Writers of fantasy stories are often inspired and influenced by, well, other fantasy stories.
But in the following email interview, author Lynn Buchanan says she was inspired to write her fairy tale-esque adventure fantasy story The Dollmakers (paperback, Kindle, audiobook) by a painting, and influenced in how she wrote it by watching a certain Japanese animation studio’s iconic movies.
In 2014, writer Christine Norris put a steampunk spin on the classic fairy tale “Cinderella” for her novel A Curse Of Ash And Iron (paperback, Kindle). Now, nearly a decade later, the book is coming back into print, and with a new publisher (eSpec Books). In honor of this, I conducted the following email interview with Norris to find out about how this story originally came to be.
The Grimm Brothers’ fairytale “The Juniper Tree” is considered by many to be their darkest story. Which is just one of the reasons why — as she explains in the following email interview — writer Ava Reid decided to put her own spin on it with the Gothic horror novel Juniper & Thorn (paperback, hardcover, Kindle, audiobook).
Keith Anthony Baird isn’t the first person to write their own version of a fairy tale. But as he explains in the following email interview about his grimdark fantasy horror novella In The Grimdark Strands Of The Spinneret (paperback, Kindle), he didn’t just want to tell a fairy tale, he wanted it to “…come across like a fable” as well.
Just as there’s been many retellings of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, there have also been many stories about what happened to Peter after that classic fairy tale. But writer Gama Ray Martinez is taking a different approach with his by making his fairy tale fantasy novel God Of Neverland (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook) be not about Peter, but instead about Michael Darling. In the following email interview, Martinez explains why he wanted to tell Michael’s tale, and what influenced this story.