Fairy Tale Mashups I Want to Make Reality (Ft. BitS 1st Book Birthday!)

Hey'a, everyone! So, exciting thing: tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of Blood in the Snow's release! As of tomorrow morning, I will have been a published author for exactly one year. Sadly, I don't have the time to do a giveaway in celebration, but I do have Blood in the Snow set to free on Amazon today through Sunday, so if you haven't read it yet or you have a friend who needs to read it, now's a good time to pick it up!

Edit: I goofed when setting up the free book promotion and accidentally made Mechanical Heart, my steampunk Rapunzel retelling, free instead. Blood in the Snow will instead be free from October 27 to October 29.

Since tomorrow is Blood in the Snow's book birthday, I wanted to relate my post to either the book or publishing somehow. That said, doing a "Things I've Learned Since Publishing" seemed a little cliche — plus, I'd rather save that post for when I've gained another book or two's worth of experience. And, while I have been working on figuring out what the next year or two looks like, publishing-wise, I don't have solid enough plans to announce five more books that I'm going to publish. The one thing that I can say about the future is that it's going to include quite a few more fairy tale mash-ups like Blood in the Snow, though not all of them will be in the same world. And, at the suggestion of the wonderful Jenelle Schmidt, I'm spotlighting five such stories that I want to write at some point.

Fairy Tale Mashups I Want to Make Reality

1. Sleeping Beauty/Rapunzel featuring a benevolent witch and the tower as a refuge rather than a prison . . . though, of course, it still feels like a prison at times. In this case, Rapunzel's parents send her to the tower under the protection of the good fairy who modified the Sleeping Beauty curse in hopes that they can protect her from the full effects of the curse . . . but of course it doesn't work out quite as well as one would hope.
2. The Odyssey/Beauty and the Beast, which I'm counting even though one of those is an epic myth and not a fairy tale. This would be more of having one as a sequel to the other — the Odysseus character becomes Beauty's father, and in the process of all his adventures, encounters the beast and gets into that whole situation. Then he returns home and reunites with his family — only to be sad because he just got back to his daughter and now either he or she is going to die. But she's all like "Dad, I'm your daughter. I got this. Have a little faith," and the whole Beauty and the Beast story plays out from there.
3. The Seven Swans/The Little Mermaid, which was actually suggested to me by my roommate while I was working on this post, but which I like enough to include in here. In this case, the little mermaid character would want to go to land not for love of a human prince or for curiosity about the human world but because she wants to save her brothers and knows the only way to do so is on land. She may or may not know that the witch she goes to was the one who cursed her brothers, but her enchantment does get her wrapped up with their curse somehow, so if she doesn't save them, she's doomed along with them.
4. Beauty and the Beast/East of the Sun, West of the Moon — though they're almost too easy to combine; they're so similar. But you could add in elements of another fairy tale at the end, if you wanted to mix it up a little. Technically, I already wrote this one, but it needs a hefty rewrite — basically, I need to rework it from the ground up to fix the plot holes and pacing problems, not to mention the irregularities in style (caused by the fact that the first draft was written over a period of two years). At its core, though, it's a story that I really like and look forward to going back to.
5. Rapunzel/The Tinderbox/maybe Aladdin? Rapunzel and The Tinderbox already share some common elements — a maiden in a tower, a witch, a rescuer of dubious repute — and so do The Tinderbox and Aladdin — namely that they both involve a magical being summoned from some kind of light source and a man who uses that being's help to win a princess. Combined all together, I think it could be quite an interesting story.

There are other fairy tales I could mention as well, but some of those (for example, Gan's story) are an odd sort of fit that can't be easily explained, and others aren't developed quite enough to post. But what about you? What fairy tales do you think would fit well together? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)