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              A Merry Christmas  and a Prosperous New Year  to all our readers!           But it's Christmas Day and you want something a little different from the usual blog.           So I offer you this wintery tale...Or, at least, its first chapter.  ******************************************************** ******************************************* Ghost Dance Or, The Czar's Black Angel 'Are you cold, my children? Are you cold?' Chapter 1       In a place far distant from where you are now grows an oak tree by a lake.         Round the oak's trunk is a chain of golden links.         Tethered to the chain is a learned cat, and this most learned of all cats ...

THE GHOST DRUM by Susan Price           Susan Price has been a professional writer since she was 16, and has published 60 books, with Faber, Black, Hodder, Scholastic, OUP and CUP, among others.  She is now self-publishing, and her books are available as downloads from Amazon .           'My story is set (says the cat) in a far-away Czardom, where the winter is a cold half-year of darkness.           In that country the snow falls deep and lies long, lies and freezes until bears can walk on its thick crust of ice. The ice glitters on the snow like white stars in a white sky!... the winter is one long night, and all that long night long the sky-stars glisten in their darkness, and the snow-stars glitter in their whiteness, and between the two there hangs a shivering curtain of cold twilight.’           The cat is the ‘...