Yes, hello, I know I have been away all this year. But I have been sick. I have been busy. And I have been working on my newest novel project.
In fact, I am writing about fairytales!
Both in my new project, and on this new post today.
I groan and blink my eyes. My dark eyelashes float in and out of my vision slowly. I’m looking up at marshmallow shaped clouds. Wait a minute. The clouds are actually shaped like mashmallows?
I started 2016 (after finishing Richelle Mead's Soundless, of course) with reading fairytales. The old fashioned fairytales. Grimm Brothers and before.
Five months into the year, I still have two more fairytales left to go: Cinderella and Peter Pan.
“Because that is Cinderella’s story,” I pointed to the castle. “And it’s the final part of my mother’s world.”
And now you're probably asking yourself what fairytales I have read this year. So let me tell you. Sleeping Beauty. The Sword in the Stone. The Black Cauldron. Rapunzel. The Snow Queen. Snow White. The Little Mermaid.
And now I am going to ruin your probably perfect views on these tales.
“So which fairytale will you go to first?” I gestured all around us. We stood exactly in the center of the nine tales, their castles and towers looming straight over our head. She didn’t have a clue.
Sleeping Beauty was a real beauty. In fact, she was so beautiful that, upon finding her and thinking her dead, a king performed necrophillia on her. Little did he know, she was actually alive and she became pregnant. With his twins. Even throughout the labor, she stayed asleep. In fact, she did not wake up until the girl twin sucked her finger trying to find the breast, and ended up sucking out the splinter from the spinning wheel that evidently put the princess to sleep. The king found her again and found out that she was alive and with twins. He continued seeing her on the side of his wife. After his wife found out, she sent a servant to kill the twins to feed the king them. The servant, of course, wouldn't kill babies, but the king didn't know that when he was told he ate his own kin.
Constance spoke up, “Did you know that in the very first written version of Sleeping Beauty – though it was actually called Talia, Sun and Moon – the man who came and found her was actually a king, he wasn’t a prince. He was married and everything. But then he screwed Sleeping Beauty, thinking she was actually dead. I think that’s called necrophilia.”
The Sword in the Stone and The Black Cauldron are not traditional fairytales, you may say, even though Disney did animated films of them. Both of the books were written in the 1900's, even. But they are two stories that take place in my book, and there are definitely some twists. Such as dead fairies in The Sword in the Stone and a suicide in The Black Cauldron.
I turn to find Megan le Fay lying out on a bed of lard. The queen of fairies is an awful gluttonous woman, and the form she’s taken shows it. Her hair is long and black, but really greasy. I open my palm to show her my dagger, and she flinches away.
“I’m not going to let anyone die!” she cried.
And at that, he grabbed her face and kissed her. It was a harsh and hard kiss that I was really afraid would hurt her. Of course, that made me want to hurt him.
In the original Rapunzel, it was an Ogress that took her. After the prince helped her escape, the Ogress cast a spell that caused the prince to go blind, but a tear from Rapunzel's eye fell upon his and cured him. And then the Ogress tripped while running and died.
“You are not taking my princess anywhere,” Mother Gothel said. “She was the prize I received for the King stealing herbs from my garden.”
“Herbs,” Constance scoffed. “You can get those anywhere.”
There is not one troll in Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen, thank you very much, Frozen. What there is, though, is a looking glass that shows your reflection as something truly ugly and horrid. And this looking glass broke into millions of little tiny shards, and happened upon the luck of piercing one unlucky little boy in both the heart and an eye, causing him to see everything as truly ugly and horrid. This little boy was taken by the Snow Queen, and his neighbor friend spent the whole story following talking crows and reindeer to find him.
I felt a small prick in my eye and a tug at my heart. If I had not been standing there, Kay would’ve been struck with the shards of the looking glass that turns everything beautiful into something horrid and ugly. I was struck with them instead.
Snow White is... Snow White. Admittedly, Disney's film doesn't divert from the story of it too much. The original fairytale traumatized readers with a death during labor and Evil Queen being killed by being forced to dance in heated iron shoes until she fell dead, but the rest of it as just as innocent as Saturday morning cartoons.
"Paul," she leaned over the bed toward me. "In Grimm's fairytale Evil Queen is forced to wear iron hot shoes in the end and dance until she dies. But today, I can simply trick Evil Queen into eating her poisonous apple instead. Now, tell me, which death is more merciless?"
The Little Mermaid is the original fairytale I find to be the most traumatizing. The mermaid doesn't lose her voice, she loses her tongue. And she never even wins her prince. She dies instead.
"What is the next fairytale?" she asked.
I pointed just as we approached the crashing waves.
She backed up, "No way."
Now, you may wonder what exactly my novel is about. Well. It is about this girl who gets stuck in a world of these fairytales, and to get out she must play them all out. But she's not the kind of girl that will simply play them out and leave them that way. She's the kind of girl that will get the princesses out, so that maybe they might find themselves.
I had to explain it to her, “The only way to get out of my mother’s world is to get through it. And to do that, you’re going to have to play the heroine in each of my mother’s fairytales. In the proper order. And with that ring on. If you take it off, it’ll just disintegrate.”
My favorite fairytale that I've read in 2016 is another untraditional fairytale like mine. In fact, most people probably would not call it a fairytale. But because I am writing a fairytale and this story has helped inspire parts of mine, I am calling it my own personal fairytale, because fairytales inspire.
And the book that I am talking about is called The Glittering Court.
I already knew I love Richelle Mead, especially after meeting her last year. And now I know that I love how she can spin a fairytale.
First, she takes you through a world filled with glitter and glam. A world our protagonist is used to, until she runs away and has to pretend she's not used to it. There are storms and ships and pirates. And then our protagonist is thrust into the gold mining industry. I just never knew what she was going to do next! And I think that is the truest trait of a fairytale, and the trait I hope my own fairytale has the most of.
"Tink?" I turned toward the sound.
"Is that Tinkerbell?" Constance asked.
