There's still time to back Upon a Thrice Time, a fairy tale anthology which includes my story "Last Dance of the Sugar Golem."

This started as an entry to Apex Magazine's holiday-themed flash fiction contest in 2015. A retelling of "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1816), it didn't win, but I liked it well enough to keep tinkering with it. Though never a big fan of the play, I had read Hoffmann's source material as part of my college study of old/classic second-world fantasy literature and really liked the similarities between Marie's visit to the Candyland-like doll kingdom and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World (1666).

My story went through several revisions and rejections leading up to 2020, when I learned about a call for submissions to Upon a Once Time. They were looking for fairy tale mashups--two stories combined and retold as fantasy, sci-fi, noir, etc. This helped me realize that my sugar golem story drew on not just "The Nutcracker," but also "Mr. Fox," Joseph Jacobs's version of the Grimm Brothers' "The Robber Bridegroom." A cousin recited "Mr. Fox" to me when I was little and I've never forgotten the grisly plot and haunting imagery. It took very little work to make its influence more overt, but a bigger revision was switching to a first-person narrative. I submitted it for Upon a Twice Time, the second volume in this series, and was accepted for the third volume.

You can visit the Kickstarter page here.

Cover art by Jana Heidersdorf.