The bear who is finally revealed to be a prince is of course Ted, of the King family. The character based on the nasty little dwarf ended up being called Mal – officially an abbreviation of Malcolm, but in its own right a word for bad.

And so on. I had fun with the names, making them appropriate for the characters’ fairytale roles and also believable in an everyday context. (Blanche and Carmen have a hippy mother – who else would live way out in the bush, I mean forest, like that? – so their rather exotic names are explainable.)

The names provide one kind of clue to the origins of my plot, and there are some other clues. Hopefully it is possible, but not essential, for readers to pick up the allusions.