There is a story of a widow woman and her two daughters, Snow White and Rose Red, who were the most perfect and darling little girls who had ever lived.
This is not—quite—that story.
BONE & BLOOD, my newest retold fairy tale, is out on Amazon Kindle today! (The print edition is on its way! I’ll make another big fuss about that! :D)
This is my first proper CE Murphy book out in ages, and I’m really excited and hopeful about this one. I think it’s good! I mean not that I don’t think they’re all good, but I think this one’s GOOD! :D
The story of this one is a journey, folks. A journey. And it begins with the absolutely mind-blowingly magnificent cover art by Ravven.
Ravven made that cover art just for the fun of it. Nobody had bought it, nobody had commissioned it, she just thought it would be neat and she made it.
And I saw it, and I KNEW, I knew in my SOUL, that it wanted to be the cover to a retelling of “Snow White, Rose Red.”
But I’ve got like SEVENTEEN pre-made covers to write stories for already, so I was like, no, no, no, I cannot buy this. I CANNOT buy this. Somebody else will buy it and do something amazing with it and I CANNOT BUY IT. So I was very brave and Did Not Buy It.
Except nobody else bought it either. I knew, because I kept checking back to see if anybody had bought it. O.O And after…a while. More than weeks. More than months, even, but perhaps less than, say, three months, I was WEAK and I CAVED and I bought it and I wrote BONE & BLOOD to go with it. :D
So that was one part of the journey.
Another part of the journey is that…well…let’s face it… “Snow White, Rose Red” isn’t much of a fairy tale. There’s not much there there. It kind of goes “Once upon a time, a widow had two darling little girls who made friends with a bear who came to stay for the winter. The next summer a dwarf was mean to them but when the dwarf got knocked dead the bear became a prince and married Snow White and lived happily ever after.”
It’s a little…lacking, innit. So I clearly had to do something about that, and aside from writing what I think is an all-time great fairy tale origin for the twins (I said modestly!), at some point I realized that this was going to work as a stand-alone sequel to my Beauty and the Beast retelling, ROSES IN AMBER.
And at that point, I had a story. It honestly took a huge amount of work, partly because it came in almost twice as long as I’d originally anticipated, but I’m really, really happy with how it turned out, and I very much hope you all enjoy reading it…possibly more than I enjoyed writing it, if we’re going to be perfectly frank. laughs I hope you enjoy it as much as I’m proud of it, that’s what I really want. :)
So once more, BONE & BLOOD is available today at Amazon Kindle!
This is not—quite—that story.
Wise women do not bargain with fair folk, but there is wisdom, and then there is desire. Born of dark magic to a widow willing to make any pact to become a mother, Chloe and Yara live in a borderland between what is real in the World, and what is not. Their gifts—to hunt, to nurture, to craft and to kill—are granted by the woodland they cannot pass beyond…until the price of their birth is called due, and the sisters are separated, one to be a queen, and the other, a soldier.
But as the untold dangers of power weave threads into their hearts, threatening corruption and the destruction of their home, it is not the help of a prince, or true love’s kiss that will defeat a malevolent force, but two sisters whose bond will see them through the impossible at the heart of an enchanted forest.