Fairy Tale: The Special Tree

Good morning!

Yes, I'm well aware that you might not be reading this in the morning, but it's morning somewhere or we're all in serious trouble. I'll discuss that some other time.

I'm sitting here in the shade, with my computer on my lap, reading my fairy tales.

I like doing fairy tale retellings (after all, a fairy tale is just a mini-plot) but the existing fairy tales don't always say what I want to say. So I write my own. I've thought about doing them as picture books, but as I learned last week (from a picture book author that we interviewed for writingsnippets.com) most picture books aren't any longer than 500 words.

I thought my fairy tales might be a little long, but I didn't know they were that long! Apparently 2000 words is too long for a picture book. Very sad. I may cry.

So I'll just enjoy them myself, and continue to write new ones for my niece-phews (nessies?).

Most times the stories I write from them come out looking as much like the original fairy tales as a cross between a tarantula and a penguin in a fun-house mirror.

Sometimes I write the fairy tale after the fact, but even then they seldom have any relationship to the story they're modeled after. I particularly like the Princess and the Dragon, but The Storyteller was fun to write. In reality they're all fun to write, but neither of those has been used in a novel. Yet.