Rainbow Snippets feels reflective
For this week, six more sentences from Spindrift. Here Siôn reflects on happiness and its dangers.
It was strange, he thought as he walked down between the houses, breathing in the glistening quiet of the morning after the storm. He had been unhappy for so long, gray and empty and lonely. Those feelings had reached breaking point on the bridge and then faded once he was safe, first muffled by drugs and finally cleaned out of his spirit like pus from a well-treated wound. He hadn’t realized that there was still something missing, that comfort, self-knowledge, and calm were merely the middle ground. Now, to his bewilderment, all these positive, sharp-edged feelings were growing in him—joy, tenderness, delight.
And fear, of course, not just of ghosts, but of the damage even happiness could do if he wasn’t strong enough to carry it without the patched cloth of his spirit tearing under its weight.
Rainbow Snippets is a wonderful little Facebook group in which writers gather every weekend to post a six-sentence peek at one of their works. All genres are included but the snippets must be from books with a LGBTQIA+ protagonist.
When lonely artist Siôn Ruston retreats to the seaside village of Rosewick Bay, Yorkshire, to recover from a suicide attempt, he doesn’t expect to encounter any ghosts, let alone the one who appears in his bedroom every morning at dawn. He also doesn’t expect to meet his ghost’s gorgeous, flirty great-grandson working at the local museum… and the village pub, and as a lifeboat volunteer. But Mattie’s great-great-grandfather isn’t the only specter in Rosewick Bay, and as Siôn and Mattie investigate an ill-fated love affair from a bygone era, they begin a romance of their own, one that will hopefully escape the tragedy Mattie’s ancestor suffered.
But the ghosts aren’t the only ones with secrets, and the things Siôn and Mattie are keeping from each other threaten to tear them apart. And all the while, the dead are biding their time, because the curse of Rosewick Bay has never been broken. If the ghosts are seen on the streets, local tradition foretells a man will drown before the summer’s end.
Coming soon from Dreamspinner Press
