"Kissing a Frog" is story #7 in "Storied Existence". I always loved the story of The Princess and the Frog when I was a little girl. I had a little hardcover copy that was beautifully illustrated. I loved to just sit and look at the pictures. I remember the princess losing her golden ball, and the frog retrieving it for her. I remember being fascinated by the story line that the frog was really a prince who was turned into a frog by a witch.
In my version of the story, there is no princess, just a witch. Her name is Camden, and she's in law school. She turns an obnoxious male classmate named Alex into a frog, inadvertently. Her friends can see that Alex likes her, but Camden has just come out of a bad relationship, so she ignores the suggestion from one of them that she should just "kiss the frog" and go out with him. She really doesn't like him at first, but just as she starts to see a little more prince in him and a little less frog, she accidentally casts her amphibian spell on him.
The idea for the story just popped into my head one day. I was thinking about that old children's book, and I thought it would be great to write a modern day version of the story for my book of short stories. I thought, why not have the witch and the princess be the same person? Why can't the witch get the guy? Camden isn't a mean witch, after all. She's actually had to occasionally ask her older sister, who's also a witch, to help reverse her bungled spells.
I included a bit of diversity in "Storied Existence" in terms of skin color and sexual orientation, though perhaps not as much as I should have. "Kissing a Frog" has characters who are white, black, brown, and LGBTQ.
As for Alex the frog, he's one of three green characters in the book.
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