I is for Incident

         Welcome to the April A to Z Blog Challenge!  Are you looking for the officially scheduled letter of the day?  You can find my 

Post for F here.

        (My A to Z Blog Challenge theme this year is Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns, my shiny new collection of short stories, poems, and art inspired by fairy tales, myths, and folklore, coming out on April 20!  All through the month I’m sharing excerpts of art, stories, and poetry, as well as some reflections on the power of the traditional stories that inspired me.  Meanwhile, to see the range of varied topics my fellow A to Z bloggers are covering this year, peruse the Master List, and visit a few other blogs that catch your fancy.)

        My short story “Incident at Bullion Mill” is my early Industrial Revolution twist on the fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin,” in which a mysterious “inspector” visits the mill girls who work the machines that spin straw into gold.  If you need a refresher on the original version of the fairy tale, you can read it here (although I took ideas from an even earlier version with a slightly different ending).  I had so much fun with this one, and I really enjoyed falling into rabbit holes doing a ridiculous amount of research into the workings of early flax mills, the slang of the early nineteenth century, and (for my illustration) aerial views of cities from hot air balloons.  You can read my blog post about that last topic here: Balloonist’s-Eye Views.

        In order to avoid too much of a spoiler, all I’ll give you today is the illustration and the very beginning…

     Each of us has been asked to make a statement of what we know about the disappearance of Mr Reuben Stiltman and Miss MaryAnn Miller yesterday around half past one past noon.  My name is Harriet Lamb.  I'm 19 years old and have been working at Bullion Mill for five years.  I'm a minder on the spinning floor.  Bullion Mill is a good deal smaller than most ordinary mills, just a single three story brick building and a clock tower enclosed in a high-walled yard beside Pudsey Beck.  The scutching and heckling of the straw are not so different from an ordinary flax mill, but it's when the bobbins are brought up to the spinning floor that the doors are locked and the magic begins. 

        The moral of Rumpelstiltskin is that knowing someone’s true name gives you power over them.

        Also, never marry someone whose proposal is contingent on how much gold you can make for them.

        I aspire to spin words into gold.  What’s your most magical crafting ability?

 [Picture: Incident at Bullion Mill, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2025 (Image from NydamPrints.com).]