History often resembles myth, because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.
J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-stories
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
This story first came to me in a dream. It was an unusually lengthy, vivid and detailed dream, and when I woke up, I feverishly wrote down all of it that I could remember. It took me about three-quarters of an hour and several sheets of foolscap paper, and only when I had finished did I read it back, and realise in consternation I had dreamed the plot of Cinderella.
Perhaps that would have been the end of the matter, except that night, I fell into the same dream. And the next, and the next. Each night I saw different scenes of the story in greater and greater detail, and each dream seemed to have its own flavour. One night the story would seem so sad that I awoke in tears, in others it was light and amusing, so that I spent the next day chuckling when I thought of it. There were nights when the story appeared to be deeply mystical, and one night it showed a face to me of pure terror, so gruesome I could not fall back to sleep.
There was simply no other choice but to begin to write the story down, if only to rid myself of the dreams. It is difficult to turn dreams, by nature of a gossamer reality that slips between our fingers, into a story told in plain everyday language. I freely confess I have failed in this transformation. This story does not hold one tenth the wonder or mystery of my dreams. Then again, it is far more coherent. I did my best with the material given, like someone making an apron from a spiderweb.
You are free, of course, to attempt an analysis of my psyche by reading this (good luck, and have fun!). But a dream cannot be made into a story without a jumble of other things going into it, such as history and folklore and royal pedigrees and memoirs and old cookbooks and herbals, so that my original dream is possibly now unrecoverable from the text.
The story is set in an alternate version of our universe, and can be read as an alternate history. Nothing that occurs in it is wholly invented, it all has at least one parallel in our own world. For reasons of plot, it is a pagan universe, which didn't require any great effort on my part. The only thing I was sure of it that it would not be a utopian world, because I don't believe in perfect worlds, when people are far too interesting to be perfect.
The most challenging part was thinking up names for characters that didn't come from the Bible, and I had to cheat in one notable case. Although Jesus Christ may have created this name (it is unrecorded until the Gospels), I was able to persuade myself that it could have been thought up by others, should history have taken a different turning.
A fairy tale became a dream, and a dream became a fairy tale. Like all fairy tales, there are adult fears in this. It may be written like a children's book, but it is essentially for older people. It has adult themes, and although it is never explicit, it does discuss sex and sexuality (a major part of most fairy tales). Also remember that Cinderella is a story of child abuse and child exploitation, even though this story touches as lightly as possible upon such dark themes.
In my defense, I can only say - it was a tale that demanded to be told. And please, tread softly as you read, because you tread on my dreams.