Eyes

"Mama Louhi carved the meat on the dinner table, but the knife could have scraped against my bones and it would have felt the same. My sisters laughed while I sat in ash and stared into the hearth, hoping to burn my last tears into my skin as they dried up. My only friend was dead, and they laughed while feasting on his flesh."

One-Eye, Two-Eyes and Three-Eyes has long been my favourite fairy tale, because it had such a grotesque atmosphere to it. The sisters with the different numbers of eyes: one, two and three, and contrary to expectation it is the girl with two eyes (the "normal" one) that is treated like dirt. I've always found it puzzling, that perception of the world that this family had. It is still quite relevant, I think; if the message you get from home is that you are not worth much, slowly you will come to believe it, even if the whole world around you might think differently.

And while this fairy tale was among my favourites, part of my fascination with it sprung from my thinking: what if Little Two-Eyes simply... evened things out? It's simple maths in the end. 1+3 = 4 = 2+2

I was looking for that slant of revenge in that story, fueled by the main character herself and not mainly outside forces as in the original tale. In the original tale the sisters get their cumuppance, but not through one particular action by the main protagonist. I wanted Little Two-Eyes to fuel her own vengeance and in this story I gave her the tools of her choice to accomplish just that. And she chose her needle and thread.

I'm proud to say my version of this story appears in the Black Apples anthology (Belladonna Publishing, 2014), alongside 17 other dark fairy tales where the apples carry thorns and the princesses have fangs.

You can buy your copy through the Amazon link of your choice here. (Digital versions coming soon!)

Photo credit: CarbonNYC via photopin

Hurdle

Every year I forget how tough the first day of NaNoWriMo turns out to be.

My excitement always fades a bit when Halloween passes into Writing Madness after all that build-up when I notice how long it actually takes to type something. And that's just the typing. The actual writing that pours out, turns out to be horrible as well.

It's especially noticeable to me because Nano means starting afresh. The horrors of an empty page with a tauntingly blinking cursor. I just finished editing a story into a shape I was very happy with the week before. Words were where they were supposed to be, characters seemed alive and carried an appearance, the ending didn't make me cry (at least, not in a bad way) and all in all, I didn't feel ashamed at the prospect of showing it to anyone.

Yet every year I forget that those stories start with a blank page and that hurdle always takes a while to get over. In November even more so.

Then I start to notice the bits and pieces buried in the needlessly wordy tangents and I can hear my brain hum: "There, that's the stuff. We'll cut the rest out later... No! I said later!"

NaNoWriMo Day One will always be the day I rediscover how to let my instinct do the talking.