ChaBooCha – Day 4. The Huntsman and the Hart.

I started to write The Huntsman and the Hart in 2016, for Teapot Tales Vol 4, but while I love the challenge of writing a flash fiction story some stories won’t be confined, and that was the case with The Huntsman and the Hart. This is a retelling of Snow White. The title is a play on words … as a Hart is a red male stag, over 5 years of age, and it is a deer’s heart that the Huntsman offers up to the Wicked Queen. I pictured a great white mystical stag, that has a strong bond with the Huntsman, and during the course of the tale the Huntsman is forced to sacrifice this beautiful creature. Then a simple question came to me: “What if the Queen had only ordered the murder of Snow White, out of genuine fear for her life?” And from there the story grew. I spent a lot of time looking at poisons, and then with a friend, comparing deer hearts to human hearts and looking at how they appear when sliced etc. That led me down an interesting rabbit hole.

The story didn’t want to be contained to about 1200 words, and so put it aside for a while, although I returned to it several times over the years. I visualise this one as a movie, maybe not for the younger kids but a dark, gritty film. It’s definitely a tale that I need to finish. So, when I was planning the stories for the anthology, I wanted to include The Huntsman and the Hart. Except after going back to the start today, and writing out a series of questions, to help me continue in the right direction, I realised that this may be more suited for a Novella.

So, the aim for now is to finally finish the sloppy draft, and then make up my mind about short story vs novella once ChaBooCha is over’ otherwise I’ll just end up stalling on this again. And on that note, I’m doing something similar with My Hansel and Gretel retelling. I was originally writing that in 2019 to submit to a horror anthology (with a tree theme). But the story couldn’t be contained even in the larger word allowance, so it stalled for far too long. After looking at it again today for ChaBooCha, I feel it’ll be more suited to a novella – which will mean I can explore some of the darker themes in more depth. So overall it’s not great progress for ChaBooCha, but at the same time it kinda is.