Jumping in with a teaser before the party starts. Here's Guinevere describing her career before she married Arthur of Britain in my modern-day retelling of the Arthur/Guenivere/Lancelot love triangle. THE POISON CUP, exclusively in PLAYING WITH FIRE: I never wanted to be a princess. When other little girls were begging their mothers to buy them Cinderella and Jasmine costumes for Halloween, I was designing my own, copying garments I saw in art books and fairy tale illustrations, badgering my mother to help me put them together using an old Singer sewing machine she’d bought off eBay as a ninth birthday present for me.When I got older, we’d go to thrift stores and buy outdated prom dresses and once-used wedding gowns and then cut them apart for the fabric. We’d haunt garage sales and estate auctions looking for bits and bobs to embellish the dresses I designed. We once found an entire box of tiny, multi-colored mercury glass Christmas tree ornaments that we painstakingly sewed to the bodice of a red velvet dress I wore to a Christmas party at school.Three different girls offered to buy it from me, and I sold it to the highest bidder after taking a picture of it for my portfolio.My mother was an emergency room nurse who’d adopted me as a child and raised me as a single mother. Her workdays were filled with blood and pain, so she enjoyed the frivolousness of my budding fashion career and enabled it and empowered me as much as she could. Because she spent her days in pastel green and blue “scrubs,” she loved dressing up and she became my first muse and model.There were mishaps along the way, particularly before I got the hang of making my own patterns, but soon enough, I could reliably dream up a design and turn it into a finished garment in a matter of hours.Long before I knew what “branding” was, I’d decided I’d name my fashion house “Chez Cherie” after her; and she went online to find someone on Fiverr to design a logo for me. Later, I would barter clothes for graphic design services, ordering up hang tags, shopping bags, and fabric labels I had printed at a funky little shop that was a neighborhood holdout struggling against Staples and FedEx office printing.By the time I was fifteen I had my own online store; by the time I was twenty-one, I had an atelier in Los Angeles and an A-list clientele that included two Oscar winners, a rock goddess, and three Instagram influencers.My designs were eclectic, retro, and lush. Think Janis Joplin in her velvet and pearls, Stevie Nicks in her leather and lace, Prince in his ruffles and metallics.I loved tissue lame and watered silk and chiffon and faux fur in jewel colors.And feathers. I loved feathers.Beyoncé posed in one of my feathered dresses on the cover of prom gowns with ruffles Vanity Fair and liked it so much she bought it.Venus Williams chose me to design her wedding gown as well as the matron of honor dress for Serena, which was anything but matronly.I designed for men as well as women. When Keanu Reeves won his supporting actor Oscar for his role in Mortal Thoughts , he accepted the statuette wearing a bespoke suit of my design. And he rocked it.My business really took off when the self-styled “witch queen” of Los Angeles chose me to design a gown for her annual charity Heartbeat Ball, an event that was the hottest ticket among the paranormal elite of the city, who paid thousands for tickets. The proceeds went to a variety of organizations dealing with paranormal-only illnesses like WAI Syndrome among shifters, and a blood-borne virus that killed vampires but left humans unscathed. I had donated my services, which earned me a lot of good karma and a high ranking on the paranormal-centric search engine whimsically named “Voogle.”I was suddenly besieged by requests to make everything from high-end sexy nightwear for mortals who wanted to play Mina in some “Bride of Dracula” fantasy to a commission from a fae lord who wanted to dress like he was living in an actual fairy tale.“I’m happy for the work,” I had told him at the time, “but can’t you just…magic…it up for yourself?”“You mean like the fairy godmothers in Cinderella ?” he asked, sounding vastly amused. “No,” he finally said. “I can cloak myself in invisibility”—and he’d demonstrated—“and I can melt into shadows, but supernatural sewing is beyond my abilities.”I never said so to the fae lord, but in my experience, fairies aren’t really all that most of the time. Some can fly, some can heal, some can see the future for brief bits of time. The fae lord had one talent that was extremely useful to him, especially since the fae are notoriously bad money managers. They could grant good luck to those they favored.My working relationship with him was extremely lucrative in the luck department. And by the time the luck literally ran out, I was established and didn’t need it any more to keep going.