Unique To This Moment, or Telling Time the Fairy Tale Way

Here's a random fact about me. I really love clever ways of marking the passage of time. Why say, "in a year", when you can say, "when the barren trees are ready for harvest again"?I especially love it when it illustrates a character. Let me explain... Better yet, here are some examples:When a character uses the phrase, "a month of Sundays," I imagine an older, heavyset religious woman--Presbyterian specifically. To be fair, my vision is this specific because it was a phrase often uttered by Mrs. Rachel Lynde on Avonlea (a favorite series of mine when I was a kid and continues to be so).The term, a fortnight casts my mind back to my historical fiction books and I can see a woman in a long gown, sitting in a castle keep, plotting and planning political intrigue. And a British accent because, why not?Often historical fantasy characters have to account for their ages. Young people will refer to how many summers they've seen, while older characters lament how many winters are left to them.All these examples show poetic ways to explain how a person perceives time. And fairy tales has the most well-known phrase of all:Once upon a time...An occurrence that is unique to this moment gives the reader the impression that the story following that phrase has never happened before or since. When I hear those four words, I'm immediately in a fairy tale.Would it surprise you that out of fifty-eight stories, only eleven have the words, Once Upon a Time, in the story? And only two out of the eleven start with once upon a time! Yet, I still know that when I hear those words I'll conjure far away lands and magical tales in my mind.What's your favorite passage of time phrase?On a separate note, I want to thank my readers, who now number over one hundred! Now that's a way to mark time! 

Once Upon a Blog Post

My writings have been sporadic at best. I can only blame myself for trying to be so ambitious. It was a little crazy of me to think that I could write two novels and still the time and ability have to come up with original stories for a blog every week. Funny enough, I think my scope was too small. Now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I should have included other materials within the realm of fairy tales and fables. Perhaps consider the current trend of “revisionist mythology” that is sweeping books, movies, and TV.

I’ll start with Once Upon a Time… on ABC. The show takes place in a fictional town in Maine (please save your Stephen King assumptions) called Storybrooke were all the characters from fairytales and legends have been transported by a curse conjured by, you guessed it, an evil queen.

Specifically the evil queen in Snow White.

The show is now in its second season, so I won’t try and summarize the entire show thus far. Suffice it to say, good tries to trump evil and at every turn craziness ensues. I went into the show with low expectations considering how poorly fantasy shows do in the ratings on network TV (I’ll talk about Merlin in a future post). I have been more than pleasantly surprised by its popularity among other things.

The clichés are self-evident. The woman representing good is blonde and blue-eyed, while the antagonist is a dark eyed beauty with black-brown hair. I was ready for Disney-level simplicity. Good is always good and evil can’t help but be so and must lose. But a funny thing happened when they let go of the obvious. The protagonist has a checkered past complete with a prison stay. The antagonist started out as good, but through a series of unfortunate events embraced the easy way—being bad.

It’s fairytales versus pop-psychology.

“There by the grace of God” club meets Of Mice and Men.

I don’t know if it qualifies as a full-blown guilty pleasure, but it speaks to the child at heart who grew up and wondered what happened to everyone after we closed the book. The child in me gets angry when evil gets the upper hand, but the adult appreciates the realism. Good or evil, I think Once Upon a Time…is a show anyone who loves fairy tales should give a chance.

Look back for more post about this show in the future.