These rewrites date back to 1997, when I was pregnant, anticipating reading fairy tales to my son, and decided to rewrite a number of them. It is not a matter of historical revisionism. (Or maybe it is--to some.) Rewrites of tales are appropriate in making them accessible to fresh generations of readers and listeners. These tales have been rewritten multiple times before, and will be rewritten again.

The majority of the versions of the tales that follow diverge so greatly in craft and sensibility from the tales on which they are based that for all intents and purposes, excepting the basic plot, they are new stories. So that one may compare them with the originals I provide links to addresses where the originals may be found, and if the plot seems vastly different one should consider that I often enough have taken several similar tales and molded them into one fat story. A good deal of thought and research went into my revisions, which I trust will be evident to those who are intimately familiar with the older tales, but I don't pretend to have divined kernals of knowledge those tales may have originally been intended to transmit. What I have done is bent some genders, clipped some gratuitous violence from the plots--violence which, in context of many of the tales, I don't think does anything to teach about the world, as some would submit, and was used as a disciplinary measure--and just generally tried to make the tales a fulfilling, entertaining read, writing always with oral rendition in mind.

The revision of Pinocchio was done as I found oral reading of translations available to me to be clumsy. Plus, however fond I am of the story, there were some parts with which I wanted to tinker if I was going to be reading the story to a young child.

In 1999, I put together a website for the tales and Pinocchio and did some illustrations for them. I did what I could with my fledgling knowledge of Photoshop and no Wacom tablet, and my then two-year-old son enjoyed them the pictures and that's what mattered. He remained quite attached to the site, a matter of nostalgia, but in 2013 I made a few slight changes, retaining much of the original flavor and formatting, for old time's sake. The slightly new look has his stamp of approval.

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