Miss Plot?

For those who don’t know, I love Star Trek. While I’m iffy on the original series, I’ve seen the original cast movies more times than I can count. I watched them after discovering my first love, Star Trek: The Next Generation. My love affair continued through Deep Space Nine, Voyager and even Enterprise (although don’t …

Living a Fairy Tale Trope

It’s a familiar trope in fairy tales. Cinderella had her father’s estate. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty both had a cottage in the woods. Rapunzel had her tower with no doors. Belle had the Beast’s castle. In fairy tales, princesses tend to find themselves in isolation. It’s not unusual. These stories were written in a …

Fairy Justice

Imagine if you will Rapunzel still wandering the swamp with her twins in tow and the prince elsewhere, still blind and searching for his love. Imagine the maiden in Rumpelstiltskin handing over her baby to the fairy who demanded her as payment. Imagine the Woodsman never happened by Grannie’s house and Red Riding Hood still …

Musing on the Muse

Next week, A Noble’s Path, the second book in my Enchanted Path series, is being released. It’s a bittersweet moment. I’m hoping that it leads to more interest in the series, but I know it also means having to embrace more marketing. It’s not my forte, not because I’m shy, but because it means selling …

January with Thumbelina

January is a quiet, broody month. The end of the holiday season is as sudden as the beginning of it. The weather is unpredictable and rarely appreciated. And the new year has a sense of urgency to be different or at least better than the last. It’s all exhausting! I think about Thumbelina hiding out …

Does this come in Faery?

I use lots of keystrokes analyzing fairy tales. Today I want to discuss why we're so fascinated by them. They're old and antiquated. They're stilted and repetitive. They're sexist and...really sexist! So why the appeal? One answer is royalty. In a healthy majority of the stories good deeds, virtue, cleverness, and beauty yield majestic results. …

First Five Pages Syndrome

Hello FF Readers! I'm currently neck deep in rewrites, so pardon the short post. We’ve come to that time of year (which has become more and more nebulous) when TV shows make a last bid for our attention. Quite a few of those shows are in their freshman run and are competing with a huge …

Admitted–Not Accepted

Here’s a weird thought. Have you ever had that moment when someone makes it clear that although you’ve been admitted, it does not mean you’ve been accepted? It made me think about Cinderella. After Cinderella was found by the prince and then he married her, what happened next? She was, for all intents and purposes, …

Author-versary

Last week a fellow writer and blogger celebrated her first year as a published author. I thought it was an amazing idea and wrote in her comments how much I lamented not having done the same. Not the post, but the celebrating. When you’re an indie author, work can be a bit of a slog. …

Fairy Tale Ambitions

I’ve been thinking about ambition lately. Wishes, yearnings, desires. It all sounds very intimate. Ambition is all about what we want deep down inside and work toward. We all have them, don’t we? Here’s where Snow White lost me. After escaping a death sentence because the queen’s servant takes pity on her and finding shelter …