B is for Briar

Long has our scribbler held a passion for dark fairytales. She was writing them herself in high school. She found herself captivated by Tanith Lee’s Tales of the Flat Earth and Red As Blood when she discovered them in college, on the shelf of a used bookstore in Santa Cruz. One of the things she’d enjoyed about Carmilla was the fairytale nature of the dream Laura had, a dream Carmilla claimed to share. She still wonders if Mircalla might not have told the truth about that dream, perhaps Mircalla did dream of Laura when she was a child, an ideal she clung to as she grew up. There is a certain similarity to the vision my Rose had of me while she was an infant, a vision which drew my princess close to me in Fairest. Our scribbler’s favorite anime is Revolutionary Girl Utena, a surreal series about ritualized dueling at a school and becoming a prince, regardless of your gender, all of which was grounded in a fairytale in its participants were caught in. Our scribbler’s favorite manga, Tokyo Babylon could be regarded as a fairytale, a cautionary tale about an innocent boy devoted to saving others, never noticing the danger reaching out for him from the sakura. Puella Magi Madoka Magica, another favorite anime of our scribbler’s has certain dark fairytale elements in the price young girls pay for a single wish. When our scribbler got a submission call for f/f fairytales, inspiration blossomed within her imagination. The quote, the myth from Revolutionary Girl Utena returned to her: “Princesses who cannot be saved by the prince become witches.” What if the witch who cursed Sleeping Beauty had once been Snow White? What if Snow White became a witch because of what the wicked queen did to her and the passion the two of them once shared? From this concept, Fairest was born. I was born. Our world and our characters have evolved greatly since that moment. Two editions of Fairest were released. A story for my lost Quartz, the seventh dwarf is being revised in Of Cuckoo Clocks and Crystal Cofiins. We began with a cycle of curses and love. I don’t think we’ve strayed too much from that concept, judging from Nimmie Not’s behavior in Of Cuckoo Clocks and Crystal Coffins along with various blog posts. It’s the heart of our stories. It still beats even when we try to rip it out of our chests. It still beats.