G.C. McRae

Well, it has been quite a year. It started out in the spring with the launch of my first young adult novel, “Kana and the Red Pilot”. I was such a blast reading it in schools. My favorite reading was to the kids at Academy at King Edward, where one poor fellow nearly died laughing. I’m not kidding. He had acute asthma and if by chance he laughed too hard for too long, he could have died. Well, that day, he and his class laughed for an hour straight at my goofy book. It was contagious, which didn’t help my reading or the health of young Master Asthma, who ended up on the floor, screaming with hilarity, his teacher hovering over him with great concern.

Then came my fairy tales. Getting those finally polished, edited and out into the world has given me such a sense of satisfaction, if I got bit by a cobra on my writing fingers tomorrow and could never write again, I would rest content, knowing I’d done some pretty decent work.

And so it’s Christmastime. For twenty years I carried around the story of the princess who discovers the dollmaker’s house in the woods. I wrote it and rewrote it dozens of times over the years, never satisfied. Now, it’s done. Though it doesn’t say so in the book, the story is dedicated to fathers who must work far away from home and miss big parts of their children’s lives. It’s as much a tale of the king as it is of his daughter, of best intentions that result in tragedy and letting go resulting in redemption.

For the five days around Christmas, I’m giving you the story as a heartfelt gift. Read it, share it if you like. And if you’re a father, home only for the holidays, hey, let it go.

 

Along with every other writer of children’s books, I seem to have a thing for orphans. In my case though, it isn’t some calculated literary device. I was given up for adoption at birth and spent the greater part of my life wondering where the heck I came from. The word ‘adopted’ represents only Scene Two of any adoptee’s emotional landscape. Scene One is all about the words, ‘given up’. Every one of us experiences the two in different proportions.

Finding my birth parents decades later was a sort of fairy tale conclusion to my own story. But it never erased the mental and emotional knowledge of what it’s like to be a young child without blood-ties, facing the world as a sort of one person nation. You have to have some tricks up your sleeve in order to survive.

The story of The Sneaking Girl came out of a decades-long attempt to turn a great idea into a workable fairy tale. Last year, while giving the idea another go, I failed once again at the original story, but succeeded in coming up with this one. (I’ve since conquered the plot of the original tale and am in the process of writing it.)

This one has a lot in common with The Wishing Oak. Both have female heros and villians and both have a high quota of quirk worked into their tellings. I have a big soft spot for The Sneaking Girl. Yeah, she’s an orphan. And I’m happy she made it. But I’m just as happy I’m here to tell about it.

 

The Sneaking Girl and the Other Queen is now out on Amazon.

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.

(Image Credit: Ivan Bilibin, Illustration for a poem “Walls of Cain” by Vyacheslav Ivanov)

Unlike my first four fairy tales, this one is inspired by a real medieval practice – that of pounding coins into the bark of an oak tree and making a wish. It’s also the first that is bluntly humorous. It contains so many tropes from traditional fairy tales even I lose track in the first three pages. And for the first time, the cover does not show our hero – but rather, her self-absorbed sister.

Here is the link to The Wishing Oak on Amazon.

I love this story. It’s an underdog tale – as you can probably tell from the cover. It’s the story of a kid with a tragic past and a hopeless future. Small, frightened and powerless as he is, he has to face a threat bigger than any adult around him can handle in order to save the kingdom where he lives. I cannot wait for this tale to be out in the world. On October 7th, you can have it for your own.

Update

The Brave Houseboy is now out! Here’s the Amazon link to the book.

Earlier this week, The Brave Houseboy came back from my editor, Marg Gilks. Even after all my grammatical and punctuational flubs, her comment at the end of the tale was, “I LOVE this story, Gordon! No wonder it’s one of your favourites. It’s one of mine, too.”

Wow. high praise from my (professionally) nit-pickiest critic. I cannot wait to get this story out into the world. It was sitting around for many years, great at it’s core, but crippled by poor execution. Earlier this year, I finally took the time to rework it and now… yeah. It’s quite the loveable tale. Another giant story. But this time the giant is uncompromisingly fierce and the boy of the title is pretty shrimpy. It comes out on the seventh of October.

In other happy news, this morning I finished editing November’s story, The Wishing Oak. This one was really good from the get-go. It arose from readings I’d done in the ’90s on the day-to-day lives of the average medieval peasant. But I’ve spent the past many weeks smoothing it out and upping the characterization. This one is bluntly humorous, a good sorbet after the dark, emotional tales of the Dollmaker and the Houseboy.

(Image Credit: Louis Huard, from Giant Suttung and the Dwarfs)

It took me forever to find the right image for this story. It’s by the London artist, Frederick Walker (1840-1875) who Millais apparently referred to as, “the greatest artist of the century”. As terrible as it is to play favorites with one’s children, I have to say, this story’s right up there. The Dollmaker’s Daughter comes out September 7th.

Update: 
My little tale is now out. Here’s the link to it on Amazon. By the way, it’s free on Amazon Sept 11th and 12th only.

The ebook-making gods are apparently smiling on me. Unlike the images for my first two fairy tale covers, the latest one has taken me an extraordinary amount of time to find. For The Seven Sisters, there was only one image – right from the beginning. For The Boy Smith, ten pretty good options. But for this latest one, when I reached 31 potential images and was still unsatisfied and, needless to say, frustrated, I knew I needed a different research tack. As soon as I took that different direction, BAM! I had my cover.

Part of the trouble is that of the three tales, this one is by far the most personal. And though the subject (the absent parent) is quite universal, my characters have not been the subjects of many classical European paintings.

The tale is back from my editor, Marg. And as you can see, I’ve started on the layout. I’m both leery and excited to get this story out into the world – it means so much to me. Want an escalator into my twisted brain? Wait for September 7th, when The Dollmaker’s Daughter is released.

If you’re looking for something quick to read this weekend, I’m doing a promo for my second fairy tale novelette. The book is usually $.99, but today and tomorrow only, it’s 100% free.

So if you’re looking for a bedtime story for your kids or a quick read for yourself, here’s a father and son story that’ll send you off to sleep with a smile. And if you’d be so kind, I’d sure appreciate a few words of review.

Link to “The Boy Smith” on Amazon

All three e-book versions of my picture books are now done and out in the world. So if you enjoyed the print books, you’ll love these. I made sure the images were all huge – so they’d fill the hi-resolution screen of a laptop, iPad or Kindle Fire HDX. What’s cool is that the reading apps scale so beautifully – so the books still looks great on a black and white device or small on an iPhone. The text size, of course, can be adjusted independent of the images.

Link to The Cannibal Anaconda eBook on Amazon

Link to The Tooth eBook on Amazon

Link to the Pretty Ballerina eBook on Amazon