A little illumination . . . the Project History

"Perhaps we may frighten away the ghost of so many years ago with a little illumination" Phantom of the Opera, the musical

Revisions are such a daunting task (not to mention endless) and I know this blog is about revising our story, however I have no idea how to go about it. I guess the most logical place is to start at the beginning, but before that, how about a little history of the project.


It all began one summer, oh so many years ago, when I suggested to you Terrwyn, we should do a letter exchange. The idea came after reading Sorcery and Cecelia by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. If you haven't read these books, you should. At least the first, I liked that one best. They have since written several sequels. Wrede describes the books like this "Caroline and I started these books as a game, alternately writing letters to each other 'in character.' She was Kate and I was Cecy. When we finished the stack of letter that became Sorcery and Cecelia, we sent it to our agent." (http://www.pcwrede.com/CeceliaandKate.html)

So I thought, why we should do the same thing, an exchange of stories. We'd been exchanging letters as pen pals for years. How fun! And it was!
After our first story (A summer of magic) we decided to try retelling fairy tales, two of them: The Goose Girl and the Golden Goose. At the time I'd read several books retelling the more popular fairy tales (Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, and Snow White) but I had never seen a book with either of these two fairy tales retold. (It was before Shannon Hale's The Goose Girl. I'll post more of fairy tale retelling later.) That was one of my reasons for choosing these two fairy tales, the other reason, both stories had geese in them. Ah ha, a connection.

I had always wondered how two authors could write one book. This method made sense to me: two interwoven stories with two different writing styles, and of course two authors.

So we each picked a fairy tale, I chose the Good Girl, and Terrwyn got the Golden Goose. We re-told the stories whoever we wanted. I took the more straight forward method, directly tracing the fairy tale of the Goose Girl paragraph by paragraph, extending and explaining the scenes. Terrwyn you took a more intriguing way, starting in the backstory and leading up to the heart of the fairy tale.

I must confess, I wanted to tell the Goose Girl story because I had no clue how to do the scene with the golden goose and everybody getting stuck to each other. Terrwyn you did that brilliantly. The innkeepers daughters do not have nearly enough appearances. They are so wonderfully loathsome.

Well, now that that is out of the way, I suppose the next step is to tackle the revisions, or discuss the theme, or characters development, or work on those plot holes or inconsistencies or maybe . . . yes, maybe I'll just continuing procrastinating and do some more research on fairy tale retelling. Yes, I like that idea. I'll have to watch some movies, read some books. Its research you know. Research, I say.