First Big Announcement . . .

What can I say.  It's been a while since I graced you with a post (feel free to slap me and punish me as you will) and whereas not much has really happened, when I actually think about it, there's been some pretty big things that do need announcing.  Why I've not done this sooner I don't know.  (That big, one-eyed monster called 'Life' has kept me locked up and has been feeding off my creativity, leaving me with not much to go around.)

Still...

The first big announcement is that I've been published!  Yes!  Not a novel, but a short story.

Before I went to New York (jeez, that was a lifetime ago - 4-5 months) I entered a competition called Fairly Wicked Tales, hosted by Angelic Knight Press.  The idea was to take a fairy tale and put a spin on it, for example, making the heroine the bad guy: Cinderella being a b@*!h to her two stepsisters, Little Red Riding Hood beating up that poor wolf, which in turn invoked it to savage her; you get the gist.  And because Angelic Knight Press deal with everything dark, the competition was right up my ally :)

I chose an almost unheard-of tale called 'The Glass Coffin' - and no, it has nothing to do with the glass coffin the seven dwarfs put Snow White in - although the Grimm Brothers did like their glass coffins.  It involved a hunter saving a brilliant stag from a bull, and in return the stag showed him the way to a hidden cave where a fair maiden was kept imprisoned in a glass coffin. The rest is nothing unusual; he kisses her; he rescues her, the stag transforms back into her brothter, they fall in love; live happily ever after...yada yada.

But then I twisted it.

The maiden in the coffin was a witch who needed the kiss and the heart of a man in order to break the curse over her and her brother - and when I say heart, I don't mean what someone gives as a token of their love.  I mean a real heart, still beating and full of blood.  It turns out the bull he killed in order to rescue the stag, her cursed brother, was the sorcerer charged with keeping their dark secret sleeping...and the disillusioned hunter slayed him and was then lead to his doom.

Worked well as a Grimm Tale, I thought - and others must have thought so too because it's now part of an anthology that's being published by Angelic Knight Press around Halloween.  What apt timing :)

I'll keep you all posted.

As for my second lot of big news (well, maybe not as big as this lot), I'll save that for another post.  It may help get me back into the habit :)

So until next time...