After the Glass Slipper: The Inspiration for The Jilted Bride

I've always loved fairy tales, and I think our culture is equally fascinated by stories of true love's kiss, glass slippers, and strange creatures. One common thread throughout many of these famous stories is magic. All you have to do is look at the box office over the past several years. With movies like Disney's Maleficent and the live action Cinderella and shows such as Once Upon A Time, we get to watch as fairy godmothers, evil queens, and more wield amazing power that can either create or solve issues for the protagonists, but what would happen if there wasn't any magic? What if the characters in the stories we all grew up with were bound by the same rules and restrictions that we deal with? What if their happy endings created more problems than they solved?

This is why inspiration struck after seeing the classic movie The Slipper and the Rose: The Story of Cinderella on television several times earlier this year. At the end of the movie, Cinderella (Gemma Craven) interrupts Prince Edward's (Richard Chamberlain's) wedding to another woman and they wind up married instead. Thankfully, the fairy godmother ensures that Edward's fiancee and his cousin fall in love, so everyone lives happily ever after. However, I started to wonder what would have happened without the fairy godmother's supernatural intervention.

That's where The Jilted Bride came from.

Demetria (left) and Cinderella.

In my new book, the charming Prince Caspar leaves Demetria at the altar to marry Cinderella. With no magic to make sure everything is wrapped up in a pretty little bow, the duke's daughter has to deal with the aftermath of two legendary lovers' happy ending the old fashioned way. Demetria is understandably mistrustful of men and her parents as well for failing to choose a good husband for her, and she befriends a maid in the castle as she seeks to understand why the heir to the Aspasian throne would choose a servant over her. The jilted bride also has to contend with an unwanted suitor from a foreign land while struggling with her own disenchantment about men.

Cinderella's happily ever becomes Demetria's once upon a time, and the heartbroken heroine grows through her pain one page at a time as she finds new meaning and a new identity in a life that she had solely lived to find and please a husband of noble birth. While a fairy godmother's intervention would have saved the duke's daughter a world of pain, she also would have missed out on a great friendship and life lessons that magic can never teach.

For more information and updates about the upcoming release of The Jilted Bride, like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/thejiltedbride/.