Still on quests. Tomorrow will be the last day of them. We’re also back in Russia. (Yay! More Baba Yaga! Three of them, in fact!) Maryushka is something of a Cinderella or a Beauty. She lives with two selfish, vain

Today is another quest story, this one Chinese. Though the details vary, quest stories are very similar across cultures. (Joseph Campbell and all). But what I like about quest stories is the way our questors go about it. So often,

This is another quest story, though a very different quest. It’s also a very classic story, often told as a ballad. You can still hear the ballad in the written story here, in the dialogue between Tamlane and Janet. Janet

The Two Brothers is a quest story. After a completely irrelevant opening (which borrows from another story – Donkey Cabbages) having to do with golden coins that never appear in the story again, it’s about two brothers, an entire menagerie

Staying with Russian stories for the moment, we have The Frog Princess. I’ve read a very similar story with a Chinese setting. The nearest European story is either “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”, but the genders are

The Twelve Months is an Eastern European fairy tale, and this version here is Slavic. My name might be Irish (and I am Irish on my father’s side), but my mother’s family are German-Slavs, and it’s from that side of

I had intended to start with an Irish story from a book of Irish tales that I’m editing, but it had formatting problems. It’ll come in a few days. Instead, I’m starting with a story that I loved from my

It’s October again, and that means that I’m tackling the Write 31 Days challenge again. The challenge is to blog for 31 days on a single theme/subject. Once again, I’m going to tackle fairy tales as a subject. And this

Sticking with a transformation theme a little longer…

I had swans on the brain, and so the story I thought of was The Children of Lir.