A couple of years ago, I was listening to a lot of horror podcasts/radio dramas and true crime stories. “Tragically Murdered Little Girl” was a running plot element, and it grossed me out to no end. Whoever it was that said that the death of a beautiful woman was the most tragic, poetic thing didn’t account for the modern fixation on little dead girls. Dead kids are shorthand for “ultra-tragic” but they’re also dead children. They existed for themselves, they were complicated beings who had desires and bad days and relationships. Why shouldn’t those girls get their own stories?

Long ago, I ran across an article online about the summer getaways post-WWII, where disfigured veterans went. There was a line in the article that said something like how these getaways would be the only time the veterans felt the sun on their skin, because they would be allowed to remove their masks that they otherwise had to wear when in public. The article went on to talk about the artists that made these masks for the soldiers. I think I found more research on this as well, one article that highlighted a specific artist. And I thought what a beautiful image that was.

As for this particular story, when I was fourteen I read a book called Zodiac about the real serial killer, and I was fascinated by someone who had evaded capture and committed his crimes with a weird intelligence and, well, panache for lack of a better word. I’d grown up with a father who was violent and sociopathic, and I was vulnerable to the idea—to the hope, horribly—that if you had to deal with evil in the world, at least you could have the consolation that it was purposeful in a sick way.

I really love speculative fiction that blends genres and plays with our expectations, like fantasy stories that take place in the far-distant future. I knew immediately that I wanted to take the fantastical elements of the fairy tale and put them into a cosmic setting, and if I wanted this place to be imbued with the kind of ancient magic that has all but disappeared in the face of modern technology and science, then my sleeping beauty would have to be dormant and undisturbed on some distant and hard-to-find world.