I have been working on something really exciting and it’s finally time to announce it!

I have a lot of young children in my life lately, and it got me thinking. When I was a kid, my parents loved reading fables and fairy tales to me. They were some of the first stories I learned to read myself and a big part of what got me interested in writing. Unfortunately, a lot of those fables are inaccessible to today’s children due to antiquated language and/or are known to be quite problematic.

Most of the fairy tales I learned as a child had (unbeknownst to me or my parents at the time) racist undertones and were very Eurocentric. So, I thought, “What if someone took some of those old fairy tales and updated them, removing the problematic parts and adding in folktales from all over the world, instead of just Europe and the US?”

Then I thought, “Hey wait, I’m someone!” And since most folktales, fables, and fairy tales are in the public domain, it is totally possible to do.

Well, for the last six months or so I have been doing exactly that, and now I’m ready to share them with the world. Starting next week, I will be releasing one “Bedtime Fable” every Friday.

Hopefully you will get to read some familiar stories with a fresh perspective and some unfamiliar tales that deserve to have more people read and hear them.

The goal with Bedtime Fables is for them to be suitable for readers of any age, but also to stay as close to the source material as possible. I also try to keep names of people and places within the languages and cultures that the story originates in, which may make for more difficult to pronounce names, but I think the stumbling over a few words is a small price to pay for being respectful. Not to mention we all get to learn words from all over the world.

I hope you’ll join me in enjoying these tales from around the world. And hopefully you’ll like them enough to share with some children in your lives, too.