FREE Today: The Red Shoes

"The Red Shoes" is free on Amazon today.  This is its last day on Amazon Prime. Tomorrow it goes on Smashwords.  I'm trying a rotation thing--the minimum 3 months on Prime so I can give out free days, and then I release on Smashwords, which in turn farms me out to a bunch of other book retailers.  I make a little bit of money on Smashwords, and it increases my visibility online, so I feel it's worth it while I'm selling so few copies of my work.

I wanna talk a bit about this story.  It's based on Has Christian Anderson's The Red Shoes.  (He's turning in his grave, like, really.)  A cautionary tale about what happens when you don't listen to your mother and wear scandalous red shoes to church, I tried to keep, not the plot, but the important aspects of the story.  The rules against red shoes, the dancing, and the painful punishment for disobeying, those are all still there.

I love working fairy tales into something new.  (If I ever get my Red Riding Hood done you will just die over the awesomeness.)  I love the versatility of the stories--you can do almost anything to them. People love them because they know them. I really love writing fairy tales in an erotic or horror genre because the original tales were gruesome and violent. (Rape, cannibalism, infanticide, take your pick.)

If you want some great adult-centric fairy tales I suggest Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow's fairy tale anthologies.  I started with Snow White, Blood Red.