Recently, I received a book review from the Online Book Club where the reviewer wrote that they wanted to know more about some of the minor characters in 'Of All Faiths & None' and what happened to them. This led me to start writing a short story and also to re-reading some of Katherine Mansfield's brilliant pieces.
It's just over a hundred years since Katherine Mansfield died. She was a wonderful writer from New Zealand who managed to capture moments of time in a few pages. She was the only writer whom Virginia Woolf said she was jealous of. I first started reading her short stories about two and a half decades ago and because she wrote about people and their lives in the early 1900s I decided to re-read some of her work before I started writing my own short story.
On my website at https://www.ofallfaiths.com/about-1 I have written a short story entitled 'Where There's a Will'. The story starts where 'Of All Faiths & None' ends, and contains characters from the novel. The story centres around a few hours at the offices of a solicitor in London, where the will of the deceased Adrian Drewe is explained to his wife (Jane) and her father - Lord Cecil Facey. Although the short story can be read in isolation, it was written for those people who had read 'Of All Faiths & None' and enjoyed the novel.
Although the reading of a will is not necessarily the subject for humour, I hope that this short story will bring a smile to the reader's face. The expectation of a large bequest and the complexities of the English legal system allowed me to write something that was comic; and the cohiba smoking, brandy drinking character of Lord Cecil Facey was the perfect character to be thrown into the mix.
Update: I am currently updating my book on Arbitration Law for Oxford University Press and then will be back re-drafting my second novel. Hopefully, I can also fit in another short story over the summer. Please do email me if you enjoy it.