Writing: a synthesized folktale, part of a fragmentary larger story

This is part of a larger story, inspired by this incredible glass spinning wheel I saw online several years ago. The larger story is not anywhere near complete, and even the names of the characters and the time I want to set it in are in flux. I have descended into research. As I quite like research, I tend to wallow in it and thus avoid the actual work of assembling anything from it.

It is set in a fictional town in Occitania, some time in a nearly 500 year period. Right now it's sitting in the early Renaissance. Kind of. Maybe it needs to be in a sort of dreamtime. I'm not sure. Right now all I really have is a mass of notes, historical, cultural and linguistic research, a small note I found about a spinning Madonna in Catalunya, a picture of the glass spinning wheel and this fragment. This is really a manufactured fairy tale with heavy Christian influences, befitting the location and time.

Story below the cut. Critique welcome, I'm kind of at an impasse.( Read more )

Writing: Brain exercises, The Glass Wheel

I think I know what I need to do to get this percolating properly in my head to make a real story of it.

I'm going to rewrite it, from memory, as it might have been told in may times and places, with and without Christianization, with and without Victorian santizing, with and without fairies or demons or angels. With both the spindle and the wheel, perhaps without a spindle entirely, if I write a version set in a country that reels silk. As if I were collecting all the versions of the story, like a folklorist.

Maybe, somewhere, in all of that, i might find the larger story I intend to write about the Glass Wheel.