My short story, An Enchantment of Twelve, was published in July of this year. It’s still a bit unreal. This story is available anywhere books are sold online.

It’s out there. My work. After so many years of writing.

And I didn’t even know the day it was released.

But I quickly figured it out based on SM posts, and I was happy to jump in and add to the excitement of the release of this anthology with Wild Ink Publishing.

While I am primarily a middle grade and young adult writer, I read almost anything. So when I heard about submissions to an adult fairytale anthology, I felt inspired to dip my toes into this age group.

This was November 2024. I was simultaneously drafting an adult flash fiction for a fantasy writing group while my current draft of my middle grade horror took a backseat. It was an exciting time. I was trying new areas of writing, and I found a few songs that inspired my telling of the aftermath of The Twelve Dancing Princesses fairytale. Songs such as Eat Your Young by Hozier, Everlong (acoustic) by Foo Fighters, and Wild Horses by The Rolling Stones (or any cover of this lovely song.)

The music spoke to me as I followed my spunky elder princess main character, whose nighttime journeys with her eleven younger sisters had been exposed. Below you will find her opening thoughts on this privileged yet confining life she’d been leading:

“As the oldest of twelve, I’d always been compared to what came after me. My next youngest sister was more beautiful and so was the one after her. By the time we reached the twelfth, and my mother died of exhaustion during childbirth, there could be no other belief than this final child was the most beautiful of all.

In that light, I was practically a hag.

I was also twenty-five and unmarried, which is the lowest a princess could fall.

An ancient, unwanted hag. And the servants wondered why I was snippy.”

If you enjoyed this snippet, please check out the rest of the story in the Wickedness & Wonder anthology found here on Bookshop.org.