One of my goals for March is to finish and submit a story to Rhonda Parrish’s latest open call for submissions: an anthology of “punked-up fairytales” called Clockwork, Curses, and Coal: Steampunk and Gaslamp Fairytales.

Of course, first that means I have to, uh, come up with an idea for the story.

But I’m optimistic! Deadlines are good for me. Submissions are free. And I’ve really admired Parrish’s work (she edits a lot of cool anthologies!).

So I started googling “best fairytales” and other weird search terms, hoping the kernel of an idea would eventually pop into something interesting.

I bounced around a bit until finding this list of “10 Classic Victorian Fairy Tales Everyone Should Read,” which mostly just made me want to go read Victorian fairy tales and/or re-read Vanity Fair (yes, I am the obnoxious English major who actually loved Vanity Fair and read it more than once, on purpose, for fun).

So, now I’m off to go read “The King of the Golden River” and “The Selfish Giant” and “The Golden Key” and maaaaybe “The Rose and The Ring,” although it’s listed as a novel and I love you, Thackery, but it’s pretty unlikely that I’ll be able to read your fairy-tale novel and then also re-imagine it in steampunk before the end of the month.