Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer

Cinderella rewrite where Cinderella’s father is an unusually successful fisherman due to his secret friendships with the shy and mysterious mermaids, successful enough to attract a moderately wealthy and ambitious bride with two daughters. Once he dies, her stepmother, determined to make sure her daughters inherit the fishing business as dowries by marrying before Cinderella, forbids her from going out on the fishing boats or into town and makes sure she spends as much of her time as possible doing drudgework, hauling offal and cleaning fish. When the Prince’s ball comes around, an important occasion for young women to make good connections, the stepmother forbids her from going, telling her that she needs to get the latest salmon catch gutted and ready for sale instead.

Cinderella’s mermaid godmother calls upon her people to clean the fish and gifts her a dress and shoes of shimmering fish scales that wreathe her in rainbows under the moonlight. She makes an impression on the Prince at the ball so strong that he immediately falls in love with her, and when she’s forced to flee before her stepmother notices her (no masquerade mask or dancing rainbows will disguise her from her own family at close range), the Prince is left with only a delicate fish leather slipper left on the front steps to try to find her again.

He goes around the houses, seeking the owner of the slipper, but Cinderella is once again working in the fish sheds. He stepmother, desperate and determined and having found Cinderella’s other shoe that very morning, realises what has happened and takes a knife to the feet of her prettiest daughter, telling the prince that she suffered an injury that very morning but those are definitely her shoes, see, here’s the other one, and they still fit.

The daughter is pretty and witty and charming, and while the Prince doesn’t feel the same spark and instant sense of connection that he did at the party, he reasons that she’s overwhelmed and in pain and once she’s healed, all will be well. There are no birds to whisper of blood in the shoe – the Prince has seen the bandaged feet already – and the daughter slips on the shoes (the only shoes she has that will fit her, now,) and accompanies him to the palace.

But the stepmother is no doctor, and by the time the Prince gets her to the palace doctors, it’s too late – his beloved has contracted an infection in her feet from the shoe leather, made unclean in its travels. She will survive – it is an infection of a common filth of fish and birds, one that the doctors have potions for for the occasions where dangerously cooked food causes outbreaks – but in her raving, she confesses the whole scheme to the Prince who, furious, returns to the village to find the girl he truly fell in love with, the girl hidden from him.

“Oh, yeah, the fish cleaner,” the villagers shrug. “We don’t see her around very much, she’s probably in the sheds. Her family calls her Salmonella.”

Unique vintage male names, companion to this post:

There are less of them because people seemed to be less creative with naming their sons. Not sure why.

the most humbling experience of being a writer is when you spend hours writing and think you wrote 10k words but it was actually more like 400. and then you do it again

I have the best friends lol. Look at this lovely cross stitch piece a friend made me!

okay sorry, one other thing annoyed me about that writing class. one of the students is this super clean-cut doctor who works at an HIV clinic, and he asked the prof "do you ever get distracted while reading books, because you find yourself analyzing the craft of them instead of sinking into the story?"

and she said "no," and turned away. and the whole class laughed awkwardly, bc it was a pretty abrupt and dismissive answer. so then she turned back to him and said "you wouldn't ask a musician if they get distracted listening to songs. they just enjoy the music."

but I dunno, I'm a newbie writer with only one (scheduled-to-be-published) book under my belt, but I get distracted sometimes when I'm reading. if I find I'm not sinking into a block of text, I'll squint at it and be like "okay, they're using too much passive voice, that's why my brain isn't grabbing on to it." so I'm sorry Mr. HIV doctor, I thought your question was reasonable!

He's a big baby who needs constant snuggles

i know i've said this before but i'm going to say it again because the more i work with geriatric women the stronger i feel about the fact that the only anti-aging that women in their 20s/30s should be obsessed with is building strong bones and muscle mass. that's like the most important thing you can you can do right now to lay a good foundation for healthy aging. you can botox the shit out of your face but that's not going to do anything to save you from dying prematurely from a fatal hip fracture that you can't bounce back from because you didn't do anything to prevent yourself from becoming frail and breakable. like i know that sounds harsh but that is reality for a lot of older women and i don't want that to be you.

thinking non-stop about the Terry Pratchett Method of Deconstruction (TM) and how it works

[...] the wages of sin is death, but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays. (Witches Abroad)

Take a common concept, metaphor, idiom, trope etc. "The wages of sin is death."

Invert, reverse or subvert it to highlight the inconsistency or issue. "But so is the salary of virtue." (Well, actually, everybody dies, right?)

While everybody's contemplating the philosophy revealed, overextend the metaphor and whack them in the back of the head with the joke like a comedic quintain while they aren't expecting it. "At least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."

He does it quite often and I love it every time.

Listen, I'm having fun playing with the ultra patriotic voice, but after a couple years in blue-collar landscaping jobs, you really do need to phrase things like that.

"I'm pretty sure that fella ain't here legally."

"Well, that ain't your business Chip, it's his."

They hate being preached to. If you pull out words like 'gender wage gap' they'll tell you you're brainwashed by the far left media.

"He's one of them transgenders."

"He got freedoms too, Jimmy."