MeFi Projects

And They Were Not My Words is a small collection/zine of various cut-up fiction experiments, in which I’ve tried creating new works from old pieces by various authors. Includes Five Entries Recovered From Jorge Luis Borges’ Imaginary Book Of Beings, In The Terminals Of Minraud (a William Burroughs trilogy), Thirteen New Tales by the Brothers Grimm, Five Tributes To The Works Of Daniil Kharms, and What Haruki Murakami Talks About When He Talks About Women. [more inside]
posted by dng on Dec 31, 2021 - 0 comments

The Man Who Left is a short fairy tale about a man sent to war, forced to fight incomprehensible battles in unknowable places for increasingly unclear reasons, who has become so weary and distraught by this life of constant toil and terror that it is only his dreams of returning to his wife and child that keep him sane. It's the 150th (and final) tale in my Thousand And One Tales project (previously on projects: 1, 2, 3, 4), which I originally planned to keep up for another 851 stories, but in the end failed spectacularly to do so. But still I tried... [more inside]
posted by dng on Jan 31, 2021 - 3 comments

For the last few years, I've been working on a weekly fairy tale project called A Thousand And One Tales (previously posted here at 25 tales, 50 tales, and 75 tales), which has now reached Tale #101 with A Story In The Afternoon, a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. To celebrate this arbitrary milestone, I put together a remix/cut-up project of old Brothers Grimm tales and made 13 new Brothers Grimm tales (The 1st New Tale, The 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th). Meanwhile, A Thousand And One Tales continues with Tale #102: You Don’t Have To Read This, But I Hope You Do, a retelling of another famous tale. [more inside]
posted by dng on Mar 31, 2020 - 1 comment

The Crow Tree is a short piece of folk horror. "It is often tempting for outside observers to judge a society or community solely by its traditions, rituals and festivals, to bestow a significance and seriousness onto events beyond that which they hold for their participants, to see superstition and fear in theatre and frivolity. Equally, of course, the reverse can be true for those involved, leading to a refusal to recognise the serious intent that underpins their festivities. The event which takes place at the crow tree is one of the community’s least talked about rituals, and consequently can be assumed to be among its most serious." [more inside]
posted by dng on Aug 22, 2019 - 1 comment

"The child in the cage had been found in the forest, they said, left behind by the fair folk there at the passing of the midsummer sun. Or, they said, the child had been a gift from the gods. The child was a traveller, the child was a spy, a thief, a lie. The child was a warning. A warrior. A weapon. The child was an offering. The child was a beast. But the child in the cage was none of these things. The child was a child." The Stolen Child is a short fairy tale in six parts, about imprisonment, escape, and revenge. [more inside]
posted by dng on Apr 18, 2019 - 1 comment

A thousand and one tales is an ongoing and ever-growing collection of new fairy tales and folk tales, with a new story posted every Friday. The 30 stories so far include retellings of famous fairy tales (Ariadne and the Minotaur in The King's Daughter And The King's Son; Cinderella in Lonely Isobel; Bluebeard in The Three Doors And The Fourth); stories about good queens (The Lunar Queen; The King And The Light), bad kings (The King And His Weeping Wife), and even worse fathers (The Wolves In The Woods; The Farmer's Daughters); transformations (The Unhappy Bride); beasts (The Three Sorrowful Sisters; A Long Winter's Night); and the telling of tales itself (Old Tales Are Made New In The Telling). [more inside]
posted by dng on Dec 17, 2018 - 2 comments

An accumulation of things is a website collecting together lots of pieces of my writing, including various short stories, fairy tales, picture books, and comics. [more inside]
posted by dng on Jul 6, 2018 - 1 comment

An unhappy bride weeps beneath the moon on her wedding night. A priest who should know better leaves the safety of his church to follow a cat out into the city and see where it is it goes. A lonely girl sits at her window and wishes, just once, to go to the ball. And is that the devil on the road, waiting for you as you make your way home… The Unhappy Bride and other tales is a collection of contemporary fairy tales, in which you'll find Queens and Kings, wolves and cats, the devil himself, even the stars made flesh. You’ll find love here, too, so much love. And with it always sadness. [more inside]
posted by dng on Dec 5, 2015 - 2 comments

The Long Yuletide War is a series of short stories I'm working on about the hidden history of that mysterious figure known as Santa Claus and his dark alpine shadow Krampus. [more inside]
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey on Dec 5, 2009 - 5 comments