Maven Fairy Godmother

However, once a reader gets past the fairy tales that have been cleaned up to be moral tales for children, one finds a tremendous body of material on various kinds of water beings. One of these is the water nixie–a.k.a. knucker, neck, sprite, sylph, siren, Lorelei, mermaid, melusine, or water-man.

When I started doing research for Maven, most of the fairy tales I knew involved girls who were set upon by their stepmothers, girls who had no mothers present. Even Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is separated from her mother, to be raised by three silly fairies. Cinderella, Snow White, Beauty, Rapunzel, and even Little Red Riding [...]

Traditionally speaking, the audience for science fiction has always been teen-age boys, and for fantasy, both teen-age boys and girls–perhaps explaining the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter novels. Rowling has created an incredibly detailed fantasy world that lies just a step away from the mundane muggle world, a world that is saved seven times [...]

And they were married and lived happily ever after.  Yeah. Right. My interpretation of the most popular of these stories–Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White was “if you’re a good girl (stupidly naive), and you wait long enough (while keeping your tormentor’s house clean), he will come.” The other variation is Beauty and the Beast, in [...]