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Remember The Querulous Squirrel’s 100-stories-in-100-days<\/a> challenge? Ambitious, wot? Supremely well executed, eh?<\/p>\n Okay, now start with a similar premise:<\/p>\n Simple to say, hard to execute, right? Just as The Squirrel’s must have been.<\/p>\n So then add another huge level of complication: invent your own genre, in which you will write every one of your month’s worth of stories.<\/p>\n I’ll pause to let that sink in: your own genre<\/em>…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n T<\/span>hat’s what Marta Pelrine-Bacon, friend o’RAMH<\/em> and proprietor of the writing in the water<\/em><\/a> blog, has been up to since May 1. Every story in her collection, called The Fairy Tale Asylum<\/em><\/a> (what a name!), does not simply retell, update, or pay homage to a fairy tale. Each is a story… well, inspired by<\/em> a fairy tale or other children’s story. A completely new story. Not quite a fantasy, not really a fable… metaphorically an inmate (as the title implies) in an asylum full of mad stories.<\/p>\n Now, I’ve had some experience with the idea of reworking a familiar tale from the collective unconscious. As I talked about back in February<\/a>, Seems to Fit<\/em> recasts the Arthur-Round Table-Grail legends, transports them in time and place to late twentieth-century Pennsylvania. It’s difficult to do this — for me — without trying too hard and\/or too clumsily. I want my old guys to be looking for something, yes, but I am damned if I am going to use the word “quest” in the book — not even once. None of the characters drives a Dodge Charger. Like that.<\/p>\n What Marta’s up to is, to my way of thinking, an order of magnitude more difficult: she’s reaching into a given tale in the canon, plucking out some signal detail or two, and building around it a completely different story<\/em>… a completely different story which nonetheless still feels weirdly “true” to the original.<\/p>\n (And, need I repeat: she’s doing this every day for a whole month<\/em>.)<\/p>\n Take a look for yourself. Here’s the opening of “The Fear of Apples<\/a>” (a story which more or less unhinged me on first reading; it takes off from “Snow White”):<\/p>\n Lily had to remember not to let her daughter see the apples. Whenever Miranda saw an apple, she began to scream. Even a picture of an apple brought tears. It made the grocery store near impossible. Alphabet books were difficult. So many of them started off with A is for apple.<\/p>\n Once Lily carefully cut an apple into cubes. She pushed the skin and core deep into the trash. The few cool whitish cubes set on a blue plate next to cubes of cheese. Miranda had skipped into the kitchen and screamed.<\/p>\n It took weeks for Miranda to stop accusing her mother of trying to poison her. All white food became suspect. Apples on television made Miranda cringe, and eventually the girl stopped watching television all together…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n