How The Serpent’s Dance Was Born

This fable was born the day I realised “good girl” is just another cage with prettier bars.

It started as a poem.

A small thing, at first—written like a whisper with a blade hidden under the tongue. I wanted to tell a story about what we teach girls to be: helpful, soft, grateful. Quiet. Decorative. Convenient.

I’d seen it up close.

In the way my grandmother carried herself: a seamstress who married a footballer and became the keeper of everyone else’s life. No room for dreams. No space for ambition. Just cooking, cleaning, caring—day after day. And yet she was a storyteller. A brilliant one. Stories lived in her like birds behind a ribcage.

I’d seen it in my mother, too—how she was judged when she divorced the man who betrayed her, as if her refusal to endure was the real sin. Society counted her flaws with devotion and skimmed past his.

And I’d seen it everywhere: in fables and fairy tales, in the “good girl” myths we hand down like heirlooms. Even in the glittery stories—especially the glittery stories.

So I wrote a fairy tale about a princess who didn’t swallow her fire.

A princess who raged. Burned. And did not apologise.

At the time, I was deep in the drafting of a larger novel I’m now querying (Of Starfire and Song). I’m… intensely normal about worldbuilding (read: unhinged in the best way). And as I kept building my world—its histories, its myths, its archetypes—this little poem began to fit something bigger.

It stopped being “just a poem.”

It became prose. It became a book. It became an artefact inside the world of Of Starfire and Song—a story characters can find, read, quote, and be haunted by.

The Serpent’s Dance stands on its own. You don’t need the bigger novel to understand it. But if you’re the kind of reader who loves hidden threads and future echoes… consider this an Easter egg. A small door in a much larger house.

I can’t wait for the day I get to show you how it all connects.

Until then: welcome to the fable. 🐍🔥