One Last Dance is a historical crime noir detective novel.
I loved the Shanghai setting which is so atmospheric.
The political and social landscape of the time permeates throughout. Rod’s trauma and survivor guilt as a veteran of the First World War is sensitively depicted, and comes to play in how he deals with events and his relationships with those around him.
There are so many colourful characters. If you’re all sweetness and light you don’t survive long in this seedy 1920’s gangster-ridden Shanghai , where the police and authorities are just as corrupt as the criminals.
I smiled when I spotted an Easter-egg reference to Michael Jecks’ Templars novels. I’ll leave it to you fellow readers to hunt it out.
The plot twists kept me guessing right up to the end. I thought I’d worked out the mystery, but as usual I’d fallen for a red herring. It’s all part of the enjoyment with a good mystery.
I look forward to more of Rod’s escapades.
An adventurous, dark, emotional, tense, mysterious read.
This free, ten day course is intended to free the creative spark and inspire your words to flow freely onto the page. This was a cosy writing retreat, not a technical ‘how to course’ on the nuts and bolts of writing.
(The course is now closed for 2024, but usually runs annually from the end of December to early January. Participants can access the course material until the following July.) This was my second year.
I found Winter Writing Sanctuary the perfect escape on the dark cold days after the festive season, which can be a difficult in-between time once all the excitement of the Yule celebrations are over.
There is a supportive community where you are encouraged to post your work, on the Facebook group or Substack, not for critique but for the experience and joy of sharing. To be honest, this year I kept to myself, enjoying the time to focus on my writing and set habits in place for the coming year.
This is not a technical ‘How To’ course, and does not go into the nuts and bolts of writing.
The structure of every lesson is a ‘Daily Spark’ where Beth reads a couple of poems intended to set the mood and act as a prompt for free-writing if you choose. Then a tutorial video, giving some insight into the main lesson. Nothing is prescriptive. While I found most of the lessons focus on poetry, life writing and non fiction, they are open to interpretation however you choose. For the most part I used them as a prompt for fiction.
I am always writing, though rarely share my work . I have note books, and Scrivener and Word documents full of first drafts. I call mine Draft Zero as there’s barely a coherent sentence. I do envy writers like my partner Jay who write clean, near-perfect first drafts.
I thought it was time to put some of my words out into the universe so here goes .
Winter
The Ice witch stalked through the bone-bare trees. The boughs of bramble and brier in her silver-white hair. She could feel the pulse of each animal through her slim bones. The rabbit’s heart raced as it sensed her presence, yet was too scared to flee. Above through skeletal fingers of twig and feather-lined deserted nests, a full moon cast wan light. Its face murked in snow cloud.
Day 1 and still no sighting. I crossed the bogs on the low-lying moors during the day. No wraiths were about despite the mist. I looked in all the stagnant pools as I jumped from one grassed tussock to the next, careful to avoid the black waters and dark green hedgehogs of taller grass which indicated more boggy soil beneath. Zero spectre sightings in the marsh.
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