I wrote a box set!

Ten books, thirty-seven stories, 94,000 words and never enough TIME to write it!

This set taught me a lot, not just about stress(!), but about how to create scene, chapter and story endings. I thought I was good at them before, but adapting a frame story with up to four nested stories at a time (a story within a story within a story within a story told by Scheherazade, who is herself a story) provided advanced schooling.

Beyond the practicalities of adapting the narrative structure, there was also the matter of toning down or rewriting the violence, misogyny and alcohol consumption to be suitable for 7+ year-old readers and certain foreign markets. In Sinbad’s fifth voyage, for example, an old man climbs onto the sailor’s back and refuses to get off. In source texts I found on Project Gutenberg, the old man uses the extra height to pick fruit, which ferments in a gourd until he finally falls drunkenly from Sinbad’s shoulders. In my version, he picks dates and throws them down to Sinbad, who juggles the fruit until the old man gets so dizzy from watching that he falls off his perch.

The scars of domestic abuse in Zobeida and the Three Qalandars are instead inflicted when Amina falls into a rose bush as she escapes her husband, rather than by her receiving a whipping for imagined infidelity. In general, I kept the threat of the original violence, but not the execution – at least not on the page. This allowed me to be as loyal to the source material as I could be within the constraints of the adaptation brief.

The most prevalent change was simply giving more of the female characters names and less of an obligation to marry by the end of the story.

Much effort and many, many glossaries later – TA-DA!