I don't remember when I was first exposed to fairy tales, but I do remember the first book of fairy tales I possessed. It was a large children's book with a glossy blue cover and contained exactly four stories: Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, and The Shoemaker and the Elves. To be honest, I didn't really like any of the stories. What was up with the elves making shoes in the middle of the night? Why did Jack kill the giant who didn't do anything to him in the first place? Why is Cinderella so nauseatingly good? The only character I liked was Puss in Boots. The cat had a lot of moxie to convince his idiotic and moody master not to eat him and to outwit a dangerous giant.
That particular book, however, was rather sanitized. The fairy tales I eventually discovered moldering the back of libraries were more interesting. Despite the gruesome depictions of murder, cruel and unusual punishment, and tribulations no one in their right mind would stand for--some of the stories, like Puss in Boots had rather ingenious characters. At the time, I also discovered in the same section books on mythology and superstition. To me, this was fascinating stuff, even more fascinating because it was obvious that no one had checked out these books in a very long time. It was amusing to read all the stories and folklore that people in the past have actually believed--it was truly the case of fact being stranger than fiction.
And that brings me back to the URL, especially the part I never explained in the first place. Gamalei. I have no idea where the term originated, but I ran across it while searching for obscure occult texts in preparation for a Ditch Day prank. Basically, a gamalei is a magic rock. Recall the birthstones and those tumbled rocks you find in the museum with little cards that tell you all about it? Superstition has special properties imbued to particular rocks. The Hope diamond isn't exactly a gamalei--the curse of the diamond was put on it by someone. By contrast, the magic properties of a gamalei are somehow innate.
So at the same time I was working on a story about magic rocks and I was looking for a domain name, I found it fairly appropriate.
