Teaser Tuesday 7/1/2014: “Once Upon A Curse”

So at the moment I’m reading (unusually for me) a couple of books: And Another Thing by Douglas Adams Eoin Colfer, which is book six in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide” trilogy, and Once Upon A Curse, a short story collection that contains retellings of various famous fairy tale scenarios, including back to back revisions of “Sleeping Beauty”, from different points of view than the originals (no Maleficent so far though). I picked it up over a year ago because it was on sale for $0.99, plus it has a Peter S. Beagle story in it. You may have heard of him.

But this is not a Teaser Tuesday of The Last Unicorn, which, no doubt, everyone has read already. If you haven’t, go do so. I’ll wait. Done? Good. Okay, here’s your teaser from Once Upon A Curse.

The story is “Words Like Pale Stones”, which is Nancy Kress‘s take on “Rumpelstiltskin”. The little guy hasn’t shown up yet, but there’s a rat hanging around who may be him. Then again, maybe it’s just a rat.

I pushed the polished wheel. It revolved the spindle, and the straw was pulled forward from the distaff, under my twisting fingers, toward the spindle. The straw, straw still, broke and fell to the floor in a powder of chaff.

And speaking of separating the straw from the chaff, I am now over halfway through the final edit of The War of the Ravels! After this it will be one more printout to look for stray typos (I won’t edit anything else, honest, really, probably), and then it will be a matter of preparing it for publication. There is finally an M-Edge E-Luminator at the end of the tunnel!

“I don’t want to step out of a window and get smashed by whatever wrecked the place.”

“There are no monstrous beasts rampaging through the Ravels stomping on buildings. I would suspect your –”