Heart's Key

When I was a little girl, I thought fairy tales were disappointing. Snow White was going to live with a bunch of short men with big noses and absolutely none of them are hot? Intentionally? Couldn't she do better for herself if she was so devastatingly beautiful? No? That seems disappointing.

That's just the tip of the iceberg of all the romantic possibilities that are ignored in fairy tales. I'm sure all of you can make nice long lists in your heads of all the fairy tale romances that fall flat.

There's also the matter of how non-violent fairy tales are. I know they weren't always non-violent. That's a relatively new thing; coddling children instead of scaring the life out of them. Hansel and Gretel is a great example of a good gory fairy tale that came through to the modern age, but it's not romantic.

Couldn't we have both?

So, there I was, a four-year-old being put to bed and my mother was telling me the story of Snow White. She gets to the part when Snow White has just escaped the huntsman who was going to cut out her heart and then... I ask her to stop. I say I'll go to sleep without any more story.

"I'll make up my own fairy tale."

However, I wasn't able to write one that would have satisfied four-year-old me until lately. That's how I got Heart's Key.

For starters, it's written from a man's perspective. If I'm choosing my fairy tale, I want one where a man explains how he goes absolutely bonkers for the main girl. Not just the words, 'He fell desperately in love with her.' I NEED DETAILS.

He's also not allowed to be a dreamer or a baby. I want a knight hardened in battle with blood on his hands.

Also, I'm tired of dragons. There will be no dragons. For the magical creatures in my story, we're going to use slimes and slugs.

Our girl cannot be a princess. The political structure of princesses annoys me. Most little girls don't want to be princesses. They want to be rich daughters, but the responsibilities associated with being a princess are tiresome. I don't want my girl to have her head filled with dumb ideas about kingdoms. No one is going to choose her groom for her for a political marriage. She's going to choose her groom herself. I want her to be a penniless girl in a dress fit for a queen.

With all that in mind, I wrote Heart's Key. It's a novelette that is under 20k words. It turned out splendidly. The little girl inside me who wanted a story that was romantic and violent has finally stopped jumping on the bed and has curled up in her warm bed. She's dreaming the dreams little girls dream when they're told proper bedtime stories.

With that in mind, I would be very hesitant to let a child hear this story. Likely, they wouldn't get it at all, but if you have a child in you who craved romance and violence and was left unsatisfied, you might give it a chance.

It's available as an audiobook through GooglePlay and AppleBooks. It's free as an audiobook or an ebook, but if you have a particular ebookstore you like to visit, it's probably available there. It's under twenty thousand words and it would take roughly an hour and a half to listen to, or under an hour to read as an ebook.

Next time, I'll talk about my other fairy tale, The House with Two Halves. That's coming out soon.