Tabitha Bouldin
Once I knew I wanted to be an author, I thought fantasy would be the genre I’d leap into with utmost abandon. I started a dozen stories. None of them reached a conclusion and most were abandoned after a few thousand words. I simply couldn’t find that spark needed to drive a story all the way to completion.
Until the challenge for fairy tale mash-ups came across my Facebook feed one day. Until then, fairy tale retellings hadn’t even crossed my radar. But suddenly, suddenly I had an idea.
What if I retold an Alice in Wonderland story where Alice never left Wonderland? What if she was meant to save Wonderland from an evil queen?
Good. Great, even.
Now I needed the mash-up part, which is where I needed to take a second story and meld it into Alice’s tale.
That took some brainstorming. I discarded several excellent potential plots before one landed that I couldn’t turn town.
What if Dr. Frankenstein lived in Wonderland? Better yet, what if his monster sought redemption for the evil he’d done?
After that, the story came together with an ease I don’t think I’ve ever had when writing. These characters leaped out at me, calling for their tale to be told at all hours of the night. I could see them sailing across Wonderland on the airships and living with the people in Treacle Valley.
Alice, Hatter, Rabbit, Alpha, and Zephyra, they ran into danger without a care and came out the other side bruised and battered but ultimately happy, and Madness in Wonderland became my first Christian fantasy.
I expected their story to end there.
How naïve of me. One book turned into two. And two has now turned into three. I suppose we’ll have to discover how far this rabbit hole goes, because it certainly hasn’t ended yet.