The Fairy Godmother Dilemma Blog Tour

I’m excited to host Danyelle Leafty today for her blog tour for The Fairy Godmother Dilemma. This is a fun fairy tale story with characters that I love already. Danyelle is doing something different with her book by offering it as a serial ebook. So each week you get a new chapter to read when you sign up for the subscription! Want a chance to win a subscription to Danyelle’s serial novel? Keep reading to find out how. 🙂

Danyelle Leafty writes MG and YA fantasy. In her spare time, she collects dragons, talking frogs, and fairy godmothers. She can be found discussing the art of turning one’s characters into various animals, painting with words, and the best ways to avoid getting eaten by dragons on her blog. Her serial novel THE FAIRY GODMOTHER DILEMMA can be found here. You can contact her here.

Danyelle has stopped by for an interview about The Fairy Godmother Dilemma and about what she’s working on next. Enjoy!

I always like to have background music for my guests. So tell us, what’s your party song?

“If I Were” sung by Kermit the Frog. It has the right medieval ambience, and my characters all have a certain . . . fondness for frogs. O:)

Tell us a bit about The Fairy Godmother Dilemma.

Sixteen-year-old Breena doesn’t want to leave the faerie queen’s court, and she doesn’t want a fairy godmother. But if she has to choose between the two, she’d leave the Faerie Realm over getting bossed about by a faerie with a pointed stick any day. Unfortunately, her attempt to evade her fairy godmother gives her growing pains in the form of fur, whiskers, and a tail.

Turning into a cat is the least of her worries, though, because the potion wasn’t meant to bring out her inner feline, it was meant to put her to sleep. Forever. If Breena wants to make it to her Happily Ever After, she’ll have to accept that sometimes a fairy godmother really does come in handy, after all.

You’re releasing this as a serial story, which sounds like fun! I know they used to be very popular long ago, but have sadly fallen out of style in today’s world. What made you decide to release The Fairy Godmother Dilemma this way?

I’d been playing around with doing something like this for a while, but didn’t know how to do it. I was very excited to learn about Tracy Hickman’s Scribe’s Forge method. He’d taken what I’d been thinking of doing and come up with something so much better.

And, as someone who measures time by the books she reads, I like the idea of serials. They give me something to look forward to each week. 🙂

Your first chapter introduces us to Nerissa, a fairy godmother who isn’t like most fairy godmothers we read about in fairy tales. What made you decide to write a fairy tale with a twist? (I love Nerissa’s attitude, by the way! She’s fun to read about.)

Thank you! She actually showed up, all prim and put together, while I was in the middle of writing something else. She was tired. Disillusioned. A fairy godmother on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

I thought I should listen to her, so I started taking notes. The notes detail (as much as a panster can detail ahead of time) an interesting time in her life when she got tired of doing good, because all she got in return was more work. All she wanted was someone to notice her, to say thank you. So she decided to go into the wicked fairy godmothering business. (Before this, I didn’t realize such an organization existed. I know better now.)

As you might expect, the results of her foray into the wicked side of fairy godmothering didn’t go quite as she anticipated. In fact, a number of well-known fairy tales (like Cinderella, The Princess and the Frog, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, among others) were the direct result.

I couldn’t help loving the idea that here was someone who wanted to embrace wreaking havoc. And yet, despite her worst intentions, things still turned out great in the end.

Can you tell us a little bit about the characters we’ll meet in the story (without giving too much away, of course)?

Nerissa, of course, is the fairy godmother in question. She wants to be Breena’s fairy godmother about as much as Breena wants to be her DID (Damsel in Distress). It’s not that she doesn’t love her DIDs, she’d just like some time to recuperate. Get over her cold. Get some sleep.

Breena is a girl who was given to the faeries in exchange for a basket of fruit from the faerie queen’s garden. And now she has to leave. She’s not happy about this, and even less happy that she gets a fairy godmother in the bargain. She tries to escape, and learns the hard way that there’s no escaping fairy godmothers.

Myles is a mage-in-training. But when he’s forbidden to work magic at court, thanks to a mistake he made in a spell that resulted in several bird attacks, he’s desperate to find a way around the no magic injunction. Little did he know that his loophole would come in the form of prince-sitting.

Natter is a . . . bit complicated. At the beginning of the story, she’s wearing a goblin skin, so we’ll consider her a goblin for now. She befriends Breena, and decides that she wants to do something to help. Unluckily, her method of helping led directly to Breena turning into a feline. It could have been worse though, which just goes to prove that while intentions don’t always matter, sometimes they save you from things like sleeping death.

Can you tell us a little about what you’re working on next?

I’m excited to start working on the third book of THE FAIRY GODMOTHER DILEMMA series soon. This is the one where Nerissa goes bad, and I can’t wait! There will be bears and trolls and poisoned apples. (And Damsels in Distress, handsome princes, and a very disgruntled fairy godmother who can’t quite get the hang of being evil.)

I saw on your website that Beauty and the Beast is your favorite fairy tale. That’s one of my favorites too, even though my little sister made me watch the Disney version ten million times when she was a kid. 😉 What are your favorite retellings of fairy tales?

Fairy Tale retellings are some of my very favorite books. Beauty by Robin McKinley, East by Edith Pattou, Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George, The Frog Princess series by Edith Baker, Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine, Goose Girl by Shannon Hale, Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier, Into the Forests of Serre by Patricia McKillip, and A Tale Dark and Grimm by Adam Gidwitz.

And while they’re not direct retellings, I also adore The Enchanted Forest series by Patricia C. Wrede, Riddle-Master by Patricia McKillip, A Well-Timed Enchantment by Vivian Vande Velde, and Reckless by Cornelia Funke.

Thanks for stopping by, Danyelle!

Thanks so much for hosting me, Shana! You’re awesome!

Danyelle is generously giving away one free subscription to The Fairy Godmother Dilemma to one random commenter. Just leave a comment here on this post (at my website or my livejournal blog, either one is fine! Make sure to leave your email address so you can get your subscription) and I will draw a winner tomorrow!

You can visit Danyelle on the rest of her blog tour at the links below!