Wait, no. Not Batman. NaNoWriMo!
This month for NaNoWriMo, I’m shooting for One Writerly Thing every day.
Yesterday, I beta-read a short story for my Indyscribes pal Stephanie Cain, which was great fun (as always). It’s part of her Circle City Magic universe.
Today, I did some poking around and thinking about a call for submissions from Rhonda Parrish for an upcoming anthology called “Grimm, Grit, & Gasoline.” From the description:
The series name is named ‘Punked Up Fairy Tales’. As the name implies, each anthology in the series will be filled with twisted fairy tales. If all goes well there will be a steampunk fairy tales anthology, and a cyberpunk fairy tales anthology, and a solarpunk fairy tales anthology… you get the idea 🙂
The very first volume, Grimm, Grit and Gasoline, will be a dieselpunk and decopunk fairy tales anthology!
My first reaction was, “A what now?!”
I have some passing familiarity with Steampunk (like, I have seen cosplayers doing it, and I once owned (but didn’t manage to read before a student made off with it) a copy of Cassie Clare’s Infernal Devices, sooooo…. I know that it exists? Helpfully, Parrish provides more info about dieselpunk and decopunk:
Dieselpunk and decopunk are alternative history reimaginings of the WWI and WWII eras beginning with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and ending before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I’m looking for tales with the grit of roaring bombers, rumbling tanks, of ‘We Can Do It’, the Great Depression and old time gangsters or the glamour (real or imagined) of flappers, Hollywood starlets, smoky jazz, elegant cars and Radio City Music Hall.Plus fairy tales.
For example: a ‘mend and make do’ take on the Elves and the Shoemaker, a trench warfare version of The Emperor’s New Clothes, or Hansel and Gretel as Bonnie and Clyde. The possibilities are limitless.
I’m not going to lie, I’m really struggling with how one would portray this in words, absent a visual medium. Charming street urchins with crank-operated… whatevers? Flappers… with mohawks?
I asked Google, obviously, and basically went, “Oh! It’s just Batman: The Animated Series!”
So that (and this blog post, and updating my NaNo tracker–worth clicking just for the vintage userpic, circa 2006) is my Writerly Thing for today.
Now to go ponder the possibilities of a deco-with-words-only fairy tale…