Still working on my draft for The Happy Ending, but I'm just about done. Here is an updated version of the prologue. Let me know if it makes you want to read the book!
Prologue
I know a thing or two about
fairy tales.
Not the Disney kind. The kind
that gives children nightmares.
When I was a kid, a family
friend gave me a recording of Rumpelstiltskin for Christmas. Either they
had never listened to it, or they had a sick idea of fun—nothing about that
recording was suitable for children. The memory of Rumpelstiltskin’s screams as
the queen got his name right still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand
up.
That kind of fairy tale.
Look up the definition of a
fairy tale and the first will say it’s a magical story set in an idealized
world, filled with happiness. But the sting comes in the second definition: a
fabricated story, especially one intended to deceive.
I have lived the paradox. I
was the little girl orphaned young, sent off to live with the wicked relative.
The teenager who fell in love with a dimpled prince, only for forces of
darkness to separate us. The woman who realized I had read the moral of the
story wrong from the start, and who was then forced to battle evil for my own survival.
I experienced the magic, and
confronted the lie, in search of my happy ending. Because even in the Disney
fairy tales, happy endings aren’t simply granted—they’re earned.
This is how I earned mine.
