Dearest Squad,
Only a few more chapters of Thieftess Thursdays (and the concurrent writing essays) to go!
When I am finished posting all of the Thieftess chapters on Patreon, I will post some more writing essays, as well as a novella or two that y’all may not have access to if you haven’t bought the anthology. (If there are any short stories you think everyone should see because they haven’t gotten enough love, please let me know! almost no one leaves comments, so your chances of getting whatever you want are very high if you just respond.)
Love you, Squad!
Thank you for your support!
xox
Princess Alethea
(Please support me on Substack and/or Patreon!)
Once upon a time, a librarian asked me how many fairy tale, folklore, and classic fantasy references I had made in Enchanted. I had only listened to Katy Kellgren’s audio narration about 4 times at that point (I lost count after 10) and I was about to go on a long road trip with my parents, so I took out a notebook and pen and hit PLAY.
By the end of the audiobook I had a list of 36, which I published on my blog.
I have never done this with any of the other Woodcutter books, though I was tempted after one reviewer of Hero said I “ran out of fairy tales in Enchanted, so the author just made up her own for this book.”
Excuse me? Hero was based on “Master Maid” (Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book), “Hansel and Gretel,” Hercules, Shakespeare (remember Hero from Much Ado About Nothing?)…Thursday even makes a cameo with her pirate ship full of Simons (“The Story of the Seven Simons,” Andrew Lang’s Crimson Fairy Book)…but I had no desire to waste my time arguing with someone who clearly wasn’t as well versed in fairy tales and folklore as I.
That didn’t stop me from carrying on with my Easter basket, however.
From time to time, I wonder how many references I have seeded in each of the Woodcutter books. Perhaps when I read them all again before Endless (Wednesday’s story), I will make another list. These moments are so fun to write. It’s also fun when I forget about them and read the book again later. Such a delightful surprise!
I can go ahead and tell you a few I wrote into Thieftess, because I jotted down notes for this essay as I was finishing up the book:
—“For an island in the middle of nowhere, this place gets a lot of visitors.”
Crow says this at the beginning of Ch. 50 (Death Keepers of the Permafrost). This line is absolutely a reference to Gilligan’s Island, an old classic TV show I watched all the time when I was a kid about a handful of people stranded on an island. It had a fabulous intro and outro theme song…and a surprising number of special guest stars (including a young Kurt Russell!). I suspect Thieftess’s ensemble cast owes a lot to my love of Gilligan’s Island.
—“He was doing the best he could. They all were.”
At the time I wrote Ch. 54 (Madame Reynard), I was also doing the best I could. Writing every day, in horrible pain, in horrible debt, hanging in there one word at a time until I got to the end of the book. Which felt like it would never come. A bit of hypomanic dialogue started looping inside my head:
Q: “What are you gonna do now?”
A: “I’m gonna do the best I can.”
Many of you might remember this exchange from The Nightmare Before Christmas. But it’s actually an Easter egg in The Nightmare Before Christmas, a call back to a Cab Calloway line in Old Man of the Mountain, a Betty Boop cartoon from 1933. My parents bought some VHS tapes full of Betty Boop cartoons that my little sister and I watched ad nauseam when we were kids. Snow White and Old Man in the Mountain were our favorites in the set.
Dad took Soteria and me to see The Nightmare Before Christmas when it released in 1993. When the credits rolled at the end of the film, she and I stared at each other in awe.
Dad slept through the whole thing.
—“This is a knife.”
Nabi says this in Ch. 54 (Madame Reynard).
No spoilers, but I freely admit that this line was 100% a send up to one of the great Fairy Tale Heroes of the 1980s: Crocodile Dundee.
—Athanasia Pendragon, author of the Legendarium (Ch 55)
There is a woman who constantly uses my email address to sign up for crap she doesn’t want. Political emails, random newsletters, the works. Her name is Athanasia Kontis. She lives in upstate NY. If you happen to know her, please tell her to cut it out, thanks.
Using Athanasia’s name in Thieftess felt a little like using my own name without 100% cheating. (Jane Austen writes about Janes all the time—could I have called her Alethea? Nah…)
While “Pendragon” is indeed a reference to King Arthur Himself, the true reason the name made an appearance in my fairy tale World is because of Howl, or “Howl Pendragon,” as he was known to some.
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones is one of my Top 5 Books of All Time (sorry, y’all, I like the book way better than the film). This book was the inspiration for my publishing logo (Alethea’s Moving Castle). But Thieftess is not the first time the name Pendragon has been mentioned in my fairy tales. You’ll have to read The Glass Mountain to find the first one.
Hey, Disney makes references to their own fairy tales all the time. Why can’t I?
How many Easter eggs have you caught in my stories?
xox
Princess Alethea
My Writing Patreon has been keeping me alive – please consider supporting if you don’t already. Thank you!
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