Category: Creative Writing

Sarcastic Beauty and the Beast

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

(Somehow I felt the need to make another Sarcastic Fairytale telling. Apologies in advance!)

Come and listen to a tale as old as time…

A wealthy widowed merchant lives in a mansion with his three daughters. All are equal in beauty, but the youngest, Beauty (Talk about a self absorbed name! And what if she HADN’T been pretty? What would you call her? “Ugly”?), is kind and pure of heart; while the two elders, in contrast, are wicked, selfish, vain and secretly taunt and treat Beauty more like a servant than a sister (Sounds more like Cinderella to me). The merchant eventually loses all of his wealth in a tempest at sea (Wait, so he loaded ALL his wealth, including his house and money onto a ship and it sinks? What? Or was it kind of a wizard of oz situation where the house gets sucked into the storm. But then it wouldn’t be a tempest. Or at sea.).

He and his daughters are consequently forced to live in a small farmhouse and work for their living (So they were like… normal people now?). After some years of this, the merchant hears that one of the trade ships he had sent off has arrived back in port, having escaped the destruction of its compatriots (And it took this ship HOW long to get it’s backside back to the port? Perhaps he took the scenic route? But how does that work? All ocean looks like ocean from what I can tell). He returns to the city to discover whether it contains anything valuable. Before leaving, he asks his daughters if they wish for him to bring any gifts back for them. The oldest two ask for clothing, jewels and the finest dresses possible, thinking his wealth has returned (Not yet, ladies. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch!). Beauty is satisfied with the promise of a rose, as none grow in their part of the country (“Daddy, get my a flower grown in south Arabia!” That’s strangely specific but hey! Who am I to judge. No one made me the mother goose of fairytales). The merchant, to his dismay, finds that his ship’s cargo has been seized to pay his debts, leaving him without money to buy his daughters their presents (Bummer).

During his return, the merchant becomes lost in a forest (Then how’d he find his way through GETTING there? Perhaps consider a GPS). Seeking shelter, he enters a dazzling palace (That just so happens to be in the middle of some random forest that no one has ever discovered or noticed. Nicely convenient as always). A hidden figure opens the giant doors and silently invites him in (How does that even work? Not to mention that’s like super shady.). The merchant finds tables inside laden with food and drink, which seem to have been left for him by the palace’s invisible owner. The merchant accepts this gift and spends the night there (Yeah, let’s spend the night in an abandoned castle with some creepy person in it!). The next morning as the merchant is about to leave, he sees a rose garden and recalls that Beauty had desired a rose. Upon picking the loveliest rose he can find, the merchant is confronted by a hideous “Beast” (Just “Beast”? No description? For all we know his “Beast” could be a furry monster about two feet high.) which tells him that for taking his most precious possession (A rose? I didn’t know the beast was a gardener…? Either that, or he has some rotten possessions. I mean, I like roses, but they eventually die and they’re, you know, flowers? Why does everyone treasure flowers so much in this story? It’s kind of weird?) after accepting his hospitality, the merchant must die (Whoa. Heavy price just for plucking a flower, don’t you think? Also, that’s kind of an awkward exchange. *Plucks flower* *beast materializes out of nowhere* “You must die”). The merchant begs to be set free, arguing that he had only picked the rose as a gift for his youngest daughter (So SHE should be the blame). The Beast agrees to let him give the rose to Beauty, but only if the merchant will return.

The merchant is upset, but accepts this condition. The Beast sends him on his way, with jewels and fine clothes for his daughters, and stresses that Beauty must never know about his deal. The merchant, upon arriving home, tries to hide the secret from Beauty, but she pries it from him (Blabber mouth) and willingly goes to the Beast’s castle. The Beast receives her graciously and informs her that she is now mistress of the castle (“I’m Queen of the Castle! I’m Queen of the Castle! Bawahahahah!” Sorry. Show quote.) and he is her servant (She could order her servant to set her free maybe? This is kind of a weird deal). He gives her lavish clothing and food and carries on lengthy conversations with her. Every night, the Beast asks Beauty to marry him, only to be refused each time (“Our children would be the ugliest things!”). After each refusal, Beauty dreams of a handsome prince who pleads with her to answer why she keeps refusing him, to which she replies that she cannot marry the Beast because she loves him only as a friend (Aw… stuck in the friend zone. Tough luck buddy). Beauty does not make the connection between the handsome prince and the Beast and becomes convinced that the Beast is holding the prince captive somewhere in the castle (Wow, some “friend” Beauty is). She searches and discovers multiple enchanted rooms, but never the prince from her dreams.

For several months, Beauty lives a life of luxury at the Beast’s palace, having every whim catered to by servants, with no end of riches to amuse her and an endless supply of exquisite finery to wear. Eventually she becomes homesick and begs the Beast to allow her to go see her family. He allows it on the condition that she returns exactly a week later (A servant giving orders? Unheard of!). Beauty agrees to this and sets off for home with an enchanted mirror and ring. The mirror allows  her to see what is going on back at the Beast’s castle (Just because she’s nosy like that), and the ring allows her to return to the castle in an instant when turned three times around her finger (Or she could just tap her magical sparkly red shoes together three times and say, “There’s no place like home!”). Her older sisters are surprised to find her well fed and dressed in finery. They are envious when they hear of her happy life at the castle, and, hearing that she must return to the Beast on a certain day, beg her to stay another day, even putting onion in their eyes to make it appear as though they are weeping (I would be weeping for real if I stuck a veggie into my eyeball!). They hope that the Beast will be angry with Beauty for breaking her promise and eat her alive (Doesn’t Beauty have a lovely family?). Beauty’s heart is moved by her sisters’ false show of love, and she agrees to stay (Of course she does).

Beauty begins to feel guilty about breaking her promise to the Beast and uses the mirror to see him back at the castle. She is horrified to discover that the Beast is lying half-dead from heartbreak (like a heart attack or…? I am not aquainted with this medical condition) near the rose bushes her father had stolen from and she immediately uses the ring to return to the Beast.

Beauty weeps over the Beast, saying that she loves him (Whoa, whoa, whoa! What happened to that whole “Just friends” bit?). When her tears strike him (“Ow! You just hit me with your tears!”), the Beast is transformed into the handsome prince from Beauty’s dreams. The Prince informs her that long ago a fairy turned him into a hideous beast after he refused to let her in from the rain, and that only by finding true love, despite his ugliness, could the curse be broken. He and Beauty are married (So much for being “just friends”. Whatever.) and they live happily ever after together. (yay them.)

The End

The Sarcastic Little Mermaid

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

Gather round children and hear a tale! A tale of how a mermaid loved a prince so much, that she was willing to dump her entire family and fishy friends for him only to die tragically (spoiler alert!)

Ladies and gents, I present: The Sarcastic Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid (She has no name. Just “The little mermaid”. What would her name if she wasn’t little? The medium mermaid? The big mermaid? You can’t just boil people down to fry sizes!) dwells in an underwater kingdom with her father (the sea king or mer-king), her dowager grandmother, and her five older sisters, each of whom had been born one year apart (Her mom had like NO rest at all between children). When a mermaid turns 15, she is permitted to swim to the surface for the first time to glimpse the world above, and when the sisters become old enough, each of them visits the upper world one at a time every year (Two of them at a time is not allowed because why?). As each returns, the Little Mermaid listens longingly to their various descriptions of the world inhabited by human beings (“It smells of rotting eggs and you get sunburn! Ain’t earth great?”).

When the Little Mermaid’s turn comes, she rises up to the surface, watches a birthday celebration being held on a ship in honor of a handsome prince, and falls in love (By looking at his face of manliness) with him from a safe distance (Okay, so if you’re at a safe distance, how can you even tell what he looks like in the first place? And even if you can, talk about SHALLOW!). A violent storm hits (Out of nowhere. Apparently the dude in the crow’s nest was taking a nap or whatever), and the Little Mermaid saves the prince from drowning (Wait, he’s on a ship and he can’t even swim. Get a life jacket!). She delivers him unconscious to the shore near a temple (What temple? Wouldn’t she have to like, walk TO the temple? Bad architecture design to put a temple right at the waters edge, just sayin’). Here, she waits until a young girl from the temple and her companions find him. To her dismay, the prince never sees the Little Mermaid or even realizes that it was she who had originally saved his life (wasn’t like he was unconscious or anything).

The Little Mermaid becomes melancholy and asks her grandmother if humans can live forever and if they can breathe under water. The grandmother explains that humans have a much shorter lifespan than merfolks’ 300 years, but that when mermaids die, they turn to sea foam and cease to exist, while humans have an eternal soul that lives on in heaven (So who REALLY gets the raw end of the deal here?). The Little Mermaid, longing for the prince and an eternal soul (She wants a soul? Not creepy at all!), eventually visits the Sea Witch in a dangerous section of the ocean (And that would be where? Marina trench perhaps). The witch willingly (*Ominous music*) helps her by selling her a potion that gives her legs in exchange for her tongue (And they made this into a Disney movie. Totally kid friendly material there! “I’ll give you my tongue and you hand over a leg and we’re even”). The Sea Witch warns that once she becomes a human, she will never be able to return to the sea (Unless you go swimming or buy some scuba gear). Consuming the potion will make her feel as if a sword is being passed through her body (Okay, ow), yet when she recovers, she will have two human legs and will be able to dance like no human has ever danced before (What does DANCING have to do with anything? I should hope you can WALK). However, she will constantly feel as if she is walking on sharp knives and as though her toes are bleeding (And she agrees to this?). In addition, she will obtain a soul only if she wins the love of the prince and marries him, for then a part of his soul will flow into her (Oh…okay?). Otherwise, at dawn on the first day after he marries another woman, the Little Mermaid will die brokenhearted and disintegrate into sea foam upon the waves. (Welll this sounds like a wonderful deal that couldn’t possibly grow wrong! Where do I sign?)

The Little Mermaid agrees to this arrangement (Yeah, dump your family and life for a prince you met from “a safe distance” with only a slight chance of winning his love and you will most likely die alone and broken hearted. Sounds fair) and the Sea Witch cuts off her tongue. The Little Mermaid swims to the surface near the palace of the prince and drinks the potion. She is found by the prince, who is mesmerized by her beauty and grace (Alright, everyone in the story is officially just plain upright shallow. Great moral here), even though she is considered by everyone in the kingdom as dumb and mute (I can vouch for the dumb part. Still can’t believe she went through with it). Most of all, he likes to see her dance, and she dances for him despite suffering excruciating pain with every step (Lovely). Soon, the Little Mermaid becomes the prince’s favorite companion and accompanies him on many of his outings. When the prince’s parents order their son to marry the neighboring princess in an arranged marriage, the prince tells the Little Mermaid he will not because he does not love the princess. He goes on to say he can only love the young woman from the temple, who he believes rescued him (But you were unconscious! What?). It turns out that the princess from the neighboring kingdom is the temple girl, sent there only temporarily to be educated (On what, may I ask? Taking, er, temple classes? I don’t know). The prince loves her, and the royal wedding is announced at once.

The prince and princess celebrate on a wedding ship, and the Little Mermaid’s heart breaks. She thinks of all that she has sacrificed and of all the pain she has endured. She despairs, thinking of the death that awaits her, but before dawn, her sisters rise out of the water and bring her a dagger that the Sea Witch has given them in exchange for their long, beautiful hair. If the Little Mermaid slays the prince with the dagger and lets his blood drip on her feet (Again, totally kid friendly. Disney accidentally left out THAT part), she will become a mermaid once more, all her suffering will end, and she will live out her full life in the ocean with her family (Whom she dumped for a shallow prince whom she met from “A safe distance”).

However, the Little Mermaid cannot bring herself to kill the sleeping prince lying with his new bride (Whoa. Creeper alert!), and she throws the dagger and herself off the ship into the water just as dawn breaks. Her body dissolves into foam, but instead of ceasing to exist, she feels the warm sun and discovers that she has turned into a luminous and ethereal earthbound spirit, a daughter of the air. As the Little Mermaid ascends into the atmosphere, she is greeted by other daughters who tell her she has become like them because she strove with all her heart to obtain an immortal soul. Because of her selflessness, she will be given the chance to earn her own soul by doing good deeds to mankind for 300 years (Not long at all! By the way, how can she do good deeds if she’s dead?) and will one day rise up into the Kingdom of God (One day. But for now she will live out her days in pain and suffering. Yeah, she totally lived happily ever after).

The Sufferings of a Writer

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

1. Staying up til two thirty in the morning on a school night because you’re in the middle of a really exciting chapter.

2. Carrying a notebook and pencils/pens everywhere you go.

3. Getting a really good plot idea out of nowhere and having to drop everything to jot it down.

4. Eavesdropping on people’s conversations for dialogue ideas.

5. Getting a new computer and being thrilled at the prospect of all that free file space, and then having half of it filled up with Word documents within a month.

6. Having so many Word documents that you don’t even remember what some of them are..

7. Becoming stunned whenever someone asks you what your book is about (as if you could sum it up in a sentence, right?).

8. Being given an assignment to write a two-page short story and turning in a twenty-page one instead.

9. Envisioning a cute/funny scene in your head during a boring class and suddenly someone asks “What are you smiling about?” and you have to stammer something dumb.

10. When someone tells you your sad scene made them cry and being like “YES! VICTORY!”.

11. When you’re confused about something, putting two characters together and having them fight about it.

12. Being able to turn everything that happens to you into a scene for your story.

13. Getting inspiration not just from English class, but also from History, Biology, Foreign Language, Art and Math.

14. It annoys you when people use the wrong form of ‘you’re’ and ‘their’.

15. You correct people’s grammar in your head.

16. You know every little thing about a character… except their name.

17. It makes you slightly concerned when people look in your Google history that they will question your mental health.

18. You question your own mental health fairly often.

19. When someone walks in and you’re in the middle of writing you’re like:

GoawayI’mnotdoinganythingsuspiciouswhileIminusmyworddocumentveryquickly

20. You want to get (or already have) a sign on your door that says ‘For Your Safety, Do Not Disturb the Writer While She is Inspired.’

21. When someone suggests you edit out a part of your story that part instantly becomes your favorite part.

22. All your favorite songs either remind you of a scene or a character in your story (or perhaps inspired them).

23. Complimenting your looks, skills and personality are all right, but when someone compliments your writing without knowing it’s yours, your day is made.

24. You want desperately someone to critique your writing and at the same time you don’t.

25. You have that one character (maybe more than one) that you know better than your own family members, sometimes better than yourself, that one that you love so dearly and you can see them in your head and hear their voice like they’re actually there and they’re so real to you.

26. You feel guilty when you have to do something mean to a character you like.

27. You love all your characters, even the ones that readers aren’t supposed to like, even the ones that you know you’d hate if they existed, because you understand them.

28. Putting your character in a tense situation makes your heart speed up.

29. You have conversations with your characters in your head (and sometimes outside ).

30. You have a quirky thing you do that gets your creative juices flowing and inspires you, and if anyone else knew about it they’d think your insane.

31. You cry when you have to kill your favorite character.

32. You critique other people’s books while you’re reading them.

33. Everything inspires you some days, other days you can’t get a good idea for the life of you.

34. You get all excited to write before you do it, but when you actually sit down and open the Word document, you get about one sentence done in an hour.

35. You join rpg’s for ‘writing practice’ because partly you can make up characters that don’t have to be super complex, partly you don’t know what’s going to happen so it’s a challenge there, and partly they’re just fun.

36. You’re that person who writes paragraph-long texts with perfect grammar.

37. Your characters show up in your dreams from time to time.

38. You get inspiration from your dreams.

39. You have a Word document open at this moment.

40. You’ve smiled and said ‘That’s so true!’ to most of these.