Well, fairy tale number six, The Sneaking Girl and the Other Queen has gone off to my editor. And that’s a huge relief. I had another tale planned as number six, but it was simply too much work to make it fit with the others, as it takes place in the 19th Century and defies the rule of narrative concision for fairy tales.
So I turned to my latest story, The Sneaking Girl, which was conceived and written in the fall of 2013. (The other six tales date from a decade or two before that.) The trouble with using The Sneaking Girl though, was that I was not satisfied with the second half of it. I spent most of the late summer and early fall revising it, but when my darling editor wife read the new ending, she pined for the old one – which was modelled on the dark twisted fairy tales from Eastern Europe, where bizarre things happen unexpectedly, because, well… that’s what sometimes happens in real life.
Back I went to the drawing board. I managed to incorporate the old ending, but in a more integrated and less jarring way. Nora loved it, but I’ve yet to hear what my editor thinks of it. She should be done in a week or so.
Which brings me to the final tale of my seven story collection, The Miller and the Old Hag. It was published in a magazine quite some time ago, but with all my recent experience reworking my other fairy tales, I figured I could improve it. And over that last month or so, I have. The general flow is better and it has a brand new ending – which had both Nora and I crying over it in the truck last weekend. (We’re just big saps like that.) The Miller and the Old Hag is too short for publishing as a stand-alone ebook. It’ll be included in The Seven Tales as a bonus for anyone who’s read the previous six online.
So by the end of this year all the writing and editing will be done. It’ll then be time to plan the cover and hand the book over to my designer slash layout artist to get it ready for print. I’m proud of everything I’ve released for publication, but nothing more than this book. And I can’t wait to hear the reactions once people get to see the seven tales as a whole. I’m pretty sure it’ll make readers darn happy someone took the time to write it.