The Sparrow's Nest

When Gwendolyn Kiste asked me to participate in A Shadow of Autumn, I tried to think of a story that would take place in the fall or Halloween. Here is how my benign coming of age story morphed into a horrifying Bigfoot chase on the Fort Apache Reservation. The first thing I thought of was hunting. Fall to me means hunting, so I went in that direction. Now the question was, what will happen on the hunting trip? Will it be a coming of age story for the character of Jay? I didn't know but that was the first idea so I just started writing. Elk show up in the early morning and at dusk, so at first I chose morning, but that was much too benign a time. It's always more exciting when you're surrounded by wild dogs that are trying to eat the kill at night when there's nothing but a bonfire to keep them at bay. I wrote as far as that, but then I hit a wall. I went over it and I got bored. That was the first sign I needed a change, but what change? While I was busting my brai...

The Grimm fairy tale that they took from Friedrich Schultz are practically identical save a few changes. So, what did the old Rapunzel teach? First of all, not to be a thief, whereas Disney's Tangled is all about thievery. They claim you need to embrace the bandit within you  and you need rebellion to reach your potential. But in Tangled, Flynn and Gothel are both thieves, so what potential did Gothel reach? She splatted on the ground outside the tower. It was when Flynn became honest that he reached his potential. In the old tale, the stealing of the Rapunzel plant  had repercussions on the child that made her suffer for the rest of her life. The evil sorceress could very well be a symbol of the punishment of thievery, bad parenting and bad examples. Rapunzel is named after the plant that ruined her life, just as children are influenced by the bad examples of their parents. Her father and mother were bound by their thievery, made helpless by their greed and fear, and so los...

Sleeping Beauty, such a beautiful tale of love, dragons and magic. So happy, so gorgeous--so watered down. From rape, cannibalism and suicide, we now have Maleficent with no real threat factor and the worst CGI since Legolas defying gravity in The Battle of Five Armies. Disney had Aurora falling asleep for a night and would be awakened by true love's first kiss. A nice, little teeny bopper story of boy meets girl, yes? Well go back further and this boy is raping a comatose woman over a hundred years old. The poor thing gets two kids out of it and one of the kids sucks the flaxen splinter from her finger and she wakes up. In Grimm's version, the whole castle wakes up with her, but in the original from Basil of Naples, after she falls asleep, her dad locks her into a castle and leaves. That means everybody's dead when she wakes up a hundred years later. So now she's raped, alone and has become mistress to a nasty king with no sense of fidelity whatsoever to his wife. ...