Issue Three of Demeter's Spicebox just went live, with many gleaming treasures, including:

1. My short story, Stronger Than the Wind, Stronger Than the Sea. The story is a sequel of sorts to my earlier story for Demeter's Spicebox, Sister and Bones, but only of sorts. The island in the story is very real, the storm is real, the fire coral was, alas, all too real, and although fairy basslets are rare in those waters, I did see one, and can assure you that it, too, was real.

The rest, though -- well, I'll let you decide.

2. Two other retellings of the Aarne-Thompson folktale type 2031C, "The Mouse Who Was to Marry the Sun: Flower of Flowers, Bird of Birds, and Bogi Takacs' Mouse Choirs of the Old Matra.

3. And an image by Kirsty Greenwood, inspired by my short story Sister and Bones. I can't tell you how much that thrills me.

Nettles

May. 30th, 2012 08:30 am
Yes, yes, I've been absent from Lj for a few days for various not very good reasons. Breaking my silence to note that my flash fiction piece, Nettles, has gone up at Scheherezade's Bequest/Cabinet des Fees today.

"Nettles" is part of a longer series of very short fairy tale pieces; previous ones have included Glass Dancing and Remembering Fur. It's been three years since the last one appeared, and I'm very glad to get back to them.

But this also serves as a nice reminder that I have not exactly been good at the finishing of short stories and other things so far this year. In part this is because of work on longer pieces (also unfinished), in part thanks to other matters, but we are close to the halfway point of the year now, so I need to re-embrace the concept of finishing things.

And if anyone reading this is looking for a bit of inspiration -- Demeter's Spicebox is still looking for stories for its third issue. Please let me know what happened to the teapot I created in this tale.
Some of you might remember that last year I published a little tale, Sister and Bones, in Demeter's Spicebox. It was one of my favorite stories from last year.

Today, Joshua Gage tells us just a little more about the teapot from my tale, and oh, what he has written is heartbreakingly lovely. Go and read, preferably with a cup of tea in hand. And once you're done, click over to The Salt of Aksum, where Mae Empson takes the sandals from Shveta Thakrar's Lavanya and Deepika to tell us just a little more about the power and magic of salt.

I can't wait to see where this project -- and the teapot -- go next.
Back in at the end of January, Demeter's Spicebox, a new project of the always marvelous Cabinet Des Fees, posted guidelines for their new project: stories based on Aarne-Thompson folktale type 711, perhaps better known as the tale of the Good and Ugly Twin. Oh, and the stories had to feature either a cracked teapot or a magical pair of shoes.

I was not that familiar with the tale, but when I reread the version not in Wikipedia , I could see why the editors had chosen it, even if the ending irked me: quite apart from all of the drinking (yay!), it is one of the rare fairy tales with an active, rambunctious heroine. And although I'm not into shoes, I am more than moderately fond of tea.

Something stirred, and Sister and Bones was written in under a day, and is now up at the inaugural issue of Demeter's Spicebox. Also up: Lavanya and Deepika, a lovely story by a writer I'd never heard of before, Shveta Thakrar, but who based just on this has a brilliant writing career in front of her; fortunately for all of us she is working on a novel. I'm very pleased to have been part of the beginning of this project, and very much looking forward to see what wonders Demeter's Spicebox will be bringing us next.
I've always loved to watch seals and sea lions playing in the water, so much so that I've figured that in some past life, I must have been a seal. Someplace in storage, I have a few stuffed seals that remind me of playfulness and water.

So I suppose it was inevitable that at some point or another, I would write a selkie story. Enjoy!

October 2018

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