I accidentally released a book! It’s titled The Bald Princess and Other Tales.
Enjoy five original fairy tales in this collection by Ariele Sieling. Written in the same style as Grimm's fairy tales, each story seeks to explore modern values in the context of an eccentric, omniscient world filled with wild animals, kings and queens, magic, and more.
In The Bald Princess, meet Elspeth, who is in search of a hair piece that will do justice to her eventual role as queen.
In The Twilight Wood, meet Eloita, a young guard tasked with protecting a prince who is determined to understand a powerful forest that kills all who enter it.
In The Guilt of the Enchantress, meet Liaandra, a powerful battle mage who makes a terrible mistake that changes the course of her life forever.
In The Wolf Princess, meet Sable, cursed as a child to run with the wolves, but who has embraced her new identity with gusto—until her parents start searching for her in earnest.
In The Milkmaid and the Death Weed, meet Fiora, a young milkmaid who sets out to seek her fortune, only to discover that everything she touches dies.
This book is the first in a series of anthologies filled with brand-new engaging and heart-warming fairy tales.
One of the things you should know about me is that I do not operate well on a fixed schedule. I keep a running list of things I need to get done, and I choose my daily activities based on my mood. This has taken some training, as I'm sure you can guess, given that sometimes I feel like playing video games or watching TV rather than working, but these days I'm excited about my work most of the time, so it's not a problem.
What is a problem, is when I try to force myself to hit deadlines. As soon as there's a due date in my brain, it's like I freeze up, and every moment I spend working toward the deadline is painful, slow, and inefficient. Of course, I can't be entirely free of deadlines—I do have to work with other people sometimes, and I have editing clients and whatnot.
I've figured out a few strategies for this. For example, I tend to give myself a lot more time to do the work than I technically need. I also try to schedule things monthly whenever I can, rather than trying to hit a specific day. Mainly, though, I just don't set deadlines on anything I don't have to.
This means that sometimes I publish books later than I planned. It also means that sometimes I publish books earlier than planned.
So here we are.
If you will remember, during Camp National Novel Writing Month last April, I focused on writing anything I wanted to, to practice and lean into my intuitive writing. It was wildly successful (you can read about it here), and one of the things I produced was a series of original fairy tales.
My new book, The Bald Princess and Other Tales, is a compilation of the first batch of fairy tales. It also includes a foreword, in which I talk about the project, and an author's note in the end which, to be honest, is basically just an essay on why I think fairy tales have such staying power in our culture. I anticipated releasing this in July, but it's ready to go, so I figured: why wait? Volume II will likely be out later this summer (though, no deadlines, and no promises!); not to mention, I have quite a few other things in the works.
I hope you enjoy the original tales in The Bald Princess and Other Tales, and stay tuned for more updates!