Continuing Education

I’ve taken too few classes in recent years, but last night I attended a Zoom session (through SCBWI) taught by Caroline Leech on “Tell Your Story to Sell Your Story.” She spoke of the different audiences one might address, and how we adapt our back stories to suit our audience, whether children, parents, or agents and editors. And she encouraged us to contemplate our stories.

So, since I had no idea what today’s blog would be, I’m posting what I came up with.

Here’s my Story:

We none of us has a choice about what age we’re born into, but we can choose how we deal with the life we’re handed. I am someone who dived into marriage and family before really knowing who I was. I might have been a wiser mother had circumstances forced me to wait. 

In my life-long love of fairytales, I look to those heroines, and heroes too, who are given the gift of time to know themselves. Told in verse and vignette, still unpublished, are two tales in which I re-envision heroines given that gift of time. 

SKY’S DAUGHTER (The Goosegirl + animistic age) 

Willow was born into a time when queens rule and every pubescent child is expected to link to an animal spirit to hold them close to the natural world. Willow rejected the terrifying creature that came to her, and so she finds herself unready to be queen and unable to defend herself against her rival. The time she spends as a goosegirl allows (or forces?) her to come to terms with what she fears, so that when she achieves her position as queen and partner to the former queen’s son, she can lead her people in respecting all of Mother Earth’s creation.

THE HIDDEN TOWER(Maid Maleen + war)

Maleen was born into a time when women are losing their position as rulers. Her father’s greed for more land causes destruction and chaos, wreaking a heavy toll on women and children. Maleen judges that her great fury and frustration with her father render her unfit to wed the boy she once loved. Placed in a tower away from her father’s final battles, Maleen finally has a chance to claim her own inner peace. When the time comes, she walks alone to find her love, now a king. But there she finds a tyrannical cousin who will stop at nothing to wed that king, rivaling Maleen’s own father in her greed.