"When you heard that music, it felt like you’d known it your whole life. That music… it made you feel things you didn’t know you could. That man with the frailing hand made you feel like you could take on the whole doggone world."

"It had been twenty years since the people had risen up and been smashed back into the ground."

Twenty years ago, in the midst of a terrible famine, the people of the Kingdom of Mindolach rose up in defiance against the Crown, inspired by the words and the music of a man known only as the Green Bard. The rebellion was crushed, and the Bard disappeared.

Now, as crops begin to fail once more in Mindolach, young Orphia Dain discovers a mysterious instrument in a forest cave. Newly equipped with magical abilities she doesn't fully understand, she will journey across the breadth of the kingdom to seek out the sorcerers of Great Rock and, joined by a hillbilly wizard, a weary veteran, a mercenary swordswoman, and a highwayman, try to revive the spirit of revolution.

The Green Bard is a fantasy novel I have been working on for months now, set in a world based on the American South, Appalachia, and Ireland, with elements of Imperial Germany and Russia. The novel is intended to be the first instalment in a series titled A Blessing From Below. I will be publishing my first draft as it is written, and have made the first four chapters and prologue available now. I hope you will enjoy it, and welcome your feedback!

Read The Green Bard below:

For a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.    Yes, he must indeed! And who better than one of our five girls?

Here's your punishment for your shenanigans in the last #cityrumble: #cityrumble Brit Edition! Here's the bracket for round one. I'll link the matches below.

Sheffield v Derby

Bristol v Oxford

Swansea v Manchester

Leicester v Wolverhampton

Truro v Aberdeen

Merthyr Tydfil v Lincoln

Liverpool v Cambridge

Blackpool v Nottingham

London v Inverness

Stoke-on-Trent v Glasgow

Southend-on-Sea v York

Portsmouth v Birmingham

Edinburgh v Newcastle

Coventry v Cardiff

Newport v Brighton & Hove

“In the movie’s most celebrated scene, Rita Hayworth does an impossibly seductive striptease that involves the removal of just two long, black-satin gloves. It’s a performance charged with eroticism, desperation and tragedy, and it cemented Rita’s status as Hollywood’s reigning love goddess of the 1940s. Movie posters screamed “There NEVER was a woman like Gilda!”, and Rita is reported to have said, “Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda… and woke up with me.””

That trope is basically saying “I know this will break my heart and I know I will never fully recover from this, what’s more I know if I walk away now this will only be an occasional twinge in my heart and nothing more. But for YOU I’m willing to suffer that passion and the heartache it brings, for our short time together I’m willing to spend the rest of my eternity slowly growing my agonizing way around it. Because you surpass my self-preservation and everything I could ever want and I will forgo anything if it means I can have THIS LOVE WITH YOU in my life.”

And it all boils down to: “I will willingly endure the darkness that comes after if it means I can have the most dazzling firework for one fleeting second in my entire life. And that firework, is being in love with you.”