Why The Pied Piper of Hamelin and the Sandman?

Hey there! I’m here to start my usual behind the scenes posts now that Songs of Stone has been out and you fast readers have had the chance to get through it! So some spoilers ahead if you haven’t read Songs of Stone yet!

If you’re unfamiliar you can read (some of the many versions of) The Pied Piper of Hamelin here and you can read Andersen’s Sandman here and Hoffman’s Sandman here. (They’re very different stories, but I used both!)

So… full disclosure, when I was originally figuring out what the rest of the series and fairytale combos would be after the first three, it looked absolutely nothing like this. Actually, the very first idea for this book didn’t involve the Sandman story at all. The original combination I was looking at was the Pied Piper and Hansel and Gretel. I still really like the idea of that combination because both stories center around children going missing/being abducted by villains, but it just wasn’t right for this series.

It also wasn’t originally going to take place in Castia, until I wrote Shoes of Red and knew I wanted to come back to Castia and actually dive into the Red Enchanter. And that didn’t work with the Hansel and Gretel idea, so I scrapped that half of the idea and went back to the drawing board. I knew ever since then Piper was going to be the Red Enchanter’s henchman, but I wasn’t sure what other fairytale I wanted to combine it with. I hemmed and hawed and looked at fairytale after fairytale to find something that really fit.

And that was where The Sandman came in.

And I said, oh, how great would it be to see another imp. This time an imp who is actually still in service to a magic user and what their usual nature is given that Ruskin by the time we see him in Stalks of Gold and especially Beasts of Beauty has become something else entirely. And the Sandman would make a great imp in my world. Plus, I loved the idea of having the Pied Piper and the Sandman be henchmen forced to work together. They also have a similar fantastic crossover point that I initially loved about Hansel and Gretel, both the Pied Piper story and Andersen’s Sandman story involve children.

These stories didn’t have a whole lot of crossover points which I usually prioritize, but since my Pied Piper and my Sandman were two distinct figures working for the same person, I was alright with it. I already knew the general premise of the story would be a cat and mouse kind of chase between Piper and Valens, so the Sandman aspect was primarily more about fleshing out Piper’s side and the villain aspects of the story.

I’m really glad I did because Sandy kind of became my favorite part of the story. I loved writing Sandy and Piper’s scenes and relationship almost as much as I loved writing Valens and Piper’s. I’ll be going into Sandy and Piper’s dynamic in a separate post, so stay tuned for that one!

But when I was doing my research into the Sandman stories, I knew Andersen’s was going to be the basis for my Sandy, but there was something about Hoffman’s that I couldn’t shake. At this point I didn’t have a very solid picture of Piper in my head about who she was before she started doing the Red Enchanter’s bidding. I knew this story would involve the culmination of the Blight storyline that had been reference in the past because of the Pied Piper of Hamelin story being closely associated with the Black Plague, and that would be part of Piper’s story, but it wasn’t completely clear to me yet.

So I realized that there were pieces of Hoffman’s story, mostly the beginning that I felt really worked as inspiration for Piper’s backstory, and that Clara, actually in that story, was the kind of heroine I was thinking of for Piper. Someone very grounded, realistic, cold, and practical. I’ll talk in more detail about that version and what I pulled from it next time.

There still questions that had to be answered about why Piper was doing this, working for the Red Enchanter. I knew early on that I was going to sort of reverse the order of the Pied Piper story because I wanted to end with the rats since the rats were connected to the Blight and the culmination of a bigger plot, so I was going to start with the children.

But why was Piper abducting children? What was Sandy’s role in all of this? How did a creature who created dreams for children fit into this scheme? Why was the Red Enchanter having them do this?

And that was where the idea for Sandy’s abilities came from. The dreams are what he does while he’s taking memories and converting them into magic so Cinnabar always has enough magic for his powerful and demanding enchantments. But why children?

Because it’s easier to kidnap children, and, in a twisted sort of way, it’s a little better than taking an adult’s because by the time they’re older, children don’t remember things as well from when they were particularly young.

And so on. I had a lot more room for my interpretation this time in some ways, but I was also limited working within the constructs of the world I had already created for myself regarding enchantments, etc. But I was so excited to really bring together the pieces that I’d been laying in the previous books for this one regarding the Blight and the Red Enchanter ever since Shoes of Red!

I’ll see you all next time as I dive into more detail about the specific aspects of each fairytale that I used and how I combined them! If you haven’t gotten grabbed Songs of Stone you can do so here!