Sarah Diemer

Sometimes an erotic story is not an erotic story, at least how we think of as one of ‘those’ stories. This is definitely one of them, no actual peeking under anyone skirts, no actual bow-chicka-wah-wah… This story is reminiscent of elegant and classic Gothic romances. Though labeled as Lesbian Fantasy, it is a story about learning to love and to accept that some people’s truths will never be your own and embracing yours as not only acceptable but truth. It is simply a stunning short show more story.

Again, the story is not just romance, or erotica, it is not masturbatory material under the waste line but above the nose in the frontal lobe. It is a beautiful and dark story about breaking through what one believes and accepting what is on one’s heart.

Heart wrenching, heart warming and beautifully written. A Witch Sea is a lyrical piece full of complex and wonderful allegory with a dark hidden treasure within the foam coating the edges of the driftwood on a beach full of common seaweed. show less

I downloaded Crumbs for free from Amazon.com (it is still free). With an author named Elora, I was expecting a mindless, erotic rehash of Hansel & Gretel. But it's the exact opposite. There was barely any sex. The only thing resembling the fairy tale are the names and the tooth-decay-inducing sweets. Our hero siblings live in a garbage heap in a bleak, grungy, post-apocalyptic world gone to pieces. Told from a very effective first person POV, you can really feel the fear and despair as the show more siblings try to escape hunger, battle raging zombies and figure out the mystery of the lady in the gingerbread house. I was very pleasantly surprised with this novella as most Amazon freebies are barely readable. I love the author's lyrical prose. It wasn't until I got to the credits that I found out Elora Bishop was really Sarah Diemer. No wonder. But I do wonder why she needs to market this book under another name when it's the same genre as her popular 'The Dark Wife'.

Like Crumbs, Seven is just 'inspired' by Snow White. The author turns the whole fairly tale on its head. Snow White is a goth witch (well maybe not really goth as per the author's description, but i can't help visualizing her as Neve Campbell from the 'The Craft'). The step mother is the damsel in distress. The huntsman is powerful like a god. And the father is . This is a heavy fantasy tale with lots of moments of dread and suspense.

Braided, the Rapunzel story was the best developed romance of the three. In the other two stories, especially Crumbs, the romance was too fast...considering Gretel was practically skin and bones, and came straight from a garbage pile. The only part I dont like is a portion of the quest to free Rapunzel read like a drug-induced hallucination or a dream sequence.

What I liked best: Well-developed original fantasy worlds despite the limited novella length, effective use of 1st person pov to achieve tension and anxiety, lovely lyrical prose, 3 novellas for just $6 -- a bargain.

What could have been better: development of the romances. This was probably limited by the novella length or the author chose not to let up on the tension/suspense. show less

Monstrously Beautiful

Project Unicorn (“A Lesbian YA Extravaganza!”) is a ya fiction project created by the wife-wife writing team of Sarah Diemer (Love Devours; The Dark Wife) and Jennifer Diemer (Sappho's Fables). Though the project is currently on hold, the idea is this: every week they post two free short stories on their website; these are gathered in a monthly zine, along with two previously-unpublished titles, which you can buy on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Smashwords. There’s show more also a quarterly edition that includes the contents of the previous three ‘zines, which is also available on etsy. As of this writing, there exist six zines and two volumes.

I first discovered Project Unicorn by way of "The Witch Sea," an enchanting story about a witch named Meriel and the unexpected love she feels for a sea creature named Nor. A multi-generational feud has placed Meriel in the heartbreaking position of denying Nor that which she most desperately years for: the depths of the sea. I loved it so much that I promptly added all of Sarah Diemer's titles to my wishlist.

The stories found in Project Unicorn, Volume 1 are every bit as magical as "The Witch Sea." Beautiful, glorious, rainbow-hued magic. Accompanied by a menagerie of fantastical creatures - Kelpie unicorns, werecats, Victorian mermaids, kind-hearted witches, demons, even trees made human - the authors invite us to find and embrace the weirdness, the alienation, the darkness within ourselves. Those monsters staring at us through the glass of a magical compact? They are different from us, but...also the same. And that's a wonderful thing. There's light in the forest, yo.

It's difficult to pick just a few favorites, packed as Project Unicorn, Volume 1 is with gems. I'm partial to those tales in which the plucky - yet still unsure and awkward - heroine comes to the rescue of a nonhuman creature. In "Surfacing," the narrator's cruel brother John delights in dragging mermaids - plentiful in the seaside town of Port Luca - into the forest to suffer a slow, painful death by suffocation. No one stops John and his friends, even when they brag about their exploits; the mermaids are just pests, after all, more closely related to fishes than humans. One day the narrator happens upon this murder in progress, and does the unthinkable: she stands up to her brother and saves the girl. And herself.

More than anything (save for lesbian protagonists, of course), this is a common theme in Project Unicorn, Volume 1: Self-discovery. Acceptance. Redemption. Transformation.

In this vein, "Two Salt Feet" springs to mind. While running an errand for her mother, Sam somewhat inadvertently helps to liberate a mermaid from her tank in the meat market. When the vendor fishes her out for sale to a customer, the mermaid unexpectedly sprouts legs and loses the webbing between her fingers; she becomes human! After years of being hunted and consumed by their earth-dwelling cousins, the mermaids are evolving. And Sam, for one, is on board.

In the Author's Notes, Sarah (herself a vegan - yay!) reveals the genesis of "Two Salt Feet": "I was thinking about how having a voice is crucial for having rights, and began thinking about gay rights and voicelessness."

Also worth a mention is "The Gargoyle Maker," in which the breadmaker's daughter falls for the gargoyle maker Annabella - the gargoyles being magical creatures who come to life at night and keep the nightmares at bay; a love which is doomed because one town only needs so many gargoyles, hence Annabella's transient nature. I also loved "A History of Drowning" (the angel in the sea); "Mirrors" (the elf in the compact); and "Dreaming Green" (the seed in space), to name but a few.

There are also some wonderful retellings here. "A Craving" recasts the seven dwarfs as the villains; captors who exploit a trusting and indebted Snow White as a source of free labor. The witch, who shows up each day at Snow White's door bearing apples for sale, melts her heart and frees her from a prison of dirty dishes and unmade beds.

Even more ambitious is "In the Garden I Did Not Sin," in which Meno - the daughter of a fallen Eve, recently dead in childbirth - and Lysys, daughter to Lilith, meet outside the walls of a crumbling Garden of Eden. Sarah reports that "In the Garden I Did Not Sin" is "part of the larger world" of a novel tentatively titled The Apple Queen, which will explore the relationship "between Eve, the first woman, and Lilith...the first first woman." Insert "hgfshghgf" noise here!

The supplemental Author's Notes and Interviews, by the way? Well worth a read! Usually I skip the back matter, but in this case I'm glad I didn't. The origin stories, if you will, are at turns interesting and revealing, especially since some of the stories have seeds in real life. For example, "Nike" is based on Sarah's research on hotline prevention scripts, including a call she placed to the Trevor Project hotline. (This might explain its overly sunny "it gets better" ending, which is inspirational in this context but not necessarily helpful as an LGBTQ campaign.) Also: "The Mermaid Circus" is a real-life, honest-to-goodness tourist attraction in Weeki Wachee, Florida, and the Diemers' rescue dog Link did go missing for a fear-making twenty-four hour stretch of time (though they did not conjure a demon to help find him, as does Corrine in "Devil May Care").

One of the primary goals of Project Unicorn is to "give greater visibility to lesbian teens in young adult fiction and to normalize their presence in genre stories," as well as "communicate a message of hope." In this, the Diemers have done a lovely job. Plus the stories here just plain rock! I'm definitely picking up Volume 2, and await the arrival if The Apple Queen with bated breath.

http://www.easyvegan.info/2014/07/30/project-unicorn-volume-1-by-sarah-diemer-an... show less

Eeeee. How do I not squee about lesbian YA heroine girl as my two favorite authors for such things break out into hard core sci-fiction in this one. In two words: I don't. I'm totally making a high pitched happy noise about this one. I did not expect it, and many of them were extras which was just what I wanted and needed at the end of the year.