The Fairy Tale That Wouldn't Leave Me Alone

How Magic of the Swan came to be. Some stories arrive quietly and wait to be noticed. Others show up and simply refuse to leave until you do something about them.

Magic of the Swan was the second kind.

The idea of retelling Swan Lake had been sitting in the back of my mind for longer than I can remember. Other author colleagues had done fairy tale retellings, and I always thought it would be fun to attempt one of my own. Fairy tales use the extraordinary to illuminate something deeply ordinary about human experience. But Swan Lake specifically kept returning. Something in the bones of that story — the transformation, the curse, the love that is tested by deception, the question of whether devotion is enough to break what darkness has done — wouldn't let me set it down.

Why Swan Lake

There are more familiar fairy tales I could have chosen. Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White. They've all been retold so many times they've become a genre unto themselves. Swan Lake is less traveled territory in fiction, which was part of the appeal. There was more room to make it genuinely my own.

But it was also the specific emotional architecture of the story that drew me. The curse at the center of Swan Lake is a distortion. It makes the true thing appear false and the false thing appear true, and the one who loves Odette has to find a way to see through that distortion and choose rightly in a moment when everything conspires against him doing so. That's not limited to fairy tales. Human nature has to grapple with that all the time. It's also a deeply theological struggle, if you're inclined to read it that way.

Why the Gilded Age

Or a little bit after. Setting the story in the Gilded Age felt right almost immediately.

The early twentieth century in America had a gilded appeal in and of itself. Glittering on the surface, complicated and sometimes dark underneath. The wealth and the beauty and the elaborate social performance of that era sit alongside labor exploitation and stark inequality in ways that create natural dramatic tension. It's a world where appearance and reality are frequently at odds, which made it a fitting home for a story about a curse that makes the true thing look false.

It also gave me rich historical territory to research, which, as I've mentioned before on this blog, is one of my genuine pleasures as a writer. The Gilded Age has texture and specifics I absolutely love and find fascinating.

The Book Launch

After the long season away from fiction, after everything the hiatus cost and required, putting a new novel into the world was an act of faith in the most personal sense of that phrase. Faith that the work still mattered, that the stories were still worth telling, that the return was real and not temporary.

The response from readers has been amazing. But holding the book in my hands proved the voice was still there, the stories hadn't gone anywhere, and the fairy tale that wouldn't leave me alone had been worth following all the way to the end.

I have a feeling these fairy tales won't leave me alone.

Is there a fairy tale or classic story that has always felt like it was trying to tell you something specific? One that stays with you or keeps coming back? I'd love to hear which one and why in the comments.