New readers: A lone wolf, a hunter, and a woman with a red riding hood cross paths. Start your journey into their strange world here.
Continuing Readers: While we’re on break until May (last week I hope), catch up if you can!
And on to a sneak peek.
The Wild Swans is a story that features a young princess born into a family with six brothers. (In some accounts this is eleven brothers.)
Like many fairy tales, the path of the heroine is difficult. When her mother passes and her father takes a new wife, she sees all seven children as obstacles to her own power and plots to be rid of them..
The six sons are cursed to transform into swans, only to change back at nightfall.
The daughter is also forced to leave and is eventually reconciled with her brothers, but to free them from the curse, she is given a task to craft shirts made from nettles that she must throw over them in their bird form. Until she finishes that last shirt, she is not allowed to speak.
The quest alone is hard enough as is, and then comes a silly King along the way to complicate matters as well as a prejudiced cleric who is convinced that the princess is a witch and well… read the rest to find out.
In crafting the characters, I thought about a few things. The Swan Queen and her six courtiers are inspired by and perhaps have a connection to the tale itself, but how that is so is not meant to be clear until she herself begins to unravel her own story to the Count somewhere within Book Two of the current “Tales of the Big Bad Wolf” series.
These six courtiers are alive at the time of the telling of our current serial featuring Elanore as Red Riding Hood and not at the time of the short story “Unicorns Walk Among Us”, which is set quite far back, almost 1000 years according to the “dates” ascribed to the author’s narrative in the short story.
Therefore the inspirations for the designs of the six courtiers were not swans at all, but other creatures.
Can you guess what they are? And can you tell which one was frustrating me the most?
Enjoy. Hope that work on this book can begin in earnest early next year 🙂