Except the Queen: Written With Jane Yolen

Except the Queen began as a game between Jane and I wondering why there were no middle aged fairies and secondly, wondering what would happen if a pair of them were cast out of the Realm into our world, losing their immortal beauty and becoming frumpy all at once. She wrote the first letter as Serena, I answered as Meteora -- and so it began. Somewhere around 15,000 words in letters we knew we had a story. We polished it up as a novella for Marvin Kaye's Fair Folk Anthology, and after that, decided to flesh the story out into a full novel, allowing us to develop further characters we really enjoyed but had little time to develop in the shorter form.