Author Archives: Maven, fairy godmother

Apprentice Fairy Godmothers

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As an apprentice fairy godmother myself, I took a look at how we are presented  across the dividing line between Faery and Fiction. There are two kinds of  godmother apprentices that authors write about:  the deadly serious and the deadly frivolous.

First, we get serious with Baillie Albus, an orphan with nothing but her red cloak, no hope and little to look forward to in her life, except more nasty and brutish. Called to the forest and chosen as a fairy godchild, she is re-named Faenwich, and becomes the apprentice of  the powerful  Marimetsai.

Laura Briggs and Sarah Steinbrenner’s The Fairy Godmother’s Apprentice is the first book of the Dark Woods Trilogy, a YA fantasy that  is dark, revealing the cold-bloodedness of the fae, and the restrictions that the enchantment places on even the most dominant fairies. The other godchildren have their own difficulties, so that Faen finds herself with no true friends, only to her mission to find her human and the trial that they will encounter. In this book, quest has just begun, now that she knows the exact price of magic. Like many trilogies, this part feels unfinished, as though I’m just to the inciting incident of the story, that changes the stakes and starts the rising action.

I’ll likely read the other two books in the series, as I like the writing, although it’s gloomier than my preferences. I like a happy ending, and to me, that means more than one you can walk away from. I also like more of a character arc, as Faen seems not to have much in the way of choices, magically or otherwise, to grow into herself, and she just keeps on keeping on.  I’ve done enough of that too.

The world is well written with layers of conflict and characters to be revealed as the depth of the darkness is fathomed. I’m interested enough to see what wish Faen must grant, though it’s already clear what the price of the wish will be.

On the other side of the deadly fence is Georgia Rhodes, a player from the Fairy Godmother University trying to slide through her final exam with the juiciest bookkeeper on Earth.  Cheryl Sterling’s The Apprentice Fairy Godmother  is a steamy frolic about her escapades when  her client,  a guy who hasn’t been laid in years, bumps into her in the hall. Her chat-speak supervisor, who poofs in as a pink-clad teenybopper,  says the switch is in for another godmother who has a mahjongg tournament, and Georgia just has to make the best of it—and pass the final.

Expecting a simple task, but armed with plastic, ridiculous credit,  and full-tilt internet, she just can’t get her man off her mind, out of his suffocating mother’s control, or away from the meddlesome adolescent daughter who shows up on his doorstep after running away from the ex.  It doesn’t help that he’s named Harrison Ford and built to match.

Georgia’s got everything to lose. Not only is her degree at stake, so is her family, her powers an d her very existence.  But she just doesn’t take no for an answer, even if she’s supposed to say it, and it’s up to her to find her own way out of the mess.  But she has more than one chance to enjoy the ride—lots of steam here for those who like sex as a spectator sport—definitely not for bright eleven-year-olds.

So now I can see that we older girls are still not part of the pantheon except as wise old harpies or valley-girl wannabes. But this  old girl’s got more than one trick up her gossamer.

I don’t know Jack

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I’ve been researching about Jack of Beanstalk and Giant-Killing fame.  He’s a typical trickster, using his wits and luck to accomplish his impossible feats. He’s small, wiry, but mostly fearless and smarter than the average giant or king.  He’s often gullible and foolish, forgetting the very good advice he gets from magical helpers, but he gets his own back and more.

Most of the Jack Tales I’ve been able to find are Southern Appalachian folklore, told in the mountain dialects that are the remnants of lowland Scots, the brogue of the folks relocated to Northern Ireland and then the US during the 1700s. They are incongruous, the valiant Jack going to market, but stopping by the house of the king which is located in the village.

He manages to kill a wild boar, a unicorn and a lion–one with a mane like in Africa, not the mane-less catamounts or cougars found in the Appalachians. The king pays him in cash–a total of $1500, and he goes back home to mom, with no princess in tow.

In another story, Jack is on his way to find the North Wind, to stop up the hole it blow through to make himself and his mom more comfortable. On the way he meets a magical man who gives him a tablecloth that provides food, a hen who lays golden eggs and a stick that will beat anything, including a log into firewood.

Of course, Jack loses each of these things to some ruffians along the way, and has to get them back by using the stick to beat the other men until they give his things back. Then it’s back home to Mom. Jack is always described as the youngest son, typical of most folk tales, but generally the other brothers are out with their father hunting or  trading or just away.

Since most of these tales were published in the 20s and 30s, they are not in the public domain and aren’t available free online,and cheapskate that I am, I’m reading through lesson plans for third grade and scholarly articles through the U. of Phoenix library–it’s good to have access. But I don’t  know Jack.

The beanstalk climber is  a thief and a murderer, so that later versions of this story have a fairy tell Jack that all the things he stole were stolen from his own father, and in some cases that he himself is a prince reduced to farming. It seems strange that his mom did not share these details with him, but then, often we don’t tell our kids things they don’t need to know.

I’m reading Boneshaker by Cherie Priest, and part of the conflict there is that the fifteen year old son does not know the truth about his father and his grandfather, one of whom is seen as a hero, and one as a villain. So he’s on a quest, and therefore, so is she. So mjuch of the conflict in relationships is not sharing the information a person needs to know, or knowing what a person needs to know. That’s the conflict that keeps Boneshaker moving, along with the wonderfully detailed steampunk setting.

In the next Maven book, the son of the Jack who climbed the beanstalk is featured, and I’m looking for his further adventures, and what I can use to explore that story, much like Andrew Lloyd Webber did with Into the Woods.  What happens after happily ever after?

Lottery winners are often broke after a couple of years, and so are Ward and his mom, a regional princess brought to poverty and completely unable to cope with it. They are down to a dry cow, and the contents of their cottage–a nice one with glass windows and slate roof, but a cottage none the less.This “jack” is named Edward,but he goes by Ward, and his primary goal is to take care of his mom in such a way that he can escape the farm and see the wider world, and maybe take the miller’s daughter Yz, short for Ysabella, along with him. She has her own problems as we all do,  and while she likes Ward, she has her dad the miller to look after.

So, I’m still working on the Jack stories and looking for the European variants, like the Brave Little Tailor and the Boy Who Knew No Fear for some inspiration of stories to fracture. I don’t yet know Jack.

NewMyths.com – A bright spot in my randomness

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I checked into my gmail this morning to see who might have “encircled” me on g+, and found the smiling face of Scott Barnes, editor of NewMyths.com.

How lucky is that?  So I read a few of the stories there, “Crumbling Butterflies” flash fiction by Joseph Zieja,with a nice illustration by Nathan Wyckoff; “Expiration Date” by Yeoryios Pantazis; and “Cinnamon Sale,” a poem by Johan Jðnsson–all well written and with that deep twist that we all like.

I’m sure I have a tale worth telling to them of one of my adventures. I’ll get busy polishing it up and submit it. They like fantasy, science fiction and mythology, and that is right down my alley. What a great find for a Thursday!

Brewster “Silicon” Jones

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Brewster “Silicon” Jones noted the sunshine slanting through the computer lab window across his monitor, making the monitor nearly invisible in the glare. Like a search light from a cop car, it invaded from literally outside his domain where he was no deity, no more than bar slime. “Where the sun don’t shine” was pretty much where he lived. Yet the golden beam of slightly swirling dust reminded him of his promise to Red to be home early, before sunset, before the full moon rose. He had planned to leave long before now.

She was doing ritual tonight—the Great Rite. She thought she needed a god with a sword to become the goddess, and he was certainly willing to oblige. His intent wasn’t focused in the same direction as hers, but he’d enthusiastically share his energy for her to work her magic. It was great sex.

He slipped out of the lab and into his car, a middle-aged Buick that generally ran under the radar when he didn’t slip into his “usual suspects” mode. He stopped at the liquor store for a bottle of tequila. It would slow him down just a little before hand, and ground them after—blending the four elements, he called it: lime for air, ice for water, salt for earth and tequila for fire. She loved margaritas. He picked up some limeade from the convenience store next door while he was at it, just in case she had run out.

He was still half a block away from her house when the Buick sputtered and quit.

Out of gas–again.

He slipped the transmission into neutral, and willed the car to coast into her driveway.  IT rolled to a stop just before the tires hit the curb.

Might as well call it magic, he thought, magic being more reliable than luck. She’d have enough gas to siphon out, or she would take him to get some later, maybe in the morning. Give him an excuse to be late to work.

Life is good, he thought, watching the red sunset fill the western sky through the pines behind her house. Tomorrow would be a nice day—maybe he would call in sick. It was still early enough in spring for him to come down with a bit of a cold, and he’d likely be hung over anyway. He grabbed the booze and went in to worship his goddess.

Who is Maven? A bit of a Scene

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When Maven Morrigan slid down from the front seat of her minivan, her pumpkin of a rump caught the duct tape that held the seat together, releasing the broken spring below.

“Damn! Story of my life!” Her last pair of panty hose ruined, another piece of her world fell apart.

Finally Maven worked the wire loose from her skirt, leaving a small hole in the polyester.

A pointed end to the worst day of her life. She’d trundled through every temp agency in the county in search of a paycheck. Even the teenage manager at Burger Haven shrugged and glanced at the semi-retired folks serving up the fat of the land. Nobody wanted a middle-aged ex-teacher when ex-CEOs were available.

She rolled her eyes in disgust. Through a break in the clouds, the evening star perched bright above the crescent moon, a spot of beauty ending an ugly day.

“Star light, star bright
First star I see tonight
Wish I may, wish I might
Have the wish I wish tonight.”

Shivering on the asphalt, she discarded one wish after another.  A golden SUV and a ripped personal trainer? A fire, chocolate and one enormous chair? A ticket into the witness protection program?

Wishing! Waste of time. She stomped to her door. If wishes were Harleys, she’d still have to put gas in them. No point in making believe. Work harder. Play the game. Keep your mind to yourself.

Her kitchen was bare. She’d sold most of her keepsakes and anything else she could liquidate at the flea market, even her books after her unemployment ran out. What was left was brown, too boring to show dirt. Could one die from beige?

A cold chill swept through her. Maven shivered again. The heater was set at hypothermal to save electricity. She reached into her pocket book to put the last of her change in the empty jelly jar on the counter.  Then she remembered giving it–her lunch money—to the woman at the copy center for stamps for the last pile of resumes lying there to be mailed in the morning. She’d forgotten to take them with her.

People survived being homeless, living outdoors and eating irregularly, so Maven made herself glad she had a cold apartment to come home to with a bed and running water.

The last four crackers with scrapings of peanut butter made her supper at the kitchen sink while she heated water, saving the last of the coffee for the morning. She poured hot water into a cup and sipped, draining her anger and warming her belly and her hands.  On the cup was a cartoon of a cleaning lady who wanted to know where her fairy godmother was.

“If my fairy godmother showed up tonight, I’d…I’d…” Maven shook her head and set the empty cup in the sink.

Still wearing her coat, Maven trudged to the bedroom to change for bed. The image of the star shone in her mind, glowing in the deep blue dusk, and the sliver of moon smiled at her, the promise of a peaceful night, and perhaps a new day, the promise of a new start. She had a few more resumes to send out, and she might hear back any day from the dozens sent before–still a bit of hope left.

Maven quickly shed her clothes and got ready for bed. Once under the covers, she began her ritual of deep breathing, partly to relax and center herself for sleep, but mostly to bring on a hot flash, which it always did, eventually. She’d learned that trick in many workshops and therapy sessions. She might not relax, but she would get warm.

She imagined sheep jumping over the star and the moon, then a cow, the cat and the fiddle, and other silly characters. As her cheeks finally flushed and the warmth flowed through her body, Maven thought of little boy blue, curled up in his haystack. Her last thought as she rolled over to go to sleep was “I’ll think about that tomorrow at Tara.”

Good-bye Tulip and Jones

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I’ve come to a hard decision. I have to cut a subplot to make the novel work better, so it’s good-bye to Tulip and Jones, for now.

I’ll be revising the scenes so that Maven will act them out, and Jones will have to fall through the Veil at another time, unless I decide to get him together with Maven sooner.

I’m not throwing them on the cutting room floor, however. They will have to wait for the next book to be fleshed out, but I want to get this done now and get the next two books started, After Midnight and That Darn Maven.

So long, Jones and Tulip. See you later.

Ashleigh

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Ashleigh moped in her room in the third tallest tower of her sister’s castle. Her satin slipper dangled from her toe. Her finger traced patterns on the rock of the open window. Her silken gown crumpled as she curled up and stared sightlessly out the window.

“I wish, I wish,” she whispered. “I wish I knew what to wish for.” She didn’t blame Pierre for leaving her. She was tired of catering anyway, though she didn’t know how to do anything else. Her sister had kindly taken her in and treated her as a noble lady, even though everyone knew that Ashleigh was only a silk-gowned kitchen maid.

“I’m doomed to be a secondary character.” She put her arms around her silk-stocking knees and poked out her lower lip. “If only I had chosen the prince, I’d be the queen now.”

“Unfortunately,” said Maven, appearing with a minimum of flash and sparkle, “it is impossible to grant a wish for the past. You have to decide what you want in the future.”  She glanced around at the tapestries, the well hung bed, the carpet on the floor. The view from the tower included a forest and a lake where the sun sparkled on the water. “Looks like you’re doing all right to me.”

Ashleigh sprang to her feet. “YOU!” she shouted, pointing a quivering finger at Maven as her face turned red. “Why do I always get you? Aren’t there any other fairy godmothers?”

“Not on your case. In fact, there is a shortage. So you’re stuck with me.” Maven held up her wand. “Now if you don’t know what you want, I’ll just….”

“No, wait. Wait!” Ashleigh grabbed Maven’s sleeve. “You rushed me last time, and I didn’t get what I wanted!”

Maven pulled the gossamer from Ashleigh’s hand before Ashleigh could stretch it out of shape. Maven snapped her fingers, and a list appeared in her hand: “bath, dress, horses with white feathers on their heads, coachmen, coach, glass slippers, food you didn’t have to cook.”  She handed the list to Ashleigh. “I can only give you what you ask for. It’s a rule.”

“But I did ask for what I wanted.” Ashleigh leaned back on the window seat. “It just didn’t work out right.” She hung her head and picked at her perfect fingernail.

“I offered you the second chance if you came back by midnight.” Maven shrugged. “You made your choices. It was out of my hands.”

“But why are you here now?”

“You said the magic words.” Maven raised her wand to poof out. “I thought you might have a true wish this time. When you figure out what you want, wish for me.”  She poofed.

Ashleigh stood speechless for a moment, but she began thinking about what she did want, and it wasn’t the third tallest tower. But she would have to be more careful this time, not to be tricked into making a bad decision.

After Midnight – Early Scene

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“That’s what happens when you don’t think about one wish, but just wave your wand over everything,” Fiona said, with a smirk. “What are you going to do about it, since you now know how powerful you are, and you’ve learned that no one else can undo your hasty and ill-formed magic?”

Fiona stood there with her arms folded, tapping a black wand against her shoulder. She didn’t usually handle her wand unless she was casting a spell. She never just played with it like that. The crockery on her shelves seemed uneasy too, though they often vibrated or rattled. Today they seemed to shrink back as far from the edges of the shelves as they could get, huddling together, backs to the wall.

Maven swallowed. She really didn’t want to get the amphibian perspective, even though she had just doomed a number of people–dozens–to that fate this morning and was not sure how to change them back. “I don’t know what to do. I really didn’t mean to transform so many of them this morning, but they were going to be crushed in the crowd. They wouldn’t listen to me.”

“That was the first smart thing you have done since you came here.”  Fiona leaned back on her desk, her wand pointing at the floor, the tip of it inscribing small circles that sparkled for an instant before fading. “Now they remember why they don’t come running to magic to solve their problems. Magic makes things worse, unless carefully and sparing applied.”

“What have you seen in your crystal ball?” Maven hoped Fiona would go and look, that she would stop playing with the wand that seemed more and more ominous every moment.

“I haven’t looked,” Fiona said. “I’ve been listening to you and your story, and this ridiculous situation, which is now all yours. It’s up to you to sort it out.” She crossed her arms, with the tip of the wand still moving, as if it had a will of its own. “What are you going to do about it?”

Maven listened for any suggestion from Bump of Direction, but got no sense of even having intuition, much less anything helpful, except to get out of Fiona’s office and see if she could think more clearly away from Fiona and her wand.

“I’m going back out there and muddle through.”  Without waiting for any sort of instruction or orders, since it appeared there would be none, she took out her wand, swizzled it and poofed back to the grounds of the Palace.

Jones and Petunias

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Jones landed on his belly in a flower bed—petunias from the smell of it—never a good sign. But the Ions were gone, his brain sparkles mere ash which filled his mouth.

He made a few tentative moves to see if anything was broken, other than the flower stalks beneath him.  It was dark, always good, and the flower bed edged a path to a small cottage where the candle light from inside seemed both warm and welcoming.

The girl who came out on the porch did not. “YOU there! What are you doing in my flowers? Get up!”

Jones found his knees and scrambled up, wiping the sticky, ruined flowers from his chest. “I’m very sorry. I…got lost….” He glanced at the cottage and the dark woods surrounding it. “I saw your light and….I must have tripped…”  That was certainly true in one sense, and the flashbacks were getting closer together.

He took a closer look at the girl, who though short was not a girl at all, but a woman of substance, muscle, even menace. In her left hand was a lantern, but in the right was a dwarf sword half as long she was.  Standing on the porch, four steps up, she was still below Jones’s eye level, though he was a few inches shy of six feet tall. He looked into her eyes, but her ample bosom was directly in his line of sight, nestled snugly in her quilted bodice covered with chain mail.

“Why were you in the woods at this time of night?” She moved the lantern to see him better, keeping the sword pointed at his most tender spot. “Are you out of your mind?”

Jones didn’t have an answer, and standing up so quickly took its toll on his already stressed body. He smiled, gestured towards her to begin a plausible lie, and then passed out  face first on the path.

What Do Vampires Wish For?

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The lanky undead considered the question posed by the chubby and hardly fearless fairy godmother before him.

“What do vampires wish for? To end the bloody boredom. Decades of the same old hunt and suck, dodge the prey in the day, bite the blighter in the night.

“If you do fall in love with one of the prey, you basically see how long you can wait it out for them to die–of natural causes or of you, whether you finally decide make them or not.  Ennui. Tedium. And double such, if you do make one of them, as being undead always changes a person in ways you don’t expect.  While there might be undying love, it doesn’t appear to be between the undead.

“It’s fun at first, especially making a new identity every few years, setting up Swiss bank accounts and such, but it wears on one’s nerves, always having to move on and on after culling the herd in a particular area. Some poor sods are as bad at death as they were in life, but at least they have no bills, no debts, or none that anyone can collect. They just bumble around, whining to anyone who will listen, and thinking of watching the last sunrise.

“There’s no fun in anything after a while, especially when you just can’t feel anything any more except the thirst, and eventually that too goes away. Life is wasted on the living, whose dull senses can’t smell the death in every rose, every breeze, every musician whose work scrapes across the eardrum. Even robots grind their bearings away and click their endless popping and fizzing circuits.

“I’ve tried to be one of those ‘righteous’ types who only take out drug dealers and whatever definition one might have of lowlife scum, but bankers just taste better than junkies.  I suppose I do my bit to clean up the gene pool too, sometimes taking out the whole family, one at a time, especially the younger ones, before they can breed.

“I’m not into killing innocent animals, and the closest I can imagine being a vegetarian is slurping an emergency pint of green coconut milk. Shudder. But then I can hardly worry about starving to death, and madness is not very far from where I live with my healthy dose of paranoia and my penchant for the nightlife and underworld. The Shadow does know what evil lurks in the hearts of men:  me.

“So what can you do for me, fairy godmother? You can’t kill me, you can’t make me fall in love, and I can see through any glamour you can throw over me.” His eyes gave her the piercing look that was usually followed by his piercing kiss.

“You’re right of course,” Maven said. “If you don’t know what you want, I certainly can’t give it to you. It’s a rule.”