Of Bizarre Stories and Re-Hashed Fairy Tales

>> Friday, February 15, 2008

I am posting rather early tonight, at least by my usual standards. Yet I haven't updated in a few days because everything has been rather hectic around here. I've accomplished little writing for most of the week, which is the bad news. The good news is that I'm doing rather well in my writing tonight. So, things are getting better for me. Granted, all of my writing so far has been in the form of notes for a new short story, but writing is writing, no? And notes are the preliminary stages of work that help you jumpstart and construct an actual writing project, so I'm rather happy with the way that things are going at the moment.

My short story idea is rather crazy. The idea is actually quite bizarre, and I got it from a snippet of overheard conversation when my husband was on the phone with one of his best friends. When I heard the strange phrase, I laughed and my husband relayed to me that his friend said not to laugh at him. Of course, I couldn't stop laughing--certainly not when I was specifically being told not to laugh. Then I blurted out that I would have to write a short story about it, just for fun.

So, I am. Although I may submit the story to some places after all. Namely, a place that is looking for silly fantasy stories. When I saw the call for that type of submission, I couldn't think of a good story that was sufficiently silly to write. Well, I think this topic just about covers it. And it can't hurt to try. Plus, it's doing wonders for my creativity.

Who knows? I may end up submitting it to other places as well, when all is said and done. I just hope that in writing this piece, it will help rev up my creativity and sense of humor for that humorous short story re-telling. I'm going to try to start working on a re-relling of the Frog Prince, and see what happens. I'll probably play around with re-telling some other fairy tales since I never could definitively pick one from my list to re-tell, and simply see which one I like the best after that. What's interesting is that I found part of a fairy tale that I started re-telling at some point in the past, and I had totally forgotten about it until I discovered it while digging through my writing files recently. It has some promise, but the reservation with it is that it's a re-telling of a fairy tale that will probably be very commonly submitted. I'll have to think some more about whether to finish rewriting that one for the contest. Until then, I have plenty of other things to keep me busy. Too much, in fact. I'm finding it harder and harder to write as much as I want to and still get stuff done around the house, not to mention preparing for our baby. Still, a little is better than nothing.

1 comments:

Anonymous February 15, 2008 at 10:13 PM  

I am glad that you are getting some writing done :)! Thinking about fairytales...have you ever read a book by Juliet Marieller called Wildwood Dancing? It is a re-telling of the fairytale the Twelve Dancing Slippers (at least I think that is the title). It is the story about the princesses who go off at night to dance and the king keeps sending someone to spy on them to see where they are going...anyway, good luck with the baby preparation :)!