Steven Mace

Many years ago, as a small child, I discovered a wonderful book in our village's local library. The book was 'East of Midnight' by Tanith Lee. It was a book for children/young adults, and was fantasy-adventure-romance fiction. The narrative concerned a sorcerer-king named Zaister, who was the Royal Consort to a sorcerer-queen in a world where women are the dominant gender. Women are the Daughters of Night, men are the sons of the Sun. Women wear all-black and dye their hair black unless naturally dark-haired, while men are only allowed to wear reds, yellows, and orange clothes. The Royal marriages are arranged, but the bloodline passes down through the women. The Queen will marry her first consort at sixteen, when he is also sixteen. After a period of five years, the Consort-King is murdered and   sacrificed to their Gods, and new consort is chosen for the Queen. The Consort-King is always sixteen years old, while the Queen ages by five years with each husband she loses,

I've started writing and submitting stories for the website 'Runaway Writings', which reviews and showcases comic book, fantasy, horror and science fiction. They are currently running my story 'Epiphany', which you can find here: http://runawaywritings.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/epiphany-part-1/   Meanwhile, only today I was just reading about this quite bizarre-sounding football story. It was written by Robin Chambers in the 1970s and is about an Iceland national football (soccer) team that win the 1998 World Cup. It's available in his book 'The Ice Warrior and other Stories': http://www.abebooks.co.uk/9780140310139/Ice-Warrior-Stories-Chambers-Robin-0140310134/plp   " The all-conquering, efficient Iceland meet bare-footed and mercurial Zaire in the World Cup final – and the evil Iceland manager plots the downfall of Zaire's star player, Odiwule, who can, apparently, bend the ball 90 degrees. When Zaire are awarded a free-kick, Iceland&