Why I Wrote It

As I was working on Princess of the Midnight Ball, I mentioned to several people that I couldn’t imagine anything worse than dancing all night until your shoes wore out. Then it occurred to me that dancing in glass slippers might possible be just as bad: would the glass bend? What if the slippers shattered, and cut your feet? And I had a sudden image of a young girl trying desperately to hold still while someone molded liquid glass onto her feet with glassblowing tools.

I had never meant to do another fairy tale retelling, and certainly not Cinderella, which has been beautifully retold a number of times. But that image of the blown glass slippers would not leave my head, and then there was the idea that my twelve princesses would never want to dance again . . . so what if they had to? Or at least one of them, anyway. While I was writing Midnight Ball, I also had a devil of a time keeping some of the middle princesses straight, except for Poppy. Any time I needed someone to say something snarky, Poppy came forward to volunteer, and so I leaped at the chance to give her a book of her very own.

This book is also my little homage to Regency romances, set in my own version of early 19th century England!