Today I wanted to share a snippet from a new book I started writing.
Originally, I wanted to call this story Beauty Woke the Beast. It was supposed to be a fusion retelling of Beauty & the Beast and Sleeping Beauty. I wanted to set it in an Italy-inspired fantasy world at the time of the Medicis. Then I read a book with this setting (The Brilliant Death) and kind of lost my taste for it. I started building an aesthetic board on Pinterest, and the setting of the story changed in my mind to Russia (it helps that I'm currently reading War and Peace). But I was struggling with the Beauty and the Beast/Sleeping Beauty storyline ... until I added Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" to the mix. The story is still a murky mess in my mind, but I think it's one of those projects I'll keep coming back to again and again to chip away at!
Here are the first two paragraphs I wrote:
There were four of us. “The wild girls,” the adults who belonged to us used to say. Elena, Sofiya, Mila, and me–Izolda. It’s funny how everyone always put Mila, the baby of the family, first and tacked my name on as an afterthought.
Very quickly we acquired nicknames. Elena was clever and quick-witted, so she was the Fox. Sofiya was a graceful dancer, so she was the Swan. Mila was the prettiest, so we called her Beauty. And I–when they remembered me–was the Beast.
Would you read this book if you picked it up at the library? Let me know!
The Pinterest board I created for this story is below. Here's the link so you can see the whole thing if you want to!
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