Today’s the big day! After months of working, planning and polishing, Once: Six Historically Inspired Fairytales is now available for Amazon Kindle!
Six fairytales you thought you knew, set against a tapestry of historical backgrounds.
A lonely girl plots revenge in the shadow of a mountain. A stolen princess fumbles a century backward. A dwarfish man crafts brilliant automatons. A Polish Jew strikes matches against the Nazis. A dead girl haunts a crystal lake. A terrified princess searches a labyrinth. A rich collection of six historically inspired retellings, Once is a new generation of fairytales for those who thought they’d heard the tales in all their forms.
Featuring the novellas of Elisabeth Grace Foley, Rachel Heffington, J Grace Pennington, Emily Ann Putzke, Suzannah Rowntree, and Hayden Wand.
Help spread the excitement for Once by sharing news of the release on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any other favorite social media, using the hashtag #OnceFairytales! Add it to-read on Goodreads here; and you could also add it to any of your favorite Listopia lists for fairytale retellings, historical fantasy, et cetera.
And now, as a treat to whet your appetite for the collection, here’s a short excerpt from my own contribution, The Mountain of the Wolf:
Away to the right, a dim light filtered from one of the smeared windows in the bunkhouse. Rosa Jean shut her eyes. The ache was there again, not just in her head but in her very being, worse than it had been this afternoon. A long line of unwashed tin plates and cups jangled through her memory; endless pots of beans and endless sourdough biscuits. Men—fat men and thin men, unshaven men, shoveling food into their mouths, the odor of tobacco hanging round them—loud ones and taciturn ones, and the scant silver and copper coins they counted out in payment. Always a prickly guard to keep up for her own safety, and never any conversation more congenial than Charlie Conlan’s. And in between them, long spaces of vacancy…She realized dimly that the one who had spoken to her tonight was the first in months who had thought to say thank you.
And then he had said that. It was always this way. A moment’s lightening of the load, a moment’s false peace, and then—the reminder.
Rosa Jean opened her eyes. The light in the bunkhouse was out.
From somewhere far, far above, in those mountains against which the ranch lay huddled, the howl of a solitary wolf fell like a dark meteor through the night. Wolves’ dens were up among the peaks, too well hidden for any hunter to find without risking his life. Packs of them preyed on the herds of wild horses that ran in the mountains, vanishing into their fastnesses afterwards too quickly for the occasional mustanger who spotted them to pursue. Her brother had taken a shot at a fleeing wolf once up in the mountains, but missed.
In the darkness of the doorway, with her head resting against her hand, Rosa Jean brought her teeth together slowly and held them clenched tight. As long as that cry from the mountain was there to remind her, she would not weaken. She would keep to the lonely course she had set.
Now, don’t forget to make the rounds of all our participating authors’ blogs to get a taste of each story! All of us are sharing a little excerpt to celebrate release day. Along the way you’ll find