Category: Fiction Friday

Adventures with Hats and Squirrels

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction Friday1 Comment

I’ve been bouncing around a bit today.  You may remember I reviewed A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag by Gordon Korman a few months ago.  After that review, I wrote him a letter.  Well, I just got a personal email back.  Which has prompted a lot of “Gordon Korman wrote to ME!”  And a bit of bouncing.  Context for this excitement: I’ve been reading (and rereading) his novels since I was, I don’t know, ten.  Maybe younger.  And I own eighteen of them.  And there are some which rank easily among the funniest books I have ever read.

So.  Bouncing.

And having just had an email from one of my favorite writers of hilarious fiction, I think it’s a good time to share some humor for Fiction Friday.  My most absurdly humorous writing, barring some very early Star Trek parodies, is definitely my Pirates of the Caribbean novel-length extended joke (I hesitate to really call it a novel, because there isn’t a plot!)  So here you are: a scene from Cornfield Madness.  The only context you need is a basic familiarity with the characters of Jack Sparrow (Captain) and Will Turner, who are currently wandering around in a cornfield in the middle of the night, trying to avoid Navy sailors who are chasing after Jack.  Oh, and earlier in the story Jack acquired a bonsai tree and named it Hector.

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            Jack and Will walked through the cornfield, more or less aiming for the far end.  Will was in the lead, as that was how they had started and neither had yet taken the trouble to change that.  It was as they walked on that Jack’s hat suddenly fell off.  A small furry body had leapt out of the cornstalks and knocked into his hat.

            Jack’s hands went to his head.  “My hat!”

            Will hadn’t noticed the small furry body, and wasn’t comprehending Jack’s concern.  “So pick it up again.”

            “Oh.  Right.  Hold the tree.”  Jack handed Hector to Will and looked around.  His hat was lying quietly in the middle of the row a few feet away.  He took a step towards it.

            The hat skittered away.  Jack frowned.  He leaned forward.  The hat sidled back a few inches.  He took two quick steps towards it, the hat hastily backing up.

            Jack frowned at the hat.  “Now you stop that,” he said sternly.  The hat snuck back another inch.

Continue reading “Adventures with Hats and Squirrels” →

When Cinderella’s Slipper Fits

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction Friday2 Comments

After sharing my very short Cinderella story last week, I thought it would be fun to share a scene from the Cinderella portion of The People the Fairies Forget (more background here).  This scene starts at The Nightingale, an inn run by the heroine of this section, Catherine.  She’s a cousin to Jack, the hero of the Sleeping Beauty section.  Tarragon, my fairy and narrator, has been hanging out at The Nightingale recently, but hasn’t revealed his magical abilities.

Earlier in the story, Prince Roderick threw a ball, and invited every eligible woman in the country to attend (it was a large ball).  Catherine, though engaged to be married, attended the ball for the sake of the food and the dancing.  Tarry came too, for the same reasons, and while they were there they saw that the prince’s favorite dance partner had mysteriously run out on him, leaving a glass shoe behind.

A few days later, they’re hanging out at The Nightingale, when…

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…we were interrupted by a sudden explosion of apples.

            Another of The Nightingale’s staff had come through the door, carrying a box of apples that had just been delivered.  He tripped on the threshold, dropped the box and sent red apples tumbling around the room.  No one looked surprised, including him.  I had already learned that his name was Richard Samuel Jones, and that this sort of event was normal for him.

            “Are you all right, Sam?” Catherine asked, bending down for an apple that had rolled near her feet.

            “I’m fine,” Sam said, rising to a crouch to gather up apples.  As he did, he remarked, “There’s all kinds of excitement going on out in the street.  Royal heralds and everything.  They’re going door to door.” Continue reading “When Cinderella’s Slipper Fits” →

A Retelling of Cinderella

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction Friday8 Comments

To continue with the fairy tale theme of this week, for Fiction Friday I have a very short story I wrote, retelling Cinderella, with some pointed observations thrown in.  This actually started out in Spanish, as a class assignment, and then I rewrote it (and expanded it) in English.  I wrote this about four years ago, but a lot of the ideas eventually made their way into Book Two of The People the Fairies Forget, “Cinderella’s Substitute.”

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Once upon a time in a far off kingdom there lived a maiden who was very beautiful and very kind.  Fairy tales always begin the same way, and the maidens are always very beautiful and very kind.  Often their name is Ella, as was the case for the maiden we’re talking about.  This particular maiden, as do most of them, had long blond hair, very fair skin and eyes of the deepest blue.  She didn’t have any initiative, spirit or goals for her life.

Continue reading “A Retelling of Cinderella” →

How Exactly It Was That We Robbed the Sultan of Arabia

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction Friday3 Comments

One of my writing classes in college was an Experimental Fiction class.  It mostly meant finding strange ways to tell stories, or odd rules to impose on yourself (never using the word “and” or telling an entire story frequently repeating the same two words…)  My professor was adamently against all “genre writing.”  Interestingly, I’ve found that in the world beyond the college classroom, the first thing anyone wants to know is what genre you write…

Despite this opinion of hers, I somehow managed to get away with writing a lot of pirate stories.  I’d use whatever constraints we were supposed to use for the story-writing, but I’d write experimental stories about Captain Red Ballantyne and the Ocean Rose.  I was writing Red’s Girl at the time, and I found the experimental stories to be useful writing exercises.

For this story, the constraint was to write a page that was all one sentence.  Red is a bit of a rambler anyway, so it kind of fit.  He’s also a storyteller, so I decided to retell in one sentence one of his stories about his many exploits.  Whether it actually happened is a different question.  But here it is: in one sentence.

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          So there we were chasing down this ship and believe me, it was a very big ship with a lot of red silk sails, which is how we knew that it was the ship we wanted: the one owned by the Sultan of Arabia, of course, seeing as we’d heard rumors Continue reading “How Exactly It Was That We Robbed the Sultan of Arabia” →

The Monster and the Prince

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction Friday2 Comments

Sometimes, the muse is fickle.  Sometimes a story starts out beautifully, and then completely stalls out.  So this is fair warning that today’s Fiction Friday is from a story that never got finished.  It went beautifully for about four chapters, and then I ran into some major issues, and went on to a different project.  I may come back to this one, but for now it’s incomplete.  I know the full plotline so if anyone’s really curious I can tell you about it, but it hasn’t been written yet.

But I thought the first chapter was pretty entertaining, and I hope you might find it that way too, even without the rest of the story to follow.

This is in the same world as The People the Fairies Forget, but a different time and a different country.  Fun bit of trivia: the countries in this world all have names inspired by fairy tale writers (or retellers).  This story is mostly set in Gaicaveene, which is named for Gail Carson Levine, and Rokinlay, named for Robin McKinley.

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            She looked up at the castle and shivered.  It was cold and there was a wind blowing—but it wasn’t that kind of shiver.  And it wasn’t, from appearance, the kind of castle that should make a person shiver.  It was a shiver that should be prompted by looming parapets of crumbling stone, moss grown walls and birds of prey winging beneath a full moon.  It wasn’t a shiver that one would expect from gleaming white towers, rooftops shining golden beneath an afternoon sun, and pennants waving gaily in the wind.

            She pulled her silk scarf more tightly across her face and told herself to stop being excessively imaginative.  It was a bad habit.

Continue reading “The Monster and the Prince” →