On Retellings

I have always loved retellings, like Gail Carson Levine's Ella Enchanted (Cinderella), Edith Pattou's East (East of the Sun, West of the Moon), Robin McKinley's Beauty (Beauty and the Beast), Diana Wynne Jones Fire and Hemlock (Tam Lin.)  Ever After, I must admit (only slightly shamefacedly) is still my favorite movie (another Cinderella retelling). There's just something intriguing about stories so timeless they can be told over and over again and no one (myself included!!) seems to get sick of them.

The novel I finished drafting last month is a retelling of the fairytale East of the Sun, West of the Moon, with a little bit of Tam Lin thrown in because I thought it meshed really well.

My favorite fairy tale of all time is Beauty and the Beast which, like East of the Sun, is a variant of the Cupid and Psyche myth. I love it SO much I never thought I'd do a retelling—there are many, many wonderful versions out there already (And yes, Cruel Beauty is on my to-read list. I'll get to it soon!). But stories have a way of tugging at you, and here I am now with a first draft of my own take on East of the Sun. I have no idea if I did the story justice (though I hope I did!), but regardless, it was a fascinating experience to follow a plot essentially already written for me, trying to keep it fresh by doing new/different things, and at the same time wanting to remain faithful to the spirit of the original fairytale. I made a conscious decision to not re-read the fairytale before writing my first draft, as I wanted to allow myself the freedom to follow the story where I felt like it needed to go.

In my version, I modeled the setting after 19th-century rural Russia. Looking at pictures of the Siberian landscape inspired whole sections of the plot (seriously, it's so gorgeous!). I'm excited to do further research and incorporate even more historically-inspired details in future drafts.

Now that my rough draft is finished, I'm going to go back and re-read the original fairytales, dig deeper into my world, fix inconsistencies, figure out the real backstory of a character who unexpectedly turned out to be somebody different than I'd planned, unravel the confusion of my middle, work on characters' relationships… Lots and lots to do, but I'm looking forward to shaping my version of East of the Sun into exactly what it's meant to be.

Novel Number Seven!

As many of my Twitter followers already know, I finished the first draft of my fairytale-retelling novel on Friday!!!!! I've lots of work to do to get it into any kind of a workable state, but it's so exciting to have the rough draft completed! This makes my SEVENTH fully-drafted novel, which is kind of amazingly great.

In any case, I just finished a read-through of the rough draft, and I think there's glimmers of a good novel in there. I'm going straight back to revision purgatory after the holidays, but for now it's time to let it simmer in the ole subconscious, get feedback from my critique partner, and do lots of brainstorming to figure out exactly where I want to go with it.

I clocked in at just under 66,000 words, which makes this the shortest novel I have ever written, though I'll probably be fleshing out scenes/characters during rewrites, so we'll see where the word count ends up.

It's also my first ever fairytale retelling, so that was an interesting experience! I'm not sure I hit all the right notes yet, but—again—it's just the first draft. It can only improve from here. Right? Right???