Aria's Song Release (Next Week) and Ariele Fake Graduates with her Fake Master's Degree

Next week is a big week for me! All three books in my new trilogy are going live on the same day: September 28th! :scream: If you noticed I hadn't written in a while, that's why; I've been totally immersed in work, trying to have everything ready to go for the 28th.

(Live event is on Facebook at 7 PM EST, September 28!)

This isn't just the launch of another book (or 3) for me, though. If you've been around for a while, you may remember in 2018, I announced I had created a fake master's degree program for myself. I didn't want to pay a university thousands of dollars, but I did want the knowledge. So I developed a curriculum and reading list, set some goals and objectives, and got to work. 

Sometime in 2020, I decided I needed a thesis for my degree. I'd just finished the rough draft of Aria, and decided this would be the perfect project.

Besides the writing of the trilogy, I did a few things to challenge myself. The first was that I did all the design work myself (paperback, cover, ebook), including the maps! It took me forever to do the world map, but I was happy with the results.

I also ... drumroll please ... hid a coded message somewhere in the trilogy.

When I was a kid, I read a lot of mysteries and I loved the idea of secret messages, though I'm not sure I ever successfully found one in a book. Although, I did hide a dollar behind a picture frame once and forgot about it; then found it like 15 years later when I was cleaning stuff out of my parents' house. This time, though, it's a real message that is both hidden and in code, so good luck.

I also planned this to be a Netflix-style series drop to test my distribution and marketing skills. I've decided I might be a little nuts, but I'm making it work anyway haha.

And now here we are, four years since I "went back to school" and 3 years since I began Aria's Song, and it's finally all coming to a conclusion.

In this time, I've read over 300 books, taken almost 20 online courses, taught several dozen workshops and master classes, attended several conferences, written numerous blog posts about writing, marketing, and publishing, as well as published almost 20 books, including Aria's Song. My editors are my professors, and I have a discord server filled with other writers who are a.) wonderful and b.) my "classmates." I'm even working on memorizing the digits of pi as inspired by my math classes. All this and the thesis too.

On one hand, it's tiring to think about; on the other hand, it feels great. I've gotten a lot done, and I plan to get even more done as the years go by.

To celebrate, I'll be talking about the new trilogy at my "graduation" on Facebook Live (7 PM EST Sept 28!) and would love if you were there. There will be plenty of time for questions about me, writing, publishing, or whatever you're curious to know. 

Stay tuned for next week! I'm so excited to share this passion project with you.

You can pre-order the three books here:

P.S. I hid a clue to the secret code somewhere in this post. Good luck!

The Universal Longings Buried in Fairy Tales

A version of this appears in The Bald Princess and Other Tales.

After I graduated high school, I spent a year at Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY. I was taking nineteen credit hours and still a bit bored, so for fun, I would help my roommates with their homework. Yes, I fully admit to being a complete nerd.

At any rate, one day, my roommate Ashley brought me one of her assignments. She had to write a paper for her psychology class, and was stumped. I don’t remember the prompt, but after a brief discussion, I suggested she write a comparative Freudian analysis of Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs. After I pointed out a few of the more obvious Freudian themes, she dove into the project with gusto and ended up with an A.

Freudian analyses, in my opinion, are really easy. Every “that’s what she said” joke is a Freudian analysis in disguise. Much more difficult is looking at fairy tales through a particular historical or philosophical lens. But as of late, I’ve been looking at fairy tales through the lens of a storyteller. And it always starts with this question: Why fairy tales?

Why do fairy tales speak to us? What is it about them that resonates with so many people in so many cultures? How did they garner so much staying power across centuries?

Is it the themes? The story structure? The characters? The plots? The tension? The morals?

Over and over and over, we tell and retell fairy tales. There are written and oral traditions, musicals, video games, movies, and TV shows; when I was a kid, the library even had a book of fairy tales with embroidered illustrations!

Of course, there are a thousand answers to the question of why. Fairy tales are short. They’re easy to remember. They’re weird and funny and peculiar and memorable.

But I have another hypothesis. In the writing community, we like to talk about emotional resonance. T. Taylor named the element of story that causes emotional resonance “universal fantasies” in her book, 7 Figure Fiction, but for the sake of clarity, I’m going to rename it “universal longings.”

The idea is that intrinsic human desires are buried within every story. These longings speak to us on a subconscious level, and while different ones hit different people in different ways, they almost always create an emotional response in the reader. Think about a scene like when Cinderella, for example, is magically made beautiful by her fairy godmother. On one hand, you could argue this is just a common trope frequently used in service to the plot. It is a thing that happens which enables Cinderella to go to the ball to meet the prince.

But underneath this common trope is a universal longing: of beauty coming easily. There’s no sitting in front of a mirror curling hair and putting on makeup. No spending money on expensive dresses and shoes. No going to salons or gyms or wherever else to achieve some external beauty standard. Instead, with the flick of a wand, Cinderella is simply beautiful.

This same or similar longing can be found in many works: The Princess Diaries (done in montage format—she becomes beautiful once and is beautiful thereafter); Hermione’s transformation in The Goblet of Fire; in the Beauty and the Beast movie when she is transformed by the cursed servants (and there’s one in many Disney films); there are even transformation scenes in Person of Interest, Captain America, and Dumb and Dumber. (And of course, many others.)

Or look at Jack Reacher by Lee Child, the books or the (new) TV series (I haven’t seen the old one): six feet tall and super strong, who can eat whatever he wants and still be attractive, who makes an impression on anyone he encounters, always knows the difference between right and wrong, commits violence whenever he wants but is always justified in doing so—these are universal longings, deep desires felt by many people across cultures.

As an aside: in the same way a person might not want to actually engage in a sexual fantasy in real life, these universal longings may not be things we want to experience in reality. But they create an emotional connection point between the creator of a story and the consumer of a story in the form of emotional resonance—they make the reader feel something.

Fairytales are chock full of universal longings: longing to find family (Hansel and Gretel); longing to know for sure if someone else’s love is true (Beauty and the Beast and every true love story); longing to experience danger and come through unscathed (Little Red Riding Hood); longing to find true friendship (Snow White); longing to be recognized for who you truly are (Goose Girl); longing to be proven right (Boy Who Cried Wolf); longing to be special (Princess and the Pea); longing to be accepted into a group or to live forever (Peter Pan); and plenty more.

These longings speak to us on a subconscious level. They allow us the opportunity to live out desires we might not even know we have through the story. Stories with more universal longings in them tend to resonate with readers more, and the more widespread the longing is, the longer the story will last in culture.

The first fairytale retelling I ever loved was Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. As a 13-year-old voracious reader, I certainly wasn’t thinking about emotional resonance and the craft of storytelling when I read the book. But I read the book over and over and over through high school, college, and young adulthood—I’d guess around twenty-five times.

Ella Enchanted is a Cinderella retelling that spans several years of El’s life. We see her mother die, her father remarry, and her meeting and getting to know the prince. The premise, however, is that she is not a slave to her stepfamily by choice—she was cursed when she was born to always be obedient. Her godmother is her close friend and mentor, but bound by rules of magic and unable to undo the curse placed on her.

In the climactic moment of the book (spoilers ahead), El is in love with the prince. She has thus far successfully hidden her curse from him through cleverness and a bit of luck. He asks her to marry him, phrasing it, unbeknownst to him, as a command: “Say you’ll marry me, Ella.” She knows that if she says yes, anyone could find out about the curse and use her to control the prince, or even to murder him. And so, she finds the strength within herself to say no, to refuse his command, and in doing so, breaks the curse.

So, what is it about this story that resonated emotionally with teenager me?

There were lots of universal longings throughout the book—feeling a lack of connection with family, to missing people who were gone, having a few close friendships built over time, finding someone who loved and cared about you for who you were, being motivated and inspired to learn. But in the final moment of the book, the main universal longing that resonated with me was finding the power within oneself to choose.

It’s a simple enough concept. It’s a longing you can find in many, many books across genres and languages and eras. The shedding of societal, familial, and cultural restraints that bind our thoughts and actions, and then having the power, strength, and courage to make the right choice for us. At thirteen, the idea of having the strength to choose held great emotional weight for me, and that same universal longing still resonates with me today.

I believe that stories have power. I believe that fairy tales have power. And I believe that that power comes from universal longings—from the ability of narrative to connect with a reader’s deepest, subconscious desires. Our desires shape our choices, and our choices shape who we are, and when stories validate or shine the light on our deepest longings, we can better understand why we are who we are, and decide who we want to become.

An Essay About Fairy Tales

A version of this appears in The Bald Princess and Other Tales by me!

One of my favorite things about original fairy tales is how absolutely, unequivocally weird they are.

Modern retellings, my own included, often take the clearest elements of a fairy tale, or the only most basic, underlying structure of the tale, and reapply it in a way that is logical for modern times. For example, you’ll see many Beauty and the Beast retellings that try to eliminate tropes which are now considered problematic—such as themes of bestiality or Stockholm syndrome. You’ll see Cinderella retellings where Cinderella chooses to stay with her family, or ends up encountering the prince well before the ball, so she’s not just running off with a complete stranger. Or retellings of Goose Girl, where the princess has a backbone and doesn’t only rely on magic to solve her problem.

And as part of this process of creating modern retellings, the element of weirdness that permeates so many of the original fairy tales gets written out. Gone are the little surprise nuggets that make you go, “Wait, what just happened?”

Consider, for a moment, Snow White and Rose Red, also known as The Ungrateful Dwarf: in the middle of the original story, the sisters come upon a dwarf with his beard stuck in a tree. Why on earth was his beard stuck in a tree?

The first time I read it, I reread it to make sure I understood, and laughing out loud as the letters “WTF” floated through my brain. Or in the original tale of Cinderella, to make their feet fit into the shoe, her stepsisters chop off their own toes and heels. And in The Little Mermaid, she has to kill the prince and let his blood drip on her feet to turn back into a mermaid.

Those are more well-known stories, but if you get into some of the lesser-known tales, the weird elements get even weirder—in The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage, all three aforementioned elements are characters who live together in a house. Just the premise is bizarre. Or have you read Hans the Hedgehog, in which a woman gives birth to a half-boy, half-hedgehog? Or The Three Snake Leaves? Or The Ungrateful Son? And the ones I’ve mentioned so far are just European fairy tales. If you explore stories across the world, like The Bird With Nine Heads, The Woman With Two Skins, The Man With His Leg Tied Up, you will find a wealth of surprising, quirky, and delightful elements mixed in with violence, fear, and destruction.

The weird and wacky abound in old fairy tales, mostly utilized as a technique to teach a lesson (though to be sure, there are more than enough tales that are just weird, with no obvious lesson in sight). As odd as it is, the story The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage teaches the reader to find contentment doing what they’re good at; The Ungrateful Son teaches that one should be generous and not greedy; Cinderella teaches that kindness will be rewarded.

But now, many of the lessons previous fairy tales taught us no longer apply. Little Red Riding Hood teaches children to fear the woods, but should we teach our children to fear the woods? Or should we teach them to understand it? And cutting open the wolf with an axe as a solution to the violence it committed would probably be frowned upon by most. And we’re glad Cinderella found a way out of her awful situation, but was marrying a complete stranger really the best option? If the fairy godmother could offer her a fancy dress and a ride to the ball, why couldn’t she have magicked up a job interview or a couple thousand dollars for Cinderella to move to a new city instead?

As society changes, its general values change as well. And the stories we tell reflect those changing values. Or rather, I believe the stories we tell should reflect our changing values.

In 2021, I went on a reading binge, focusing almost exclusively on fairy tale retellings. I read ones you’ve probably heard of, and ones you haven’t. I read fantasy and sci-fi retellings, romance retellings, even some down the pretty steamy end of things, even though steamy isn’t really my cup of tea. I watched a lot of movies too—Holiday fairy tale retellings, young adult retellings, TV shows like Once Upon A Time and Grimm. And I found I was, by and large, rather disappointed.

Sure, there were a few I really liked. And a few I hated. But what I was mostly disappointed by was how closely the underlying values in the modern retellings aligned with the values of the original tales. Are we really still teaching ourselves to be afraid of the unknown? Are we still trying to tell women and girls that their priority in life is marriage to a man? Is true romantic love the only important thing in life?

What about personal agency? What about consent? And having the freedom to make a choice?

Why not teach ourselves what finding choices looks like, or creating love rather than magically being struck with it? Or that not everything is about hard work, and working ourselves to the bone doesn’t make us better than anyone else?

Why not include disabled people in our stories? Or write stories of friendship and trust?

And after some contemplation, what I decided was that perhaps it wasn’t the retellings that were the problem. Perhaps it was the original tales themselves.

So I decided to write some of my own.

The Bald Princess and Other Tales collection of fairy tales reflects me, mostly. It reflects my values, and the underlying themes are those which are important to me. I tend to repeatedly explore themes of personal agency, learning how to change your mind, accepting (or not accepting) the hand you’ve been dealt, what strength looks like, forgiving yourself, and finding ways to connect with and understand people who are different from you.

I don’t claim to speak for everyone. I don’t even mean to suggest that my own values are clear or obvious in these stories. And I certainly don’t mean to suggest that my values are the same as the values of modern culture as a whole.

Instead, all I claim is that in these stories, I attempted to take the quirky oddness I loved in all the old fairy tales I’ve explored, and blend them with values I wish I’d learned from the fairy tales I grew up with.

Patreon Update: Digital Only Rewards + Free eBooks

If you've been following me for a while now, you probably know I have a Patreon! I started it way back in 2018, as I was gearing up with the Land of Szornyek series. My plan was to create monthly artwork I would share as postcards, posters, digital wallpapers, plus my patrons would get ebook copies of all my books included with their subscription, no matter what level they were at—Land of Szornyek, Rove City, Sagittan Chronicles, my original fairy tales, and soon, the Aria's Song trilogy + whatever I come up with next!

As you know, I released the last book in the Land of Szornyek series, Fog & Flame, a few weeks ago. It’s been a long time coming, and I’m proud of the series of books I produced. But Land of Szorynek is only one part of me and my author journey, and while I began this Patreon as a way to support this series, I’ve expanded significantly since then. As such, I’ve spent the last six months considering how I want to move forward with Patreon, and here is what I’ve finally decided.

Starting now, I will be providing digital goods only. My plan is to share art when I have it as well as free ebooks whenever I release a new book, and occasionally stories about myself or whatever else I might feel inspired to share. I don’t want to commit to a tight schedule either as I feel guilty when I’m unable to meet it. Instead, some months I will likely share a slew of new stuff, and other months, not as much.

This means that I will not be sending out any more posters or postcards after the final June one. The cost of printing and stamps has become prohibitive--the postcards now cost me 4x as much, and posters 5x!

I've also updated all the tiers to reflect the new direction I'm going:

· Friend ($1)

· Comrade ($2)

· Accomplice ($5)

· Familiar ($10)

· Warrior ($25)

· Champion ($50)

It's a pretty sweet deal if you read all my books—I publish between 5 - 10 per year typically, which is $12 total for Patreon subscribers versus roughly $20 - $40 if you pay full price. Plus, you'll get your name listed in the acknowledgements. 

I'm so grateful for my Patreon supporters; they've been a huge part of my journey these last five years, and I'm excited to share what's coming down the road.

Strolling Through the Antelucan Mist

Words. My favorite things.

I was reading The Horologicon by Mark Forsyth recently, which is a book exploring the lost words of the English language. It’s pretty funny and entertaining in general, but it also solved a huge problem I’ve been having for years: it gave me the word “antelucan.” Antelucan means something along the lines of “relating to the early morning hours pre-dawn;” not to be confused with “antediluvian,” which means something like “relating to the period before the Great Flood.

I’ve been looking for the word “antelucan” for years. I like to write scenes where people wake up early or stay up all night, and I myself am a morning person, so I like to describe pre-dawn, and honestly “pre-dawn” gets old after a few repetitions. I mean, to be honest, it’s kinda old before even using it for the first time. And if you use the thesaurus as obsessively I do, you’ll learn that “pre-dawn” isn’t in it, and searching for “dawn” yields words like: daybreak, morning, sunrise, daylight, cockcrow, and wee hours, none of which really get at the vibe I want the same way antelucan does.

Before night comes “twilight,” and before dawn comes the antelucan light; antelucan is the twilight of the morning.

“Antelucan” is not the only word I’ve found that I’d been searching for. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is one of my favorite word-inventing/discovering sources. “Sonder,” for example, means, “he realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own,” and “rubatosis” means, “The unsettling awareness of one's own heartbeat.” Or "agnosthesia" which is "that feeling of not knowing how you feel about something." 

You’re probably not surprised that I’m obsessed with words. I am a writer, after all, and a pretty nerdy one at that. But every so often, I find a word that has a noticeable impact in the way I think about it, a word that helps make my life better by naming an observation or describing a specific experience. It offers nuance and complexity to the way I experience the world, and I find that experience wonderful. Not to mention, it gives me the ability to describe my characters’ experiences in a more complex and nuanced way.

Life is so complicated. And I’ve never really been a fan of simplifying my understanding of it. Rather, I want to acknowledge the complexity of everything, and expanding my language to describe the things I see and experience allows me to do just that.