New Story

With my YA needing time to marinate and my MG needing a new ending which I still don't want to tackle, I turned to starting a new story. I've been reading (again) The Tale of Despereaux to my class and so have been in a very fairy tale frame of mind. (I've also been in a second person POV frame of mind, but I've repressed the urge to write that way) A week or so ago I read many of the first para entries on Agent Bransford's blog contest and for some reason one of them (well really just part of one of them) got stuck in whichever part of my brain that remembers stuff. It was something about an ugly princess and I liked that idea. So I stole it. That's what we writers do.

---TANGENT ALERT---if you don't believe me and think I'm some unscrupulous hack, let me provide the following "evidence." I'm a big Kate DiCamillo fan (see above) and I've read her bio and watched online interviews and done all sorts of stalker-like stuff, and one tidbit I ran across is that she was inspired to write after reading CPC's The Watsons Go To Birmingham. Well, in Watsons, CPC uses an analogy about missing something being like sticking your tongue in the open space where a tooth used to be (he puts it better than this). Careful readers of Because of Winn-Dixie (and that would include me--I read it to my class every year) know that Ms. Kate, God love her, uses pretty much the exact same simile in her debut novel. Now I'm not pointing this out to accuse of her plagiarism (Truthfully, I'm not even sure one stolen simile counts) but only to assure you that this creative, uh, borrowing is done quite often. Stephen King essentially admits ripping off his idea for The Stand from someone other book (too lazy to google which one right now).

So I stole this ugly princess idea and I tossed in some other interesting characters: a slovenly King, a Queen of staggering vanity, and an alien whom I named PG-13. I've tried to give it a fairy tale feel. Last night I started the story. I wrote one page. That's it, just one page, but it's a pretty decent page.

I might post it on here later this week. Then all of you will have something of mine to, uh, borrow.