My Valentine, aka my husband, gave me these things he likes to call "kids", so I've been doing "kid" stuff with the eldest today and am just now settling in to read Book Brew posts and join the festivities. Looks like we've talked about food and cover art and inspiration, and then more about food — eye candy, anyway. Hey, it's food for thought, right?
My first published novel was inspired by a fairy tale, The 12 Dancing Princesses. In the classic story, the 12 daughters of the rather evil King keep disappearing at night and ruining their shoes. Heaven forbid! The REK (rather evil King) decides to offer one of his daughters in marriage (they sound like SUCH a prize) to anyone who can figure out where they're going…but executes anyone who fails. Hence the rather evil part. Needless to say, some dude figures it out and ends up married to one of the princesses. There are different versions of the tale in which the dude is old, or young, and in which the daughter chosen is the eldest, or youngest, but the basics remain the same. Here's a link to the Grimm version with great annotations: http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/twelvedancing/index.html (one of my favorite fairy tale research sites)
In my version of the story, nobody is getting executed and the King isn't evil so much as… Well, how would you like being the single male in a family of 13 women? And how in the world did the King and Queen have 12 daughters in a row? That has to be some kind of curse.
Here's the blurb for A SPELL FOR SUSANNAH, a not ready for Disney fairy tale:
Princess Susannah is the eldest of twelve sisters who discovered a land beneath their palace that definitely has an edge over the Middle Kingdoms: the secret land is chock full of princes who just love to dance. A fairy cursed the Middle Kingdoms nobility to bear no more male children, and the human lands are on the verge of anarchy.
Susannah, alone among mortals, discovers she can work fairy magic, but it's just another secret she has to keep from her parents. When the King and Queen employ Jon Tom, a very handsome detective, to discover where the princesses sneak and go dancing every night, Susannah finds herself wanting to tell him all her secrets.
The problem is, when Susannah's secrets go public, the fairies are going to come looking for her, and they won't be happy.
Warning: this title contains the following: hot sex, hot springs sex, hot-to-trot women and patriarchal hardheadedness.
*** You can find out more at my site: http://www.jodywallace.com/books/spellforsusannah.htm
I've actually written a prequel to the story I'm going to make free to blog visitors today! Let me go set up a code and I'll tell you the details in a future post, where I'll also share an excerpt of A SPELL FOR SUSANNAH.
Thank you for stopping by, and I hope everyone has a fabulous fairy tale of a February.
PS My husband has been forbidden from giving me any more "kids" for Valentine's Day.
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