Rabia Gale

alchemical fantasy

creativity

prompt me: the fairy tale edition

Today, I finished up a fractured fairy tale, this one based on Snow White and Rose Red. It’s been a while since I did one of these and I’m reminded of how much I enjoy them.

I’m busy with The Sunless World series, so I don’t have time for long side projects. However, I’m eager to stretch my creative muscles with drabbles and flashfic.

Here’s where you all come in. I need prompts, specifically a fairy tale (or fairy tale character) and a concrete noun to go with it. Something like Prince Charming/chimpanzee or Sleeping Beauty/disco ball. Weirdness is encouraged, because Snow White/mirror and Cinderella/shoe have been done already.

So. Have at it. I’ll post my short pieces in response to your prompts as I write them.

Happy Mail Day and other musings

I got an unexpected royalty check in the mail today. It’s not huge, but it’s not peanuts either, easily matching my best selfpub months.

I joke to my husband that my tradpub sales pay for my selfpub hobby. It’s funny, but it also stings. A little.

A large part of it is that I treated the selfpub hobby like, well, a hobby. Going over a year between releases is not a great thing. Nor is publishing a sequel two years after a first book. Oy.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the business aspect a lot. Especially about that overlap between what I want to write and what my audience wants to read. That’s the sweet spot I’m aiming for when deciding what stories to write.

The other thing is taking a cold, hard, and realistic look at my process, ie: the time elapsed between concept and bringing the product to market, and all the steps in between. My husband threw out an MBA term for it a couple nights ago. Pipeline flow, I think it was?

I haven’t done a lot of detailed tracking and analysis, but from my informal, back-of-the-envelope calculations, I’ve come to the conclusion that writing novellas or short novels in a series are my most profitable option.

This is not something I can shift to right away. I’m locked into The Sunless World series for the time being. It’s not a big commitment–I can wrap up the series with the book I’m currently writing. It may end up as a long book, but it’ll do the trick.

I have a couple of series concepts already. But if there are worlds or characters or stories of mine that you love and want to see more of, let me know in the comments. Feedback is super-helpful, because writing for publication often feels like shuffling about in the dark, stumbling over scattered toys and bumping into furniture as I lose all sense of direction.

And my sense of direction wasn’t all that great to begin with!

of kelpies and killer unicorns

On Twitter, Thea van Diepen and I had a long conversation about fantasy & supernatural races.

And I realized something.

I’m all about vicious equine races (shh, don’t tell my daughter). Killer unicorns. Kelpies. Nightmares that are shadowy horse shapes of terror. Innocent-looking horses that suddenly bare their very sharp, very canine teeth.

I love Maggie Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races. When I came across Diana Peterfreund’s Rampant, my reaction was, “Gimme!”

My own version of a kelpie is a way horse. Lives on a far-future Earth with a dying, cooling sun. In roads. Smells like tar and fresh asphalt and burning–all those lovely smells that assault your nose as you’re driving past a construction zone on the highway with the windows down. When they materialize out of the highway, crumbs of rock are tangled in their manes. Their hides are hot and sticky.

Like water horses, way horses will drag people down into their element. That’s bad news, because we can’t live in road anymore than we can live in water.

Are you familiar with Dragonflight? There’s a scene in which F’lar is teaching Lessa and Ramoth to go between. He talks about the important of visualization and about finding a young rider and dragon entombed in rock from a fatal, long-ago accident. Yeah, way horses will take you down into their murky, gooey subterranean worlds. As long as you’re holding on, you’ll be all right, thanks to their inter-dimensional magic.

But then they leave you. In rock. Not pretty.*shudders* Have I mentioned that being buried alive is one of my big fears? Now you know.

Sometimes, when you’re driving, you see a patch of road shimmer ahead of you. It’s hot, so you think it’s a heat mirage. Or it’s been raining, so you think it’s slick, wet patch.

Nope. That’s the sign of a way horse, swimming just below the surface.