Fairy Tales and Romance by Naomi Stone

Please join me in welcoming Naomi Stone to The Roses of Prose.

Thanks so much for having me here with the Roses of Prose today. I thought I'd talk about a lifelong interest of mine: Fairy Tales.

I’ve read a lot of fairy tales in my time. The complete collection of Lang’s colorful fairy books (‘The Red Fairy Book,’ ‘Blue Fairy Book,’ etc., through a spectrum of twelve colors) more than once. I've read  'The Thousand Nights and a Night,' both abridged and in the complete Burton translation, the Grimm Brothers collection, Hans Anderson and many lesser-known folklore collections from cultures as diverse as Gypsies and Polynesians. I’ve read modern retellings of the old tales, from Disney to Tanith Lee and read the articles of folklorists such as Terri Windling, Jane Yolen and.Jack Zipes.

Based on all this reading, I could enumerate countless examples (but will spare you) of fairy tales all leading to a happy ending in which the happy ending is thanks to the poor but good-hearted (simpleton, youngest son, shepherd, wood-cutter, etc.) winning the hand in marriage of the beautiful princess -- or the beautiful, good-hearted (goose girl, orphan, youngest daughter of a peasant or merchant) winning the love and hand in marriage of a handsome prince.

The sheer prevalence of this trope tells me that there is a deep-seated longing in human hearts for an ideal match – for a mate combining physical attraction with social success (position, wealth and power). In days of old, fairy tales expressed and offered vicarious fulfillment for this longing – just as romance novels do today.

Fairy tales are the age-old root of modern romance. Fairy tales address a deep-seated human longing that still exists today. Fairy tales offered blatant, unapologetic wish-fulfillment in a world where life was harder than we can even imagine who live in a world with modern plumbing, electronics and health care.

But, in the evolution of fairy tales, a time came when fantasy and romance grew apart.

Romance eschewed magic for more realistic settings, with rational modern day men and women for heroes and heroines. Romance grew in its comprehension of what constitutes a happy ending. It taught us that there's more to a hero than a princedom. That actual individuals are involved in marriages and their individual personalities and feelings offer challenges as mysterious as any found in a fairy tale quest.

Romance moved away from the realm of the fantastic and vice-versa. And while her followers might do so, Jane Austen did not write of zombies or eldritch monsters. If Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker did, well 'Frankenstein' and 'Dracula' were not romances. During the Age of Reason and for long since, Fantasy set aside Romance, pulled on its Grown Up Pants, embraced the machine age and gave birth to Science Fiction.

Both genres have grown and matured through the time they spent apart, but they have been coming back together in recent decades.  At first, when romance and the fantastic met in modern times, romantic fantasy sneaks back in its horror-tinged vampire fangs and howls at the moon. Coolly logical SF often dismisses the happiness of two little people as not amounting to a hill of beans in this world with its larger, world-spanning concerns. Yet, story-telling has room for more than our limited genre-expectations can imagine, and all the old fairy tales are with us still, reminders of a natural affinity between romance and far-flung fantasies of magic and adventure.

Increasingly, modern writers such as myself seek to bring the best of both worlds together again. I've been pleased with reviews telling me that the romance in my stories doesn't get in the way of readers coming from the world of science fiction, and that the science fiction elements don't prevent romance readers from finding the fulfillment of a satisfying love story.

I'd like to ask your readers today to tell me about their favorite fairy tales as children, and whether they can still find something meaningful in the tale.

Naomi Stone

Latest release: 'Spirited' from Champagne Books,

Amelia Swenson's plans for the weekend didn't include a sexy djinni or saving the world from demons, but plans change.

www.dreamspell.net/LKS/stories.html

NaomiStone0RWA (on Twitter)

www.facebook.com/naomi.stone.5

Guest Jane Toombs - Learning to Type

Jane Toombs

WHAT HAPPENED AFTER I LEARNED TO TYPE

  I was either six or seven when I asked my totally deaf father, by painfully scrawling a note that said: “Please teach me to use your typewriter.” Yes, I had some help from my mother with spelling and she also told me to add the “please.”                  

   “Hmm,” he said. “Since you can read and write, I  guess you’re ready.”

I was thrilled to pieces, even though he added, “In return you will have to write me a story every time you use the typewriter.”

   I figured that couldn’t be too hard.  After all, I read stories, so I could write them, couldn’t I?  So for my first story I wrote abut him bringing me my first cat, Merriweather, which he found in the woods as a half-starved kitten.

   He told me the story was very good, then pointed out a few places where a word or two would improve it.  He also corrected my spelling. 

   I didn’t mind having to change it a little or correct the spelling--after all, he’d said it was very good!  And so I survived my first editing session from my tactful father.  

   In this way, he taught me to accept critiques by first praising what I’d written, then suggesting ways to improve it.  He gave me a great gift, even though I didn’t realize it at the time.  Unfortunately, he also taught me his method of typing--hunt and peck. Which I still use.  

   I can’t remember how many, many stories I wrote for my father, then for myself  (which I always gave to him to critique) but they were just that, stories.  By the time I was in high school, I knew he was a non-fiction writer who wrote articles and two books.  But the idea of writing a book never occurred to me. 

   My father, James K. Jamison, died in 1963, having gotten the rights-back to both of his books.  One of them was titled: By Cross And Anchor, which was the story of Bishop Baraga who came from an aristocratic European family, but entered the priesthood, sailed to America and ministered to the Chippewa or Ojibway Indians in the then wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  He spent all the rest of his life among them. 

   This year, Bishop Baraga is up for consideration for sainthood because of a “miracle” that occurred while he was ministering to the Indians. I am not a Catholic so do not know the exact process for this, but recognizing the opportunity, I gave an old copy of his book to our Historical Society to be torn apart and reprinted, with all sales to go to them.   The paperback copy is extremely well done, with a striking cover of “The Snowshoe Priest,” Baraga’s name among the Indians.  It’s already a best-seller. 

   So, of course, I was primed to be a writer. Tule Witch, a gothic, my first published book and, actually the first book I ever wrote from start to finish,  got published by what I always thought of as a lucky fluke. I wrote it in a writing class given by a published mystery writer when I lived in San Diego.  He critiqued it in class and told me privately that if I finished it, using his edits, he’d send it to his agent.  Well, I did and he did.  The agent sold it to Avon.   So I was a real newbie with an actual agent.

    I learned a lot, including the fact I turned out to be a plotter, not a pantser, despite the fact I wrote my first two published books as I went along. My agent couldn’t sell my third book, though.  Then a packager (sort of a middleman between agent and publisher) asked him if he had an author   who could do Sagittarius for a Zodiac Series.  All I had to write for now, my agent told me, was a synopsis and the first three chapters.

   I asked what a synopsis was.  After a moment’s silence, my agent told me it was a short account of the book’s plot. I’d never thought out a plot ahead of time, but I said yes. When the packager went to contract on my synopsis and first three chapters, I was amazed.  I’d always figured I had to write an entire book first.

   The book proved very easy to write and I had an AHA! moment.  From then on I was a plotter.  I rewrote the  third book after doing a synopsis for it and saw how I’d wandered away from the main story time after time. The agent promptly sold it.     

    So I always use a synopsis as a guideline to keep me traveling on the right road.  Byways may be fun, but they don’t belong in plots.

    Some day I’ll scan Tule Witch for an ebook and see how it reads today.  In the seventies  there were no personal computers so it was typing and carbons, which I didn’t save after publication.  Who could foresee e-books?

   I sometimes wonder what the next advance in publishing will be.

   Lately I’ve been getting rights-back books ready for epublishing,  so my latest actually new ebook is Taken In, the first book in the DAGON HOUSE TRILOGY from Champagne Books.

 

 

     Blurb: Gail flees New York City after witnessing a murder.  Afraid the hit man has seen her, she heads for the Adirondacks.  Jason, a secret agent reaches her first. With the hit man on their tail, Jason swerves onto a narrow mountain road, losing him, but crashing.  Both are forced to take shelter in a old Victorian called Dagon House where a terrible danger awaits…

Buy links for all my recent books, plus a bio can be found at my website: www.JaneToombs.com