Pop Top 20 Fairy Tales, Villains, Heroes, And Twists

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Mirror, mirror on the wall -- can I be safe when I am tall?

Rumpelstiltskin got the baby.

Rapunzel and her prince never again met.

Snow White still sleeps in the forest.

Biancabella, Snow White's half-sister, knows that if she is more beautiful than her mother, trouble will follow again. Her appeal to the magic mirror only gains her stories of how hard it is to fight the evil sorceresses and wizards and witches who have banded together to bring unhappy endings.

But with her mother seeking to constrain her, Biancabella knows she may have no choice to use that knowledge to attempt to escape.

Available now for pre-order in many fine online venues! To be released May 1!

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Smashwords, and more! And more are processing it!

(The ebook. I can’t set up the paper for pre-order, but it will be ready as soon as I can push it through after May 1.)

This story was inspired by some discussion of villains winning in fairy tales.

This is a very popular theme in the retellings, often with the villain reworked as being in the right. I am not overly fond of them, but -- what if the villain did learn from the past? Or, worse, the villains? After all, in The Princess Seeks Her Fortune, Alissandra learns from the past.

But from the combination of these ideas, Even After arose. The villains and the heroes alike know how things go. And therefore they have some notion of what to avoid, and what to do.

Not that that makes life simple.

My first thought was to weave together Pop Top 20 tales. This hits problems. One is that I'm not particularly fond of all the Pop Top 20 tales. The second is that I keep having ideas about weaving in another fairy tale, and have no ability to resist them.

The third is the big one. If you draw on enough fairy tales you can actually confuse matters. The first child to go does not have to be the one who fails; it can be the second and later who enviously try to emulate the success of the first.

Usually it's when there are two children who go that the first succeeds, and the second fails, and three when the first two fail, and the third succeeds. But it can be switched. Indeed, sometimes there are three children, the first one succeeds, the second one succeeds if not quite so well, and only the third fails.

So I wove together tales and problems and resolutions. And wrote this book.

Available for pre-order now!