This was the last of the stories to be written, for a mix of aesthetic and pragmatic reasons. Aesthetically, my brain had stopped producing these kinds of ideas on a regular basis; I would have had to consciously work at it to come up with more. Pragmatically, it was not easy to sell them; editors see a lot of fairy-tale retellings in various modes, and so are rather jaded on the subject. Furthermore, their short length sharply limited the number of markets I could offer them to. Ergo, it didn’t seem like a good idea to put a lot of work into thinking up more stories of a type that wouldn’t easily find a home—certainly not when I had so many story ideas of other sorts knocking at my brain door, asking for some time and attention. But I couldn’t stop without trying my hand at “Cinderella,” the last of the classic fairy-tale trinity (as established by Disney, anyway). The need for her to leave by midnight suggested the witching hour, which naturally suggested horrible necromancy, and so it went from there.
