Discover Making Myself Little today, and step into a reimagined fairy tale where a mer-prince doesn’t silence himself for love, but instead learns to breathe, belong, and remain whole. This story is part of my Faeries Tell series, where familiar tales get rewritten with honesty, tenderness, and unapologetic queerness. You can also explore more of my work on my Amazon author page.
Why I Wrote Making Myself Little
For as long as I can remember, fairy tales have been both magical and cruel. They offered dazzling kingdoms, enchanted objects, and quests for love—but they also carried a quieter, darker demand: change yourself or you don’t get the happy ending.
I wrote Making Myself Little to resist that script. I wanted a story where a queer character refuses to make himself small to be loved. Where voice is not a bargaining chip, but a lifeline. Where love, if it is to be real, has to meet us in our wholeness.
The Faeries Tell series grew out of this conviction: fairy tales don’t need to be discarded, but they do need to be rewritten. They can still be shimmering and strange, but also rooted in the complexities of identity, queerness, and survival.
What the Book Is About
At its heart, Making Myself Little is about a queer mer-prince navigating a palace obsessed with optics and a court ruled by ritual. Instead of disappearing into someone else’s story, he learns to anchor himself in his own.
The book carries the rhythm of a fairy tale—storm, threshold, longing—but instead of silencing the character who dares to love differently, it lets him keep his voice. And in keeping it, he finds room to breathe and a path toward something more alive than the old bargains ever offered.
The Little Mermaid, Revisited
The inspiration is clear: The Little Mermaid. But let’s be honest—Hans Christian Andersen’s story (and even Disney’s) carries a message that hasn’t aged well. In the original, love is tied to sacrifice, pain, and erasure. The mermaid literally loses her voice to be heard, her body to be seen, and in many tellings, her life to be remembered.
For queer people, this message is hauntingly familiar. How many of us have been asked to mute parts of ourselves—our gender, our sexuality, our desires—just to be allowed into the room? How often have we been told love is conditional on our ability to pass, to conform, to shrink?
Making Myself Little refuses that inheritance. It asks: what if we stop trading away pieces of ourselves? What if the fairy tale ending isn’t love at any cost, but love that costs nothing of your core self?
The Metaphor That Breathes Beneath
The metaphor of shrinking, silencing, and bargaining for belonging is painfully real. Coming out often feels like standing at a threshold where every version of yourself is on the line: the one your family knows, the one the world expects, the one you’re still learning to live into.
Making Myself Little plays on that tension. The mer-prince isn’t deciding whether to hide—he’s deciding how to exist without betraying himself. He’s navigating a world where the rules say: cut away what doesn’t fit, or you don’t belong here. But instead, he writes his own ethic: I will belong without vanishing.
Why This Book Matters
I created Making Myself Little because I believe readers deserve fairy tales that honor complexity. Tales that don’t punish queerness but celebrate it. Stories where a prince can fall in love without giving up the ocean inside him.
It’s tender. It’s defiant. It’s a reminder that survival sometimes means refusing to bend—even if the storm is bearing down and the rules say otherwise.
And more than anything, it’s alive.
For Readers Who Crave More
If you love fairy tales that are honest, fierce, and full of breath, this book is for you. If you’ve ever felt the pressure to shrink, to silence yourself, or to change for acceptance, you will find yourself in these pages.
Read Making Myself Little free with Kindle Unlimited. And if you don’t yet have Kindle Unlimited, remember Amazon offers a free three-month trial so you can dive into this story without hesitation.
The Faeries Tell series is just beginning. This is not about escaping the old fairy tales; it’s about reclaiming them, one by one, for the lives we actually live.
A Thank You
To everyone who supports indie authors: thank you. Each review, each download, each conversation keeps these stories alive. We’re not just retelling fairy tales; we’re making them truer.
So step into the seam, where storm meets threshold. Read Making Myself Little, and refuse to shrink.