Category: Fiction Friday

A Visit to a Good Fairy

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction FridayLeave a comment

I thought it would be fun to pull out another excerpt from my novel The People the Fairies Forget–it’s been a few weeks!  Click the category at right (or the page at the top) for more extensive background.  The brief background is that Cinderella’s slipper has fit the wrong girl, who is now having difficulty getting out of an engagement to a not at all charming prince.  My fairy narrator, Tarragon, has gone in search of his very traditionally-Good-Fairy colleague, Marjoram, who he suspects was involved in Cinderella’s arrival at the ball.

I don’t know if I’m supposed to say I enjoy my own writing 🙂 but I do enjoy that this scene shows Marj at her most Marjish–and at her most aggravating!

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            Marj was at home.  Marj’s home involves endless piles of flowers and pillows and silk curtains and pink furry things.  And sparkles, of course.

I popped in, moved a pink kitten off of a chair—wondering as I did if it had been something else before becoming a pink kitten, and if so, had it been a sentient something else—and sat down.  “Hello, Marj.  I need a word.”

Marj was sitting in front of an immense, extremely ornate mirror, with powder puffs and lipstick and I don’t pretend to know what else hovering in the air around her head.  “I really don’t have time right now, Tarry, there is so much going on.”

“Speaking of things going on, about Prince Roderick’s ball.  Did you help a girl go?

“I did.  Aren’t you pleased?  I helped a commoner.”

“I might be pleased.  I’m not sure yet.  Does any of that so much going on involve the girl you helped?”

Her eyes shifted to the side and I knew she was checking something magically.  After a moment she shook her head.  “No, nothing happening with her.  No one’s brought the shoe around yet.”

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The Magic Hill Rewritten

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction Friday1 Comment

A. A. Milne is best known as the author of the Winnie-the-Pooh books (which are lovely, by the way), but he also wrote a picture book called The Magic Hill.  It was about Princess Daffodil, a little girl who made flowers grow wherever she walked (a gift from the Fairy Mumruffin).  To keep the palace gardens looking nice, Daffodil was only allowed to walk in the flowerbeds, while the other children could only walk on the paths and lawns–and never the twain shall meet.

Spoiler alert here if that worries you!

Daffodil becomes very depressed because she’s separated from the other children, and finally the court physicians decide the answer is to let her go play on a hill outside the palace.  Flowers grow there, it becomes known as the Magic Hill, and everyone is much happier.

It’s a cute story, but, with all due respect to Mr. Milne, I’ve never liked the ending.  Why should Daffodil be happier playing alone on a hill rather than alone in the flowerbeds?  So after I read it, I wrote a new ending–which is what makes this a Fiction Friday rather than a book review.  🙂

A note before we begin: this is a little cutesy in spots, but bear in mind that it’s a continuation of a picture book (one with characters named Daffodil and Mumruffin!) and I was echoing Milne’s style a bit.  🙂

My writing picks up just before the physicians tell the King and Queen that Daffodil should visit the hill.  In the original, they say she must be like other girls, and then send her to the hill.  Mine goes differently…

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“In short, Your Majesty, although she is a princess, she must do what other little girls do.”

“But she is not like other little girls,” the Queen sighed.  “She is a princess, and one who spreads flowers besides.  What are we to do?”  So the King and the Queen fretted and fussed and the Doctor shook his head wisely and no one knew quite what to do.  They consulted physicians and herbwives and tried to contact Fairy Mumruffin but she had gone away for a long trip (and wouldn’t be back for at least a year and a day, and probably longer) and so everyone went on fretting and fussing.

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Movie Night in the Cornfield

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When I originally wrote my Pirates of the Caribbean novel (or two-hundred-page extended-joke, as I like to think of it), the second movie hadn’t even come out yet.  The characters ended up with very different lives compared to the later movies.  At the end of my story, Captain Jack Sparrow is still sailing the Black Pearl, Will and Elizabeth are married and living in Port Royal, and Commodore Norrington is still chasing Jack and his crew.

I’ve developed a tradition of going back and writing an extra chapter when each movie comes out.  I’m not trying to fit my story to the later developments–but I really enjoy having the characters, as I left them, watch the movie and comment on how things are going.  It’s that kind of story where you can do that sort of thing.

Since the fourth movie just came out a few weeks ago, I went back to the cornfield to write a new chapter in response.  If you haven’t seen Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, this is your warning that this has spoilers!  And probably won’t make any sense at all anyway.

But if you’ve seen the movie, I hope you’ll enjoy the POTC characters commenting on POTC.

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It was movie night in the cornfield.  Movie nights were rare—although, considering this was a time hundreds of years before movies were invented, they were less rare than you might expect.  Every few years, the characters of the cornfield would gather to see what the latest developments were in their canon lives.  Tonight—On Stranger Tides.

“A brilliant piece of cinema,” Jack pronounced, after the movie—but not his Super-Extra-Large-Jumbo-Really-Big-size bucket of popcorn—had been finished.

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Of Reindeer and a Very Large Fish

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I have an odd little story for you today.  The backstory to how it was written is that it was for a writing class, where the assignment was to focus on repetition.  The backstory within the story is that the narrator is my pirate captain, Red Ballantyne.  He and Tam develop this habit where he tells her stories about his father’s profession; the stories are never consistent and are often contradictory, because after all, he’s a pirate and has only a loose attachment to the truth.  And the point is really the stories anyway.

But you don’t actually have to know any of that.  Outside of the backstory, it’s just a slightly odd but I hope funny story about Arctic fishing, a reindeer, and a Very Large Fish.

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So my father, you see, was a fisherman.  He was a more interesting fisherman than most, seeing as he did his fishing up in the Arctic.  The funny thing about fishing up there is that the water is all frozen.  So when you fish up in the Arctic, you have to cut holes in the ice.  Because the water is frozen.  Into ice, you see.

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The Man with the Dark Brown Eyes

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction FridayLeave a comment

Considering the mythology theme of this week, I thought it would be a good time to share a mythology retelling of my own.  In high school I took a mythology class, and for our final we had an in-class essay, retelling one of the myths we’d studied.  I can’t remember anymore if the teacher was expecting two paragraphs or two pages, but either way, I probably went overboard.  And then I spent the next several months stalking my teacher to get the copy of my writing back.  🙂  Once I did, I revised a little to end up with the story I’m sharing today.

I decided to retell the story of Jason and the Argonauts, from Medea’s point of view.  All my reading up until that point convinced me that Medea didn’t get nearly enough credit in that story.  Later mythology studies led me to realize that Medea’s point of view is better represented than I knew.  But it’s still true that she isn’t represented in the retellings for children, since I’d read a lot and been left with the impression that Medea was pretty well ignored.

But I won’t wax on about that.  There’s enough of that in the story.

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            Maybe you’re familiar with the story of the Golden Fleece.  Maybe you know about the golden ram who carried off a boy and a girl to save them from their stepmother’s wrath, about how the girl slipped off and drowned and was never heard nor thought of again, about how the boy survived to land in far off Colchis.  Maybe you know that the ram was killed and its beautiful golden fleece hung up on display.  Maybe you know about Jason, who came to take over his rightful kingdom and was sent by the usurper king to obtain the Golden Fleece.  Maybe you know that Argos built the Argo and that Jason filled it with any number of great heroes—Heracles, Orpheus, Castor, Pollux, the list goes on—and calling themselves the Argonauts they set off over the sea, dealing with storms and sirens and sea monsters to finally land in Colchis.  And maybe you know that he did steal the Golden Fleece and go back home again.

But I bet you don’t know my side of the story.  And I bet you don’t know that Jason was a lazy, good-for-nothing, ungrateful lout who couldn’t steal sheep’s wool to save his life.

I am Medea, princess of Colchis, and this is how I tell the story.

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