Among the many irons I have jammed in the fire, I have lately been working on a retelling of the Snow Queen. I thought it was a novella, but we have made 11K without getting Gerta more than a few days down the road, so I may be wrong. We'll find out, I suppose.
This is a hard story to work with, mostly because after about ten minutes, I want to drop-kick Kay into the sun. He's about as sympathetic as dirt. Theoretically we should feel sorry for him because...uh...he's a kid who had something bad happen to him that wasn't his fault, I guess, except I kinda ditched the magic mirror bit as unworkably weird, so basically Kay is now a totally normal self-centered obnoxious angsty teenage boy, and I have no patience with him whatsoever and as far as I am concerned, the Snow Queen can have him and good riddance.
(In my own defense, Hans Christian Anderson did NOT give his much later retellers a lot to go on. Kay does nothing in the entire story except get kissed and be a jerk.)
God help me, Kay is basically a somewhat malicious McGuffin. You could change the whole story so that Gerta is trying to get back a rug that ties the room together and it would make just as much sense and also you probably wouldn't want to punch the rug.
Obviously I am shipping the hell outta Gerta and the robber girl, but I am running into the problem where Kay is so profoundly worthless that I am starting to get impatient with Gerta for going after him in the first place. And while I am very sympathetic to "loyal and broken" as a character type, the whole story sort of hinges on them both being so damn young, and I am old and grumpy and sort of just want Gerta to stay home.
(Also, hoo boy, but this is a weird one. "Oh, yeah, your buddy the raven? Dropped dead off-screen, very sad." "I'm outta paper, let me write this note on a fish. LIKE YOU DO." I am having fun with some of it, like the plant dreams, but kind of worried that no one who isn't familiar with the source material will find this story even remotely readable...)
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