Three Little Visits
Last year, when I was living in Mexico, I didn’t have access to any in-person writing workshops or cons. In an effort to continuously improve my craft, I found some wonderful writing workshops online. I attended The Brainery’s Science Fiction Fairy Tales class, in which I wrote the first draft of the story THREE LITTLE VISITS, which will be out later this year in the After the Happily Ever After Anthology.
The goal of the workshop was to create a science fiction re-boot of classic fairy tales. Every week we would read a new fairy tale, then we would find alternatives to the classic tale across different cultures and time periods. After that we would focus in on a science theme and do some research (starting with some great curated material from the instructor). Finally, we would come up with our own new short story. Sometimes it was just an element taken from the original. Sometimes it was the structure or the theme or a certain type of character. Sometimes the story came out so far off that you couldn’t tell that it had any inkling of a relationship to the original fairy tale. The class was fantastic and I highly recommend it. I wrote 9 new short stories in a 12 week period.
THREE LITTLE VISITS began as a retelling of the Three Little Pigs. This is probably one of the most recognizable of the fairy tales. The many retellings of this story often stick fairly close to the original circa 1886. I loved the rule of three in this tale but I knew I didn’t want to anthropomorphize animals. I focused in on the wolf character and the science. The science topic for this fairy tale was animal testing. That’s a topic that could’ve led me back to my old vegetarian lifestyle.
The science that interested me the most is xenotransplantation: the process of grafting or transplanting organs or tissues between members of different species. I’ve been fascinated by this for years because of the potential in transplantation. And of course, the species has to be a pig to throwback to the original.
This is a story that doesn’t look much like The Three Little Pigs, but it’s a wild, fun ride and I am thrilled that it will be published and available later this year.
