Patreon Membership! Merch! Book! Etc!

 Okay, so! The winning pin design was this one:

And now to discuss what we're doing with the pins. As you may have noticed, I'm really trying to improve Patreon membership and engagement for 2024. This includes a lot of new rewards for various support tiers, as well as plans to, like, actually post things on Patreon regularly.

One of our new things is that everyone who is a member on the page by January 1, 2024 gets one of these pins. This means free members, paid members, members who signed up on January 1, and members who've been here for five years. Everyone gets a free pin. (Unless you're not comfortable giving out an address, in which case I guess you don't get a pin, because how would I send it to you? I guess you can have a copy of the file so you can make your own pin at home?)

Another new thing is that everyone who's a member by January 1 is entered in a drawing for a free, signed copy of either Shards of Glass or Lindworm, your choice, with a personalized message. All free members get one entry; all paid members at all tiers get two entries. I'm giving away 5 books. (To five different people—if your name is entered twice and gets drawn twice, you only get one book. I'll draw again.) If you don't want a copy, you can waive it, or you can take it and give it to a friend.

(It is worth noting that given the current member breakdown, there are 7 people total who are eligible for 1 of 5 books, and 50% of entries go to my family members. So if there seems to be a significant bias in the drawing results, well. That's just math. Become a member to improve the math!)

https://www.patreon.com/konglindorm

Riquet with the Tuft

(This month I am reposting relevant blogs in preparation for the release of my upcoming short story collection - every blog shared is about a fairy tale that inspired one of the stories.)

So first off, a quick overview of French fairy tales. There were a whole bunch of really cool ladies writing really cool stories. The Salon Writers. And one guy, who wrote a few cool stories but occasionally just straight up ripped off their stories. So, of course, a couple hundred years later everyone knows the dude, and all the ladies and all their cool stories have been pretty much forgotten. (Except Beauty and the Beast. Go Beauty and the Beast.)

The reason for that little overview is that today we're going to talk about one of those stories the dude ripped off. It's called Riquet with the Tuft, and there are two wildly different versions. The first is by the lady, Catherine Bernard, and the second is by the dude, Charles Perrault.

Honestly, I prefer Perrault's version. But, like, I sort of feel bad about it? They have the same title, but they're basically completely different stories. And I read his first. And it's not that I actually like it, really, so much as that I feel it has potential? Which honestly is the case with a lot of my favorite fairy tales.

Anyway. We're gonna start with Perrault's version. And depending on how long that takes we might have a part two for Bernard's.

A prince is born. His name is Riquet, and they call him Riquet with the Tuft because he has one little tuft of hair. He's super ugly, but his fairy godmother says that he's going to be super smart, and gives him the ability to grant an equal amount of smartness to one other person in his life.

A princess is born in another kingdom. She's super pretty, but her fairy godmother says she's going to be super dumb. She gets the ability to make one other person in her life as hot as she is.

A second princess is born - the first princess' younger sister. And she also grows up smart and ugly, but not as smart or as ugly as Riquet. Don't know what the fairy godmother gave her. This story's not really about her.

Riquet does pretty well for himself, except for one thing. He's so ugly, no one wants to marry him.

Our first princess, on the other hand - she's struggling. She's so stupid that it doesn't even matter how pretty she is. Her younger sister is much better liked despite being really ugly, because at least she has a brain. Our princess is too stupid not to drop fine china on the floor. She's too stupid not to spill a glass of water all down her front. She's too stupid to remember her suitors' names. She's too stupid to maintain a simple conversation about the weather. It's...not great. She's just smart enough to be aware that she's astoundingly stupid.

Eventually she ands Riquet meet. Riquet has seen her portrait and fallen madly in love with her, which, like, shouldn't he maybe be smart enough not to randomly fall head over heels for total strangers just because they're hot?

Whatever. They meet. Princess is sad because no one likes her because she's stupid. Riquet offers her his fairy gift - offers to make her as smart as him. In exchange they'll get married, in one year.

So princess goes home, newly intelligent. Her poor little sister suffers for this; she isn't the hot one or the smart one now, and no one pays her any attention. Our girl's new smarts have changed her so much that she barely remembers her life before. She has dozens of suitors, one of whom she's particularly fond of, and seriously considering marrying. She's not totally sure, though, so she goes out into the woods to think about it. The same woods where she first met Riquet, a year ago now, which by this point she's almost totally forgotten about.

Riquet's excited that she's gotten there right on time for their wedding. At which point she has to tell him that she hasn't; she forgot all about that and it's just a coincidence that she's here today. And she's not sure about marrying him after all, because she was still stupid when she agreed to that - so stupid she didn't even realize how ugly he was. And surely he's smart enough to realize that he's far too ugly to marry, right?

(I'm totally not loving how her new brains for some reason made her shallow? Like, how is it smart to be judging people by their appearances? She and Riquet have both done it now.) 

Riquet asks if she has any concerns other than his physical appearance, and she says no, she thinks he's a great guy overall. So he reminds her of her ability to share beauty, she makes him hot, and they live happily ever after.

The part of the story that's always really stood out to me, despite the fact that it doesn't really fit in with the overall tone, is the little section right after they get married, where Perrault basically says that maybe she didn't actually make him hot, maybe it was just her love for him that made him seem hot to her. Which is a really sweet thought. It just doesn't make a ton of sense with the general shallowness displayed earlier in the story.

Since this is Perrault, we end the story with a moral. Two morals, in this case. First: What we love is always fair. Second: Love comes from unseen things, not just brains and beauty. These are actually both better than his usual morals, but, like, I'm still annoyed by the existence of the morals at all. Just seems, I don't know, self righteous or something. And again, not really consistent with the bulk of the story.

(Order The Shoemaker Prince to read a story inspired by this fairy tale, and 13 more!) 

Perrault and His Stupid Morals

 So I was thinking this morning about Perrault, and his annoying tendency to ruin perfectly good stories with self-righteous moralizing.

If you haven’t read a lot of Perrault before, what he does is tell his story, and then at the end he tells you the moral of the story. Sometimes two morals. And, okay, these are good stories, fully capable of standing on their own. So I’m already annoyed that Perrault has so little faith in our reading comprehension that he has to tell us what each story is about. But the other thing is, that’s not even what the stories are about. His morals are garbage!

I have two specific examples, which fill me with rage every time I think of them:

Bluebeard:

Summary: Girl married to skeevy older dude, already widowed several times. He leaves her home alone and tells her not to go in a specific room. She goes in anyway, and finds the corpses of all his previous wives. He finds out and tries to kill her too, but her brothers save her.

Moral 1: Don’t snoop

Moral 2: At least your arranged marriage probably isn’t to a serial killer, so suck it up.

Donkeyskin:

Summary: Beautiful queen on her deathbed makes husband promise not to remarry unless new girl is as hot as her. Tragically, she was the hottest. Until their daughter grows up to look exactly like dead mom. King has the brilliant idea to marry his own daughter! Daughter, grossed out and freaked out, flees, undergoing much trauma before eventually marrying a foreign prince. Her dad is invited to the wedding, and they reconcile, all the unfortunate incest business magically forgotten.

Moral: Do the right thing (i.e. don’t marry your dad) even when it’s hard.

Now, is it just me, or do these moral seem a little victim-blamey? How about “don’t murder”? “Don’t store rotting corpses in a closet”? “Incest is bad”?

Bluebeard dies at the end, sure, but Donkeyskin’s dad is facing zero consequences for his actions. And yeah, Donkeyskin did the right thing by not marrying her dad, and Perrault acknowledges that, but honestly? She’s a young woman being groomed/manipulated/threatened by the one person in her life that she should absolutely be able to rely on and trust unconditionally. If she did marry him, I would not blame her. Because she’s young and she’s scared and she’s tried, she’s tried to reason with him, but it’s not working, and what is she supposed to do? This particular girl didn’t panic, and was smart enough to find an escape route. But a different girl in the same situation might not have seen a way out, might have wound up marrying him, and that wouldn’t be her fault. It would be her dad’s.

Yeah, Donkeyskin did the right thing, even though it was hard. So what? That’s not the moral of the story! There are a lot of potential morals here, but Perrault can shut up unless he wants to call out the evil dad, and preferably kill him off in the most painful and gruesome way possible.

And Bluebeard? Let’s go back to Bluebeard. “Don’t snoop”? Don’t snoop? Seriously? If I’m ever forced to marry a skeevy older dude with several dead wives, I’m absolutely going to snoop. That’s, like, preemptive self-defense. And I will complain about being forced to marry a skeevy older man as much as I want, whether or not he’s a serial killer, and I have every right to; screw you, Perrault, you insufferable jerk.

Why do you have two morals calling out of heroine for perceived bad behavior and nothing to say about the actual literal serial killer? Stop scolding girls for being in a terrifying situation you’ll never experience and can’t possibly understand. Start scolding Bluebeard for being a serial killer who keeps rotting corpses inside his house. Like, let’s be real here; how much snooping was even involved? Girl probably followed the smell. And smelling dead bodies absolutely trumps all “do not open this door” instructions.

I love Perrault’s actual stories, but his stupid morals just kind of make me wish he was still alive so I could strangle him.

The Shoemaker Prince

So I wrote another book. The Shoemaker Prince is a collection of thirteen short stories based on or inspired by folklore, and it’s coming out on November 2. Digital preorders are open now through most major retailers, and print preorders open through the Wax Heart website on October 12. And I’m super excited!

Some of these stories I wrote as recently as August—I think one I actually finished in early September. It happened to me, very suddenly, as stories sometimes do, and I knew it belonged in this collection.

Other stories I’ve been working on for a very long time. I wrote the first draft of “Violet and Zorzal” when I was sixteen, and I consider it my first real story—the first one I wrote down in its entirety that was for myself and not a school assignment. Before that, my stories existed only in my head.

I began “The Girl With No Heart in Her Body” when I was somewhere in the eight to ten range. It’s a story about a girl born literally heartless, and I think it was my small child attempt to make sense of my undiagnosed mental illness—most of the stories I remember telling myself at this age were about girls with something missing, and no one around them understanding what was wrong with them or why they couldn’t just be like everyone else. The story has obviously been updated significantly since my mental first draft twenty years ago, but it’s still very important to me.

Other stories include:

The title story, about a boy with amnesia, red shoes, and a pet cardinal.

“The Princess Who Refused to Marry a Merman,” a story about a sailor princess with a missing, enchanted fiancé.

A retelling of “The Frog Prince.”

A retelling of “The Frog Princess.”

A retelling of “Puss in Boots” from the perspective of the princess that the cat and his owner are attempting to hoodwink.

At this exact moment, my personal favorite stories are “The Princess Who Refused to Marry a Merman” and “The Ogre Bride,” both largely original stories, though obviously heavily inspired by folk traditions. So keep an eye out for those, and the other eleven!

(Because people often ask: This book can be purchased in print or digitally, from Wax Heart Press or from most major booksellers. All purchases support me both financially and in terms of sort of passive promotion. I get the same amount of money for print purchases no matter where you buy them, but while I get a fraction of the profits from ebook sales elsewhere, I do get 100% of the profit from ebook sales through waxheartpress.com. You’re also charged a dollar less for buying it from there. I make about the same amount of money from print sales and from ebook sales through Wax Heart Press, and a bit less from ebook sales through other channels. But I am super grateful for any purchase you make, and you should absolutely do what works best for you!)

 

 

Story and Memory

Let’s talk today about fairy tales and their softening over time. 

Now, I mean this, not in the sense that in the Grimm brothers and Perrault people are getting raped and having their limbs chopped off, and in Disney they’re not, but on a more personal level. Maybe a better way to put it is, let’s talk about story and memory.

Human memory is flawed. We frequently remember things as better, or worse, or simply different from how they really were. For fairy tales, I default to remembering them as better. I think it’s because, despite all the research I’ve done and everything I’ve learned about fairy tales over the last 15 years or so, some subconscious part of me still thinks fairy tale=good, sweet, happy.

So the other day I was reading King Thrushbeard. And, like, I’ve always known that King Thrushbeard was, let’s say...questionable. But I’ve also always been a sucker for anything involving secret identities - superheroes, Beasts, The Princess Bride, the Scarlet Pimpernel.

I’m not going to get into the details of King Thrushbeard here, because I just did that over here, which was my whole reason for reading it in the first place. Anyway, I knew it had some not great aspects, but on my reread, this little section here absolutely blew me away with how bad it was.

Kindly. He said it *kindly*. Like, F you, dude.

I’ve experienced this kind of in-memory softening of a fairy tale before, the first time I reread Perrault’s version of Riquet of the Tuft after many years. And again, you can read what I’ve said about this story here. But basically, I remembered it as this beautiful story about beauty being in the eye of the beholder, because I had very clearly remembered this line:

But what I hadn’t remembered was this line:

Where, for some context, the princess is saying “I agreed to marry you, an ugly man, when I was a total idiot. Surely, now that I am no longer a total idiot, you cannot expect me to keep such a promise.” ie, marrying an ugly man is something only a total idiot would do. She only agrees to marry him when he tells her that she has the power to make him hot. Which I feel just really undercuts the meaning of the line I remembered above; in context it seems as worthless as the morals Perrault likes to include at the ends of his stories, which often have nothing to do with the stories themselves. (Either that or they’re outright stupid - often both).

So. All this to say, I don’t think I’ll be reading my kids (if I ever have kids) a lot of fairy tales. I think I’ll be telling them, as I remember them, because I trust my own memory to produce a nicer story that Perrault or the Grimms can. Which, I suppose, is why oral tradition is so important. A fundamental part of folk tales is making them your own.

Riquet with the Tuft, Perrault's Version

 So first off, a quick overview of French fairy tales. There were a whole bunch of really cool ladies writing really cool stories. The Salon Writers. And one guy, who wrote a few cool stories but occasionally just straight up ripped off their stories. So, of course, a couple hundred years later everyone knows the dude, and all the ladies and all their cool stories have been pretty much forgotten. (Except Beauty and the Beast. Go Beauty and the Beast.)

The reason for that little overview is that today we're going to talk about one of those stories the dude ripped off. It's called Riquet with the Tuft, and there are two wildly different versions. The first is by the lady, Catherine Bernard, and the second is by the dude, Charles Perrault.

Honestly, I prefer Perrault's version. But, like, I sort of feel bad about it? They have the same title, but they're basically completely different stories. And I read his first. And it's not that I actually like it, really, so much as that I feel it has potential? Which honestly is the case with a lot of my favorite fairy tales.

Anyway. We're gonna start with Perrault's version. And depending on how long that takes we might have a part two for Bernard's.

A prince is born. His name is Riquet, and they call him Riquet with the Tuft because he has one little tuft of hair. He's super ugly, but his fairy godmother says that he's going to be super smart, and gives him the ability to grant an equal amount of smartness to one other person in his life.

A princess is born in another kingdom. She's super pretty, but her fairy godmother says she's going to be super dumb. She gets the ability to make one other person in her life as hot as she is. 

A second princess is born - the first princess' younger sister. And she also grows up smart and ugly, but not as smart or as ugly as Riquet. Don't know what the fairy godmother gave her. This story's not really about her.

Riquet does pretty well for himself, except for one thing. He's so ugly, no one wants to marry him.

Our first princess, on the other hand - she's struggling. She's so stupid that it doesn't even matter how pretty she is. Her younger sister is much better liked despite being really ugly, because at least she has a brain. Our princess is too stupid not to drop fine china on the floor. She's too stupid not to spill a glass of water all down her front. She's too stupid to remember her suitors' names. She's too stupid to maintain a simple conversation about the weather. It's...not great. She's just smart enough to be aware that she's astoundingly stupid.

Eventually she ands Riquet meet. Riquet has seen her portrait and fallen madly in love with her, which, like, shouldn't he maybe be smart enough not to randomly fall head over heels for total strangers just because they're hot?

Whatever. They meet. Princess is sad because no one likes her because she's stupid. Riquet offers her his fairy gift - offers to make her as smart as him. In exchange they'll get married, in one year.

So princess goes home, newly intelligent. Her poor little sister suffers for this; she isn't the hot one or the smart one now, and no one pays her any attention. Our girl's new smarts have changed her so much that she barely remembers her life before. She has dozens of suitors, one of whom she's particularly fond of, and seriously considering marrying. She's not totally sure, though, so she goes out into the woods to think about it. The same woods where she first met Riquet, a year ago now, which by this point she's almost totally forgotten about.

Riquet's excited that she's gotten there right on time for their wedding. At which point she has to tell him that she hasn't; she forgot all about that and it's just a coincidence that she's here today. And she's not sure about marrying him after all, because she was still stupid when she agreed to that - so stupid she didn't even realize how ugly he was. And surely he's smart enough to realize that he's far too ugly to marry, right?

(I'm totally not loving how her new brains for some reason made her shallow? Like, how is it smart to be judging people by their appearances? She and Riquet have both done it now.)

Riquet asks if she has any concerns other than his physical appearance, and she says no, she thinks he's a great guy overall. So he reminds her of her ability to share beauty, she makes him hot, and they live happily ever after.

The part of the story that's always really stood out to me, despite the fact that it doesn't really fit in with the overall tone, is the little section right after they get married, where Perrault basically says that maybe she didn't actually make him hot, maybe it was just her love for him that made him seem hot to her. Which is a really sweet thought. It just doesn't make a ton of sense with the general shallowness displayed earlier in the story.

Since this is Perrault, we end the story with a moral. Two morals, in this case. First: What we love is always fair. Second: Love comes from unseen things, not just brains and beauty. These are actually both better than his usual morals, but, like, I'm still annoyed by the existence of the morals at all. Just seems, I don't know, self righteous or something. And again, not really consistent with the bulk of the story.

This is pretty long, so I think we'll wait until next time to go over the second version; see you then!

The Beard and the Bird

Can we talk about Bluebeard? I hate Bluebeard, okay? But you know what I love? Fitcher’s Bird. So let’s look at the differences.

Bluebeard is French. Perrault. Fitcher’s Bird is German. The Brothers Grimm. So let’s put away the idea that the Grimms are the most horrifically sexist fairy tale people of all time, shall we? Historically, they’re a major improvement.

You probably know the story of Bluebeard. Man with peculiar facial hair marries girl, tells girl not to enter one particular room while he’s out of town, gives her a key to said room, and leaves. Girl, full of insatiable curiosity, enters room, finds corpses of all Man’s previous wives, and in her shock, drops the key in their blood. She leaves the room quickly, but the key has been stained, and try as she might, she cannot wash away the blood. Man returns, inspects key, and prepares to kill another wife. She begs for time to say her final prayers, and during this time her brothers arrive, kill Bluebeard, and rescue her. The girl proceeds to live happily ever after, but the two morals of the story, as provided by Perrault, are:    

1.       Curiosity will get you in trouble       

2.    Real life guys aren’t nearly as bad as Bluebeard, so chill.

On, then, to Fitcher’s Bird. I’ve always pictured this bad guy with a silver nose, but I might be mixing up my Bluebeard variants. Someone has a silver nose. Anyway, we have a sorcerer.  He just straight up kidnaps his girls, and for some reason I find that sort of comforting. If you’re gonna be evil, just own up to it, you know?

So he kidnaps a girl, brings her to his fancy house, goes on a business trip and leaves her home alone with the forbidden key and an egg, which she mustn’t let out of her sight. Why an egg? Beats me. Spoiler alert—it never hatches.

Girl number one opens the murder closet, drops the egg, stains it, and gets chopped up and added to the mix as soon as the sorcerer gets home. He goes and kidnaps her sister. Same thing. And it’s down to the youngest sister.

Now this girl, she’s got some brains on her. She leaves the egg sitting safely on the kitchen counter when she goes exploring. Finds the murder closet, doesn’t drop anything in the blood, and begins carefully putting together the chopped up bodies of her sisters. And since this is a fairy tale, they promptly come back to life. Of course, the fragmented bodies of a dozen other girls get left behind, but hey, two resurrections in a single story? You’re already getting more than your money’s worth.

Sisters get stashed up in the attic or something. Third girl presents clean egg to the sorcerer. The test passed, he proposes to her immediately. And boy is she ever wearing the pants in this relationship.

Yeah, she says, whatever. But while I plan the wedding you gotta haul this huge basket of gold to my parents, ‘kay?

So she dumps the sisters in the basket, sprinkles some gold on top for appearances, and sends the man off, with strict instructions not to stop and rest, because she’ll be watching him from her window the whole time.

Dude gets tired. Sits for a minute. “And just what do you think you’re doing?” asks a zombie sister. “I thought I told you not to stop.”

Surprised at how close his bride’s voice sounds, he gets up and starts walking again. Meanwhile, she’s inviting all his friends over to celebrate the engagement.

He stops to rest. “Slacking again?” says the zombie sister. “My parents are waiting, dear.”

He hurries on. His bride fetches a skull from one of the skeletons in his closet, dresses it for a wedding, and props it up in the window.

“Hurry up,” her sister tells him in her voice. She coats herself in honey. He drops the basket on her mother’s porch. She slices open his feather bed and rolls in it. He walks home. She walks home. 

Paths collide—no problem. Why should he suspect anything, when his bride is right up in the window there, smiling down at him. Crazy humanoid birds aren’t that unusual, I suppose, where he comes from.

He enters the house. Bird girl’s friends and family, alerted by her sisters, meet her out back, and they set the house on fire. Evil sorcerer, evil sorcerer’s evil friends, all up in flames.

So here’s a girl who knows what she wants and finds a way to get it. Sensible and determined. Sneaky. Persistent. Smart. She saves her sisters, she saves herself, and she finds a way to bring down countless bad guys. Not to mention all the gold the sorcerer carried home with the zombie sisters. This family is set for life, just like in Bluebeard, but in this version, the girl wasn’t stupid and careless and she didn’t have to rely on her brothers to save her. They helped, sure, but she orchestrated the whole show. Got the world wrapped around her little finger, that girl. She’ll go far. Just as soon as she washes all those feathers off.