Sharp Words

I’m sick. Sick and sad and uninspired. Stupid cold.

So here’s me cheating on my blogging by posting the start of a story I started a while ago, and mean to finish once I get three or five other Works in Progress out of my head and into my hard drive (and thumb drive, and back-up disk. Save early and often, peoples.)

Nieves

When I was very young, I asked my mother what had happened to the smallest finger on her left hand.

“I cut it off,” she told me, miming the chop of a knife with the flat of her right hand. One swing, sure and swift. She’d smiled when she said it, no doubt meaning to keep the conversation light. She often told outrageous tales just to see my eyes grow big. And when I asked, “Truly?” she’d shake her head and we would giggle over my credulity like a pair of mean little girls.

I did not realize until I was much older that she spun those fanciful tales a purpose. She meant to teach me to tell a lie from the truth, and to distrust even the people I loved the most.

Teach Me Tonight is a blog that looks at the romance genre from an academic perspective. I’ve enjoyed many of their posts and am just tickled that Laura Vivanco chose to mention Ember in todays post, Beyond the Fairytale which discusses the Cinderella motif in romance novels.

On the subject of re-imagining and retelling fairytales, Eloisa James wrote an article called “My Fairy Godmother, Myself” in which she argues that

Cinderella was never about the prince. It was about the wonders of a magical transformation. [...] That turns out to be the key to rewritten Cinderellas: the heroine learns to honor and appreciate her pre-transformation self, forcing the prince to do so as well.

I’m not really sure if that would be true of Embers, but maybe we can discuss that in the comments.

My first instinct was to post and say that of course it isn’t true of Ember. The second paragraph of the story is:

This is no fairytale. The real story doesn’t even start with me; it starts with the Prince.

I would also have added that one of the reasons I wrote Ember was to write a Cinderella story that was not about the cosmetic transformation or the ball or the competition between Cinderella and her stepsisters for the prince, but to explore the line that fairy tales so often draw between good girls and bad women, between virtuous princesses and wicked queens.

But here’s my question and the real point of my post: Do I have any right to comment? Would it stifle discussion?

I’ve talked before about learning to let go of my stories once they’re written. And I’ve talked about how it’s important for me that Ember be a free story, since I would not have written it if I hadn’t needed some content for my website. But now it seems to me that the biggest part of letting go, and of making Ember free, is letting other people make what they will of it without my input or explanations of what I meant.

And yes, I am aware that this post adds another layer of the very sort of explanation I just decided I shouldn’t do. But letting go is a process, people–a journey. I’m working on it. :o)

That’s how I felt when I hopped on the Internets this morning to read Sherry Thomas’s combined review of Ember and Like a Thief in the Night at Dear Author.

Many, many thanks to the bidder who won the Ember auction with a bid of $35. She asked to remain anonymous, so I’m not printing her name, but I will sing her praises. In addition to being generous, and having excellent taste in reading material, she is a kind and humble person–far more so than me.

Because, let me tell you, if I had something before everyone else got it, I would gloat so much. How much? A lot. Just watch me spend the rest of the week gloating about the ARC of Meljean Brook’s Demon Night I won over at Dear Author.

I’m so busy getting my gloat on, I didn’t even finish singing the praises of the kind, noble, humble bidder who even went so far as to donate an amount higher than her winning bid to Mercy Corps.

So, let me resume:

Dear Mystery Lady,

I hope you enjoy your advance copy of Ember. Specifically, I hope you enjoy the car chase and the gun fight in Chapter 8. I hope you are shocked and amazed by the heartwarming alien abduction in chapter 9. Most importantly, I hope you are touched and amused by the surrealistic denouement in which Ember wakes up in her bedroom in Lancaster, California and realizes that the whole story was just dream she got from eating pork rinds and pop rocks with Pabst Blue Ribbon beer while watching her little sister’s DVD of Disney’s Cinderella on a replay loop.

(Sure, we both know that’s not what happens, but everyone else has to wait.) Happy reading.

Thank you again.

Bettie

No, I haven’t gone all money-hungry. IT’S FOR CHARITY. For charity, people. Here’s how it works:

1. Starting Wednesday, November 28th, you send me an email naming an amount you’d be willing to donate to Mercy Corps charity. (bettiesharpe at gmail dot com)
2. I will post the highest bid for each day on this blog–no names, just bid amounts.
3. The highest bid I receive by 12:00 pm Pacific on Wednesday, December 5 2007 wins.
4. You, the generous winner, go to the Mercy Corps site and donate. You choose which program your money goes to. Crisis in Sudan, Cyclone Victims in Bangladesh, Where Most Needed–pick whatever program moves you. You’ll also get the tax write-off :o)
5. When you donate online, choose the option to donate in honor of someone. Enter “Ember”, and have it sent to my email: bettiesharpe at gmail dot com.
6. Once you’ve completed the donation, save an electronic version of your web receipt and email it to me. The web receipt will not list your full credit card number, but it will list the amount you donated and your address (same as if you won a book in a contest, and you had to send in a mailing address). I’ll treat this information as confidential and will delete the file after I’ve seen it.
7. I send you a copy of the full PDF of Ember–weeks before anyone else will read it, and you (the generous winner) get to join the small and select club of fabulous people who have been kind enough to read Ember in its entirety: Jodie, Bam, Kate R. and My Mom.

But wait! There’s more! Along with your early copy of the Ember eBook, you’ll get:

• The smirky satisfaction of knowing what’s going to happen before almost anyone else does.
• The the warm glow that comes from helping fellow human beings who are in need.
• An income tax deduction in the amount of your donation.

But I thought you said Ember was free?
Ember is free. I wrote it intending for it to be a free eBook, and it will stay that way through the end of its run on The Serial, and for the foreseeable future on my website.

Why Mercy Corps?
Because 90% of the money you donate to Mercy Corps goes directly to charitable work around the globe. Because they fund a wide variety of innovative programs. Because they need to feel better after losing the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore.

If I win the auction, can I taunt other readers? What about spoilers?
If you win the auction, you can taunt to your heart’s content. Taunt early and taunt often, but DO NOT reveal any spoilers.