First up with my fairytales is Cry Wolf. So I thought I would tell you some of my initial inspirations for this story. I always enjoyed the overall story of Beauty and the Beast and identify a lot with the main character Belle (the books, the castles, the whole town singing about her oddity, what’s not to love?), but I hate angsty, brooding love interests.
No Edward. Your services are not needed here!
So just on a whim one day, I wrote a scene, basically just the dialogue, of a new kind of “beast” that was a bit more cuddly. One who was raised to be more animal-like—and somehow this introductory conversation is what I ended up with:
As a lot of you have guessed, I grew up as a more sensitive/conservative type, so this took me a bit off guard, but I also loved it for its innocent rawness. I laughed and put it my folder for a few years as “maybe something I will look at later.”
Then I pulled it out again just this last year when I saw some of my friends were doing a fairytale anthology for Beauty and the Beast. I laughed and thought, well, this is obviously werewolf territory and I need a villain. So I started looking up some of the legends and quickly felt drawn to the story of the Beast of Gévaudan. Such an interesting story and it already seemed to fit right in the same area/time period I always imagined for Beauty and the Beast.
And once I dove into that and had this character in mind, the book just took off. I think the first draft took me like three months to write and most of the edits after that were pretty minor.
Sure I had one or two early readers who were expecting someone a bit more like Edward for the beast, but I still really like that mine is a bit different. And I will stake anyone who says otherwise.
I kid, I kid.
Maybe.
Cry Wolf is coming up fast! If you would like a chance to read the full ARC, you can sign up here.
Thank you!
Jacque
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