Sleeping Beauty

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I love comedy.

But comedy is nothing to laugh about. I know from listening to comics talk and reading their thoughts about it that comedy is hard, hard work. The best comedians study comedy, study timing and pacing, balance a fine line between "too far" and "not enough."

Terry Pratchett, for instance, has my undying admiration. He manages to sustain comedic writing on that narrow line for entire books; he doesn't rely on tricks like puns or pratfalls, and his books just flow from one great scene to another, loaded with terrific one-liners and dry, wry descriptions and little asides to let you knowhe knows that you are smart enough to get the joke and that he appreciates that.

Alas, I do not write comedy. I'm not nearly brilliant enough for that. I settle for "occasionally funny," with the occasional drop intoAmerica's Funniest Home Videos territory.

But I did have fun, a great deal of fun, with this latest Fairy Godmother book\emdash the fifth in my Five Hundred Kingdoms series. Here we have a truly fractured set of fairy tales\emdash when Sleeping Beauty gets hijacked by Snow White, then punted right off the field by the Siegfried saga. All three have sleeping princesses in them, which is how they manage to get crossed up, but how theystay entangled is what made this so much of giggle to write.

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