I did not feel like working this afternoon, so I did a bit of writing for a project I’d like to see take off in the next days (due date the last of May), and then I brew me a cup of tea and dug out one of the (virtual) stack of Tor.com novellas I have here. Short, high quality fantasy fiction – what’s better on a rainy Saturday afternoon?

Red as blood, white as bone is a fairy-tale story by Theodora Goss, a wonderful writer with a great catalog of excellent books. It is a deceptively simple story about stories, and their importance and value. It starts like a re-telling of Cinderella, then swerves in Angela Carter territory (but better, in many respects, than Carter’s Blood Chamber stories), only to finally morph into a story of resistance against oppression and dictatorship.
All in one neat package that you read in two hours, while sipping tea.

It is very different from the sort of fantasy I write, and yet it is a source of inspiration, and a great example of how language and structure can be used to tell stories that are not as expected, but that deliver exactly what we did not know we needed.

Absolutely beautiful.