On Saturdays, you can check out a snippet from my latest writing efforts. All snippets are copyrighted. These excerpts from my writing are first draft, unedited words, and may not appear in the final work.
My love for magic and mythology is no secret. I love the more gruesome variants of our tidied up fairytales, and novel-length retellings of Cinderella like Gregory Maguire’s or of Beauty and the Beast like Robin McKinley’s add such depth to simple stories that I find great joy in the ultimately happy endings. I also never weary of classical mythology—if you haven’t read Percy Jackson yet, what are you waiting for?—and appreciate the depth unique mythology has to a fantasy series.
After all, in what world do people tell no stories? Why should a created fantasy world be any different? And yet rewriting Cinderella for Del’s world simply isn’t necessary—they would have other stories, other monsters and gods with their own fantastical tales to draw from. As a reader, you just need to know they exist, and as a writer, I need to be able to deliver them when necessary to further the story. And what better place to start than an ancient magical forest? Here’s a few lines from Book 2 (still untitled):
The setting of Del’s favorite childhood fairytales, Silvanwylde’s ancient and hoary trees covered southwestern Worvanz and formed an unspoken boundary between myth and reality. She’d often imagined herself the heroine of some magical adventure, traipsing through the wilds and slaying fearsome beasts, saving unfortunates who had unwittingly wandered into the clutches of villainous witches.
Do you have a favorite fairytale?