I think I am the most proud of this story. I get frustrated by the fact that I can never come up with original ideas for stories--pretty much every BE plotline, from magic to chemistry to freak accidents, has been done. So one day I decided to chuck it all and go with an existing fairy tale plot, therefore requiring little or no effort on my part. (Well, except that I made it very difficult on myself and went back to the original text of the fairy tale from 1729 and rewrote it line by line, a more or less direct parody of the style, throwing in bad puns and double entendres whenever possible.) After being very amused by the title, I promptly sat on my ass for about a year while the story waited in various states of disrepair. It was finally completed and released January 1, 1998.