A Sleeping Princess - But Different

Available now! (with some discussion)

In stores now, a new and different sleeping princess, not the one you know, even though she was cursed at her christening. I offer you The Enchanted Princess Wakes!

And I did indeed go wide, so take your pick. (And more are still processing.) It’s available at Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Everand, Smashwords, Amazon, and still others.

Alas, I do not know if any of these links work outside the US, but I did go world-wide, and your nation’s online venues may have it.

I had fun writing it. It started with a meme.

A meme trying to justify Maleficent's conduct in Sleeping Beauty by saying that inviting people to the christening was political, and failure to do so an insult.

The problem with that being, of course, that even if you do not consider the ethics of cursing the baby because the parents insulted you, death is excessive.

An ogress infuriated by the way a small prince or princess laughs at them generally resort to cursing the child to be unable to marry except to one person -- who requires a quest to find, or an enormous effort to disenchant.

A witch whose daughter ran away with the prince only curses her to be forgotten by him as soon as he is kissed.

And there's always the classic turn-her-into-a-frog -- or another animal, or an old woman.

The advantage of all of those, when considering it as justice for the insult, is that if you set them up right, you deprive the parents of their daughter without serious harm happening to her, because it was her parents, not the daughter, who insulted you.

I opted instead to just curse her to sleep. But then there was the other fairy, the one to give the last gift, to try to fix that.

I could have omitted her, but as long as I was doing the Sleeping Beauty christening, it was more elegant to fit her in.

As anyone who's read my fairy-tale fantasies knows, those fantasies tend to pull in other fairy tales. Even The Other Princess, which retells Sleeping Beauty from the point of her cousin, drew in other tales, and since this was already diverging from Sleeping Beauty in its earliest conception, it drew in more tales.

In particular, tales of sleeping princesses -- with a few nods to tales of sleeping princes -- got mixed into the brew. Some Snow White, but then again, there are many sleeping princess tales. There are Sleeping Beauty variants, and Snow White variants, and there are tales that are variants of neither -- even a number where the sleeping princess is the love interest of the hero, not the heroine.

Chop, chop, chop to get the parts I wanted. Even from tales where no one sleeps an enchanted sleep. Then blend, blend, blend, to smooth the parts together and with the political considerations I mentioned up front --

It is, of course, perfectly possible to write a story and have the original inspiration vanish entirely. Not from this one. Considerations of the political implications of things feature, here and there.

And thus this story came to fruition.