These Are the Dog Days
4/5
()
About this ebook
Good day dear reader.
If you delve further into these pages then I warn you now you'll really wish you'd read something else. Somethings, once read, cannot be unread.
Still reading? Well, if you weren't you wouldn't be the inquisitive soul I took you for. So, as we both know that more will be read I guess I'd better be straight with you. All things recorded within these pages are real. They may not fully tie up with any news coverage or accepted history but they are what I saw and what I heard and in my heart, I know my words to be true.
There are Others that walk among us in what we like to believe in our ignorance as our world. It is their world and has been for longer than we stopped swinging in trees. They do not all hide, you probably know some of them, have been taught by some of them or have sat next to them on the train. They most definitely pass you by as you walk without you realising they are so close they could reach out and touch you. I on the other hand do know they're there. I hear their presence, I hear their strength and their emotion flowing out of them as if the very air knows they are different. The aura-sonus, the sound of the heavens... or maybe not.
My name is Valentine Orphanet, I’m 19 and this is my diary. When you've finished with it please return to Mr Xanthic's antique and book shop. If you can.
Safe night.
Chris Norgate
Chris Norgate lives in Hampshire in England with his wife, children and small furry rodent like things and spends most his time playing with them or mucking them out - you decide which.Why write a book? After years of struggling with the written word dating back many years to being labelled at school (by a teacher who was too scared to call him thick) Chris has tried to find ways to not read or write. After having to write more reports for work and driving the automatic spell checker into meltdown, he sat down to make a list of the top ten misspelled words he makes......this soon turned into well over 100. So with a blogging site set up to try and get a short paragraph or two to constantly write words until spelt correct he started the diary; it was originally about his life and was as boring as a firework party under the sea, so he added things to make it more interesting. When comments on the blog started coming in that the girl character was very interesting - which surprised him as he was writing about himself, Chris changed 'her' into Valentine as it was the 13th Feb when he was looking for a name and it seemed a good one to go on with. And there it is, 17 months later a book has been created and now its been unleashed onto the world until Chris is paid an extortionate amount of money to take it away and smash the hard-drive its saved on.If Chris ever finds the courage to write another book he promises to try and put a plot into it.
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Reviews for These Are the Dog Days
1 rating1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A fun short story of double and double cross.
I found this on my friends kobo reader and started on page 3 (I quickly went back to page 1). This isn't a long story, too short even for a novella yet there's something of familiar feel to the characters not often brought through in short stories. But more on that later.
This is a tale filled with confidence, confidence tricks to be exact and how the characters progress after them. It's not just a con and go, as with many like this, but a family approach that goes deeper.
At first I thought it was a basic Father figure solves the day affair yet again there's more. It's written from the perspective of Valentine, a witch if you go on information in the title, but I saw little of this here. She has a diary where she records her daily events, so even though this is a story led by others we see it through Valentie's eyes and through her sensibilities. What transpires is a lesson in trust and what you can do if that trust is broken; if you have a friend as confident and capable as Mr Xanthic.
Who is Mr Xanthic, and where does he get his confidence? That's not explained here. In honesty I've now downloaded one other short story called Play with me and a novel that I believe is the start of it, for Valentine at least. But more on these once I've read them.
This is a fun and entertaining yaunt that will brighten any meandering afternoon. It's upbeat and reassuring. I liked it.
Book preview
These Are the Dog Days - Chris Norgate
Copyright © 2018 by Chris Norgate
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the author and publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
The right of the author to be identified as the author has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design
and Patents Act 1988
Printed in the United Kingdom
Mr Xanthic has reminded me to state that all characters within these
Pages are fictional, even him.
Diary of Valentine Orphanet – Witch.
These are the dog days
Good day dear reader.
If you delve further into these pages then I warn you now you'll really wish you'd read something else. Somethings, once read, cannot be unread.
Still reading? Well, if you weren't you wouldn't be the inquisitive soul I took you for. So, as we both know that more will be read I guess I'd better be straight with you. All things recorded within these pages are real. They may not fully tie up with any news coverage or accepted history but they are what I saw and what I heard and in my heart, I know my words to be true.
There are Others that walk among us in what we like to believe in our ignorance as our world. It is their world and has been for longer than we stopped swinging in trees. They do not all hide, you probably know some of them, have been taught by some of them or have sat next to them on the train. They most definitely pass you by as you walk without you realising they are so close they could reach out and touch you. I on the other hand do know they're there. I hear their presence, I hear their strength and their emotion flowing out of them as if the very air knows they are different. The aura-sonus, the sound of the heavens… or maybe not.
My name is Valentine Orphanet, I’m 19 and this is my diary. When you've finished with it please return to Mr Xanthic's antique and book shop. If you can.
Safe night.
Tuesday 13th February
08:00
Whilst packing my case to return to Xanthic’s country estate to continue my studies in my craft, I received a text so cryptic I had no choice but to abandon my plans and return to the small antique and rare book shop in town.
OMG SHOP STK! COME QWIK
I knew Xanthic was local, he would have been my first choice to call when trouble walks by, so I felt a mixture of pride and confusion to be contacted instead of him. I quickly changed my long heavy skirt for a pair of jeans, jumped on my old bone cruncher of a bike and sped off through the Wintry afternoon sleet.
My employer was the owner of the place we called the dust farm but the customers knew as Mr Xanthic’s Antiques and Books. It is a place where anything could be bought or sold if the price was right and most of the trading done there was in information. As Mr Xanthic, to the customers at least, always said, Information is the grease that lubricates the world. Without it you run dry and seize up, you can never have too much and the Tax man can never see its value. My duties often involved gaining as much information as I could from the streets and the small collections of unnatural creatures that forge an existence there. I say unnatural but the longer I work for Xanthic the more I think it is us that do not really belong on this world.
The ride to the shop was unpleasant due to the persistent rain and abhorrent due to the uncourteous car drivers clogging the saturated roads. When I reached the door I left my bike leaned up against the front. For all the crime in the city no one had ever even touched it let alone ride off with it. I did think it was some arcane protection or ward, rune or glyph of protection written around the site but a small part of me thinks it could be because