Cinders of Glass Inspiration

Today I’ll be talking about the inspiration behind Cinders of Glass! Some spoilers ahead if you haven’t finished reading Cinders of Glass yet!

We’ll start with Cinderella!

So there’s a lot of Cinderella fairytales out there, a lot. And they all have their own details and quirks, and there’s been lots of adaptations of Cinderella drawing from these variations or adding their own twists to it, so there’s only a few major points to hit for something to be a Cinderella retelling. Here’s my list:

• A Prince Charming (ideally looking for a wife)
• A girl who was well-off as a child but is now poor or a servant
• A stepmother and stepsister (typically abusive)
• A ball Cinderella is invited to but is prevented from going by her stepfamily
• A fairy godmother (or someone who acts like one) who helps Cinderella get to the ball
• Cinderella runs away at midnight, leaving behind a shoe (ideally glass)
• Prince Charming uses the shoe to find her

As always, you can give or take a few details. One of the original versions doesn’t have a fairy godmother figure but instead it’s a tree at Cinderella’s mother’s grave that gives her the dresses. I think it’s usually a big plus if a story does incorporate the sleeping by the cinders aspect of the story even if they don’t have her stepfamily literally call her Cinderella (or Cinderwench or Cinder Maid in some variations) in order to make fun of her.

The great thing about Cinderella is that it’s so well-known you can usually tell something is a Cinderella story even if all it has is the abusive stepfamily and a well-off love interest.

The Little Match Girl is not as well known. But that also means I can be a little more flexible in which aspects mattered most to me. But I definitely wanted to have enough that it still counted as a Little Match Girl retelling. Here’s my list:

• Poor girl who sells matches on the street to provide for her family
• She fails to sell her matches
• She loses her shoes, leaving her barefoot in the cold
• As she’s wasting away, she lights the matches to try to keep warm and save herself
• She sees visions in the smoke of the matches she lights of the things she wants

The Little Match Girl is a tragic story, so I couldn’t use everything from it or else Cinders of Glass would have ended very differently! For me, the crucial part of including the Little Match Girl was the visions in the smoke of the matches of the things she wants most. That’s what I think really makes her character so compelling.

It’s also what I think is compelling about Cinderella. Both characters are in incredibly difficult circumstances dealing with abusive family working them to the bone but they still have this light in them, this hope for a better future. As I mentioned last time, I started off this idea knowing Cynrik as Prince Charming, but it was when I sat down and really looked at both Cinderella and the Little Match Girl that I saw how similar the heroines were and that was who Liora was.

So now it was time to merge. I knew I’d be relying on Cinderella for the majority of the structure and plot elements, and the Little Match Girl was more for shaping Liora and adding details to her and her stepfamily. It gave Liora more of a job than relegating her to just a maid for her stepfamily.

Which worked great because I didn’t want the stepfamily to be the traditional/Disney-esque stepfamily, where the stepmother is a gold-digger trying to marry her stepdaughters off for wealth and status, trying to climb the ranks and using Cinderella as a maid and free labor. With a Cinderella retelling, as soon as you see the stepfamily, you just know they’re going to be awful. Of course, there are retellings where they’re not, but the majority of retellings keep to the abusive stepfamily aspect that is iconic to the story.

I didn’t want to eschew their abuse completely, but I also didn’t want it to be obvious verbal and physical abuse. I wanted something subtler. Something almost sinister. I also wanted to incorporate the elements of some Cinderella variations where the father is still alive and implicated if not outright part of the abuse. That’s a more detailed post for later though, I’ll talk about Liora and her family and all of that on its own.

The real problem I had was figuring out who was the antagonist because I had all of the framework, the two main characters, but what I didn’t have was the plot.

I had an idea of Liora’s backstory which I knew was going to influence the plot, but I didn’t really have everything. I especially knew the stepfamily wasn’t going to be my obvious antagonists.

And that’s where Eran came in. Well, Eran and the Castians. I knew the what the next book was going to be and therefore who this book needed to introduce to set it up. I just didn’t really have all the how until I thought of Eran and the conspiracy. It also very neatly answered my “why is Besart making Cynrik get married” question, because Cynrik’s brother is getting married and giving Besart a nice little foreign alliance. His third in three years, and Cynrik has done… not much else.  

And Eran? He made it work, funnily enough since he’s like the most important character who doesn’t really exist in the source material.

I knew pretty early on Aurelia would return as the fairy godmother. I can’t really explain how or when; I just knew that was Aurelia. It was almost like I wrote her for the role while I was writing her story. She just fits and answers the questions I would have to ask when creating my fairy godmother. Aurelia is a new witch, still finding her footing, especially now that Junia has sent her off on her own, that’s one of the reasons why the magic fades. That and magic is limited over distance and time, so the farther Liora got from Aurelia the faster the spells wore off. Why does the fairy godmother not appear until the night of the ball? Because Aurelia wasn’t in Avia. She’s a foreign witch, she arrived in the city that night because she’s going to the ball. Why does the fairy godmother help Cinderella? Because Aurelia, as a result of her story where she ignored her magical instincts, is now trying particularly hard to listen to them, and when she sees Liora, someone who is being trapped and controlled by magic, she wants to help. Why does the magic on Cinderella’s dress and disguising her fade when the shoes remain the same? Because Aurelia is a witch, and she didn’t make the shoes. Liora’s sister, an enchantress did, the same one who enchants the matches Liora tries to sell.

Of course, I write all of this out linearly, but it’s actually really hard to describe the process I go through when crafting the story. These things, these threads of connection that make everything fall into place don’t all come at once, and sometimes they don’t come until after I’ve already made the decision, and my subconscious had already done the ground work and now I see it clearer than I did before.

I think and I think and I think about these stories for months, sometimes years, sorting through the details, coming up with ideas, and looking at all of the threads before I start finding the best ways to connect them to make the story I want. I come up with things and later my brain tells me what for.

Anyway, up next will be a whole post about Liora and my approach to her stepfamily! If you haven’t already, you can grab Cinders of Glass here!