A
lake. I could see, a lake.
I pulled a hand out of my sleeping bag to
move hair out of my eyes. I had to be seeing things. But no, it was still
there, a huge expanse of water – wet, running water. But how?
And then I felt it, on my skin, the sun and
the heat of it. I hadn’t felt heat from the sun in over a decade. No one had.
Could it be true? Was it over?
Then I heard other sounds, people sounds,
they were waking up all along the shore. There was laughter and high fiving. I
fought my way out of my sleeping bag to join them.
“What the fuck?! I thought I was seeing
things,” I called over to Jesse.
“I know, mate, it’s unbelievable. No more melting
ice over a fire. And soon we should see some greenage.”
“Yeah but it won’t be green.”
“It won’t take long,” Maddie reassured me. “Not
with these temps, this is incredible.”
“The ice age is over!” The very words
seemed incredible as I said them.
“You might be being a bit hasty there mate,”
Marcus didn’t want me to get carried away. “Melting the surface of the water doesn’t
mean it will stay this way for long. It is mid-July by the old calendars, the
peak of summer, and we aren’t seeing that kind of melt on anything else.” He
pointed towards the shoreline, and my eyes followed the arc as I looked at the
solid ice still up there. There wasn’t any dripping or rivulets of water.
“Don’t dampen his enthusiasm, Markus.”
Maddie defended my excitement. “This is huge! Even if it is only brief, it’s a
beginning.”
“Yeah, but are we high up shore enough? Will
the water rise? Otherwise we’ll need to find somewhere else to settle.” Marcus
wasn’t going to be persuaded not to worry.
“Not just the water rising. If the caves
melt we will need to find new homes. These were only caused by the development
of the glacier when we were plunged into this. If there is indeed a melt going
on, we are going to need to find higher ground.” Brady had always been the
pragmatic one.
“Can we all just take a breath, and enjoy
this historical moment for a second?” Halle called over the noise.
We all quieted. She was our leader. She
kept us all on an even keel, and that wasn’t easy. We were all scientists with
different specialities and liked to express our opinions about everything. We’d
been thrown together as it seemed only those that knew how to survive an ice
age actually could survive one.
“The lake has begun to thaw, as we can all
see. This could well mark the beginning of the end of this stage of the ice
age, or at least a shift in temperatures. But this is not just a result of the
air temperature shifting a couple of degrees – it hasn’t risen enough to do
more than create a thin layer of water on top, at most, which would quickly
freeze again at sunset. I believe a warm current has come in from somewhere,
and being that this is a land-locked lake, it concerns me what that might be.
Plus the speed of the thaw; the ice was solid all day yesterday, no significant
change. This lake is over 300 miles long, what could thaw it so quickly, and
overnight too?”
We all paused, our minds racing as we
looked at each other.
“I can only imagine there’s a vent of some sort
causing a warm or even hot current,” Jordan offered.
I baulked. “You mean, seismic activity? We
didn’t feel anything.”
“It might not be in this lake. It could
have happened elsewhere and the warm or even hot water began flowing in and out
from tributary rivers.”
“We need to science the shit out of this,”
Parker stated. He liked the hustle of the team working together – in fact we
all did, which is why we had come together. And he was right. We needed to get
moving and start running tests. Days were short when you had a lot to do.
I rushed back to my cave to get my equipment.
It felt good to finally have a purpose again, one that ended with hope.
Wednesday 19 April 2023
Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 291
This week's picture prompt is a digital creation by Ciara, or Aura, as she calls herself online, and She Freaks, She Speaks, over on Facebook. She actually have a whole selection of these baths as well as Moon Crescent shape ones, but this was the one that spoke to me to be written about. She also has a shop where she sell crystals and crystal jewellery. If you like that sort of thing there's a lot of choice.
Short and sweet this week. Just what came into my head.
The General Guidelines can be found here.
How to create a clickable link in Blogger comments can be found on lasts week's post here.
There is also a Facebook group for Mid-Week Flash, if you fancy getting the prompt there.
Happiness
She knew he wanted
to make her happy, but she wasn’t sure buying her a stained glass bath was what
she meant. It was beautiful and functional, and lying in this rainbow bathwater,
made that way by the light reflecting through the different coloured stained glass,
was delightful, but it had nothing to do with their relationship.
It wasn’t beautiful things she needed to
make her happy, it was an attentive, loving partner. Mostly he was absent – not
physically but mentally. He’d come home and either switch on the telly or the
gaming machine. He barely spoke most of the time. And she understood that his
work was demanding, and was grateful for everything he provided, but she felt
invisible, transparent, much like this bath.
When out socially, he might admire her when
talking to others, and pretend she was the most beautiful thing on earth, but once
home, it was like she had no substance. She was like this bath, beautiful to behold,
but when the door was shut, it was like it wasn’t even there.
She wanted to have vibrant conversations
with him and know his thoughts and feelings on things. She wanted to feel connected
and not just in bed at night when he was in the mood.
She wanted to believe he loved her, but
again, like the bath, she felt functional. She took care of the house, the
kids, the day to day. She organised and tidied and had all the time in the
world to do her own thing. But she didn’t want to do her own thing all the time,
by herself every day, day after day for the rest of her life. She wanted a life
with him, a life together, where they shared conversations, interests, friends,
and had a social life.
She had tried to explain this any amount of
ways but still he just thought she was unhappy about some minor thing that had
happened, or something from the past. He didn’t actually understand what she needed.
She sighed, sinking lower into the warm enchanting
waters of this beautiful bath.
And if she chose to go? He would never understand
why. He would just tell himself he couldn’t make her happy, when really he never
tried.
It wasn’t beautiful things she needed to
make her happy, it was an attentive, loving partner. Mostly he was absent – not
physically but mentally. He’d come home and either switch on the telly or the
gaming machine. He barely spoke most of the time. And she understood that his
work was demanding, and was grateful for everything he provided, but she felt
invisible, transparent, much like this bath.
When out socially, he might admire her when
talking to others, and pretend she was the most beautiful thing on earth, but once
home, it was like she had no substance. She was like this bath, beautiful to behold,
but when the door was shut, it was like it wasn’t even there.
She wanted to have vibrant conversations
with him and know his thoughts and feelings on things. She wanted to feel connected
and not just in bed at night when he was in the mood.
She wanted to believe he loved her, but
again, like the bath, she felt functional. She took care of the house, the
kids, the day to day. She organised and tidied and had all the time in the
world to do her own thing. But she didn’t want to do her own thing all the time,
by herself every day, day after day for the rest of her life. She wanted a life
with him, a life together, where they shared conversations, interests, friends,
and had a social life.
She had tried to explain this any amount of
ways but still he just thought she was unhappy about some minor thing that had
happened, or something from the past. He didn’t actually understand what she needed.
She sighed, sinking lower into the warm enchanting
waters of this beautiful bath.
And if she chose to go? He would never understand
why. He would just tell himself he couldn’t make her happy, when really he never
tried.
Wednesday 12 April 2023
Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 290
This week's photo prompt is by Sortvind over on Deviant Art, a Norwegian artist. He posted it back in 2007! He hasn't posted since 2016, and I haven't been able to track him down to anything recent. Anyway, he calls this Stay Focused II.
Short and sweet this week - and dark.
The General Guidelines can be found here.
How to create a clickable link in Blogger comments can be found on lasts week's post here.
There is also a Facebook group for Mid-Week Flash, if you fancy getting the prompt there.
It carried him away from this place of
torture, where they were trying to get him to speak. They hadn’t worked out yet
that he couldn’t. Their enemies were also his enemies. They had taken his voice
box some years ago and he couldn’t tell them anything while they kept his hands
tied behind his back.
They seemed to think this kind of persecution
would help them, but it wouldn’t. They’d never be able to catch them if they
couldn’t understand who were their friends and who were their enemies. They
were foolish people from a land so far away they had no concept of life here,
either what it had been or what it was now.
This wasn’t hard. He could lie here as long
as it took them to work out that they were wasting their time. He had learnt
long ago to see beauty in the tiniest of things; it was the only way to survive.
And here he was again observing each drop as it fell like they were coming from
another dimension … and maybe they were. They seemed to slow down when he
watched them, as he waited for them to tumble in the light and take up the
pattern of the walls. He could dream of being in another dimension, stepping
inside one of those droplets and vanishing from this place. And mentally he did
just that. He had all the time in the world.
Thursday 6 April 2023
Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 289
This week's picture prompt was created by William Eubank, an American film director, screenwriter and cinematographer. He shared it on twitter with the words: 'Eyes open, heart braced ...'
How to create a clickable link in Blogger comments can be found on lasts week's post here.
There is also a Facebook group for Mid-Week Flash, if you fancy getting the prompt there.
Master of Time
It was huge and it was bright, and everyone could see it, Tricky was sure, but she was also fascinated. How had he managed to create something like this? It was mesmerising.
She stood on the edge of the woods, keeping
herself cloaked by the trees, not daring to step out onto the road, staring at
what looked like a giant open portal in the middle of the sky. It moved too, in
a slow circular motion. She could see different skies from different dimensions,
and lines of different coloured energy wrapping round all of it like roots of a
tree.
It was a trap, it had to be. It’s how he
would lure her in and convince her of his powers. Tricky knew tricky when she
saw it. It could be a projection of some kind. She knew there were people on
the landmass busy trying to bring back that kind of technology and some of the
old machines from before the shift still worked if they could generate a power
source.
But this was big, and even though she’d
been standing here a while with the sunsetting on this strange phenomenon, she
hadn’t seen any movement – even the trees were still, probably admiring it too.
She sent her energy out to it, and
immediately felt immense amounts of energy swirling in and around it, as she
suspected. She even took some of it in, only heightening her interest more.
Should she attempt to enter? She was a
master of time after all, and this was definitely her thing. But she worried
she wouldn’t be able to handle such power. She was just one tiny piece next to
the realms of that. Oh how she wanted to go in there, and discover what was in
it. Oh yes, this was her thing alright, and he knew that.
Did he really have that much power to create
such a thing? One man – a pompous bloated one at that? She scoffed at the idea
this could be a natural occurrence. Something this big? No, this was a
man-sized anomaly.
Nature had a way of knowing how to create
and sustain boundaries. It didn’t split and part things without good reason,
like when a species gets too big for its boots and destroys things on an epic
scale. Then nature has to step in and do something to correct the balance, like
shifting landmasses to release pressure and correct the bio rhythms of the
planet.
But rents in space and time? No, that
wasn’t nature’s thing at all. It was manmade - one particular man in this
instance. Tricky was impressed. Maybe he did earn his nickname, Gandalf. Maybe
he was a mighty wizard … just not a likeable one.
What to do? Go in or stay out? This was
Tricky’s weakness. It piqued her curiosity and her paranoia at the same time.
Curiosity killed the cat they said – but it had nine lives, so it didn’t matter
if it cost one or two. She’d done alright for herself so far; come close to
death a couple of times, but she could hold her own.
And this? She needed a piece of this. Oh
yes she did.
She turned back into the woods and
travelled through the trees, moving closer until she could feel energy pulsing
right through her. Her body tingled from top to toe – it was marvellous!
She approached it from the side. It had a
sound now like rushing wind. There were other sounds within it, but she
couldn’t define them. They could be animals or birds, or even other humans. Or the
sound of so much concentrated energy.
When she was right up against it, she could
see into the dimensions. Some seemed to be all sky but there were stretches of
land in some too. If this was a trap she wasn’t quite sure what she was meant to
do with it. Was he in here somewhere? How would he know where and when she entered?
Was it booby trapped? Was he going to jump out and grab her? It’s not like she
wanted to find him – not really, but as the saying goes, trick your enemy
before they trick you.
And he would trick her. Then he’d kill her.
Oh yes. He had no compunction about that. He wanted her dead. And to be honest
the feeling was mutual. Usually Tricky wouldn’t go in for such dramatic
thoughts and murder was definitely NOT her thing. But in this case, it was
definitely a matter of who would get who first, like one of those old western
books her dad loved to read. They were always standing there ready to draw
their guns and shoot the hell out of each other. Except there were no guns
anymore. If any turned up they were immediately melted down. Metal was too
precious, and so was human life too. Humanity had at least learnt that since
the shift. Although fat wizardy types and his cronies might think differently.
But they didn’t have guns now, they had magic instead. And staring at this big
swirling rupture it could be just as deadly.
It was then that Tricky realised she
wouldn’t be going in. Oh no, she had to shut this thing off. Close it up before
some innocent happened across it. If she was going to chase him into another
dimension, she was going to be the one controlling the when and where of it.
Saturday 1 April 2023
Review: Hard Man by Jack Rollins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A brutal short story. I was hooked from the opening and enjoyed the first person POV as though the main character was talking to me in a pub.
The rough setting with dealing and fighting and a touch of territorial gangs in pubs felt familiar as I have been in those pubs and met those people - even broken up some of those fights, though maybe not 'quite' as violent!
A quintissentially British read about the rougher side of life. Really enjoyed it. But it's not for the faint hearted, being blatant and graphic.
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