My next short story will be published on Danse MacCabre in May: https://dansemacabreonline.wixsite.com/neudm/sylvia-woodham-150
In the meantime, enjoy this teaser telling you about the journey for this story and easter eggs to watch for. This story was actually a lucid dream with a linear plot. If there are those of you out there who are lucid dreamers, you know that a linear plot is rare. In the past 18 months I have had three that I have turned into stories. THIS story, however, was a "Fairy tale," and when I woke up I knew immediately that's what the dream had been. The context for how I wrote this story comes along with some pet peeves of mine in how "fairy tales" are used in modern publishing and writing. The historical context probably starts with a book published in 1994 called "Politically Correct Bedtime Stories" https://www.amazon.de/-/en/James-Finn-Garner/dp/0285640410
The supposed purpose was to correct the messaging in these stories communicated to young girls about a man saving them. It was not very popular in communities I was part of... I grew up absorbing volume after volume of every fable from Christian Anderson, to full collections of Grimm, to the more complete and the more obscure stories they contained the better, all the way until I was studying French and was gifted a bilingual edition of La Fontaine's fables.
Living in Germany, you really feel the context of these stories, from the Strewelpeter example I mentioned in an earlier post that these stories were told to children to scare them into behaving, or the post about how many of them were remnants of demonized deities and folk religious traditions passed down. When that is appropriated badly by Disney, and then modern commercialized culture reacts and things the appropriated representatino needs to be "fixed" without any diligence or respect for the original culture, it really starts to become unbearable.
When I awoke with this dream, so clearly under this umbrella, in the original cultural context, my motivation for keeping it in that style was not to add to the over saturated number of options to modern renditions, but to add to the original cannon of "here's how you say this within the original cultural context."
I had a collaboration partner developing the German version in tandem with the story concept, rather than have an English version and a German translation, and I wished for the two to appear side by side like my bilingual edition of La Fontaine. Influences from Matthias, who has released his first MG novel about dodos, were to help me understand cultural meanings of names - which names were fitting for the station of the characters. For example, Hans is a farm boy, and not a member of the nobility, but Franz and Freidrich are appropriate for titled nobility. In addition, I chose the use of the name Yulia - even though in German it would be Julia - I knew an English speaking audience would not pronounce that name the way it would be pronunced in German, so I used a more phoenetic spelling. Matthias thought if the region is 18th century middle European geography, it also lended ambiguity of Slavic influences, which would be appropriate if the geographical cluster looked like decentralized Germanic kingdoms. We also devised the inspiration behind a magical talking animal. Full disclosure - in my German class, we had to create fairy tales that started with a King and daughters, and we had the Frog asking for a kiss and the princess called on a previous animal suitor seeking the same request from her, and the two cursed animals fell in love and set each other free. Matthias and I arrived on a Raven, because he said they were underrated by Germans, and considered bad omens. The irony being that ravens are also a representation of the Germanic god Odin.
Therefore, please read and enjoy, but please do not walk away with the lessons of the story about original context and meaning of these stories lost on the reader. There is one character in the story that is a cultural commentary on the lost meaning of how modern readers read these stories for the romance and lose the plot of what they are about. Let me know when you have read it, if you can identify that character. On that note, it's time for embarassing submission rejection feedback story time. Not in the sense that I was embarrassed, but more a case of good old fashioned German Fremdshade. I submitted this story to a place that claimed it wanted original styles, but then when I outlined exactly what original style the narrative was written, the person responding compared it to something else entirely, and not the original narrative style at all. Because the narrative style bucked modern "close pov" norms, I knew it would be more niche to place, and happy that it has found a home where it is appreciated with our friends in Nevada.
