Original Fairy Tales
by Zade Green
This is my lifetime dream project—to write original fairy tales for 1001 nights.
Hi :) I am Zade Green, the author of <FANTASY PIECES>. As a big magic lover, I indulge in imagining fantastic stories and characters, and their feelings that could move people’s mind. And those imaginations becomes short fantasy stories of my own. <FANTASY PIECES> is made up of those stories, and the first volume of “SAPPHIRE” has 16 of them.
This book was originally written in Korean but I am working on to translate it into English too so that this book could reach far and wide into the world.
At this moment, I’m at the stage of making a dummy book and drawing the illustrations myself, studying English writing to make it more reading-friendly to people around the world. Can’t wait to launch it finally and show it to everyone.
You can read about the progress at my WIP diary here.
The pen name “Zade” is from Scheherazade of <Arabian Nights>. I wanted to be herself by using the whole name, telling people all the amazing and fantastic stories, but I thought the name was hard to read or say out loud to most of us. So I took only the small part of it.
Still, I feel like her in my mind and am eager to tell stories that people have never heard about anywhere else. I wish I could carry the name of her just right.
I’m a complete addict to the style of vintage, antiquarian books. Those beautiful foil-stamped cover, the elaborate ornaments, the pretty initial letters, the illustrations, and the marbled papers… To me, all the crafts seemed like the best way to put magic in.
I still remember how often I watched the video tape of the old Disney animation <Snow White(1937)>, and the sensation I felt whenever I saw the vintage book at the first part of it. I used to get captured so hard, every single time. That is the reason of my obsession to the art—I drew everything of the book, from the patterns to the initial letters.
It was a big challenge, though, to design Korean initial letters, because there is no reference at all. The system of consonant and vowel is totally different from the language that use Roman alphabet, which most initial letters that exist are written in. But I managed to find a way to do it and I’m looking forward to make more ornamental designs with Korean letters. (And of course, I’ll make sure there are pretty initial letters in English version too, in the future.)
Each volume will have the name of a jewel stone, instead of number, and the first stone is Sapphire. I chose it because this book has the story about a golden bird with sapphire eyes in it.
After finishing the volume of Sapphire, I’ll continue writing and drawing the illustration for a long time, so that I can have every beautiful precious stones in my bookshelf by the time I become a very old woman. I imagine having Ruby, Emerald, Onyx, Amethyst, Amber, Moonstone and etc. I am very sure that it will be so wonderful to see all the glittering books of all the colors representing jewels in one shelf—it’s my lifetime ambition.
The idea was inspired by Andrew Lang’s Fairy Tale series.
Contact | zadegreen0909@gmail.com