Dis- and re-assembly

At some point in the recent past I agreed with some friends to spend this month writing a short story based on a fairy tale. It's a venture we attempted once in the past but didn't follow through on as a group--although I personally came out of it with "The Long Dance," a longish short story that I am quite proud of and that would be in the mail on its way to an editor right now if not for some frustrating events at my local FedEx place grumble grumble never going back there again grumble. This time, everyone is more on board, I think.

The seed this time is "The Little Mermaid," which I initially protested was not a fairy tale in the strictest sense, but a children's story by Hans Christian Andersen. (My strictest sense of "fairy tale" is a subset of "legend," so having a single, definitive author is a disqualifier.) I was outvoted, though, and there are worse things than having to temporarily swallow my personal flavor of pedantry. I had never actually read the original story anyway, so my education in things everyone except me has already read continued.

It will be fun to see how other people interpret the task. Although I complained at first, the source material is rich enough to offer different solutions to the problem of what to keep and what to throw out. And that's without getting into the rich and varied tradition of other stories about aquatic females.

After some headbanging, a partial inversion, and a transportation to a fantasy world that I was already working on, my mermaid story (ahem) grew legs. Then, as is apparently inevitable, it stalled out around the halfway point. Today I started from the beginning and realized that I've done all this before--in fact, it may even be my "process" to write half a first draft and then start over with a second draft of the first half, and continue that straight on into a first draft of the second half.

Once I can see what the story is starting to be shaped like, I know how to tear it apart and shape it like something else, I guess.

I still don't know how this story ends, which vexes me, because given the source material I have no confidence that it will end happily.