Have you ever finished a great novel and wanted to know more about the person who wrote it? I mean beyond the little bio on Amazon or their website? Personally, I love hearing the nitty gritty details of author life, routines, and more, so I thought it’d be fun to interview other fairy tale authors for this blog. That way we can nerd out AND get book recommendations at the same time. Win-win!! 😉
We’re kicking off the series with an interview with author Tricia Mingerink. Hi Tricia! Tricia is the author of two book series, The Blades of Acktar and Beyond the Tales. Beyond the Tales is a new fairy tale series with two books out so far. Aaaand she has her own fairy tale sidekick – Hi Shadow!
Book 1 in Beyond the Tales is called Midnight’s Curse. I’m a few chapters in and loving it so far! Here’s the blurb:
Dagger’s Sleep (Beyond the Tales, Book One)
A prince cursed to sleep.
A princess destined to wake him.
A kingdom determined to stop them.
High Prince Alexander has been cursed to a sleep like unto death, a curse that will end the line of the high kings and send the Seven Kingdoms of Tallahatchia into chaos. With his manservant to carry his luggage and his own superior intelligence to aid him, Alex sets off to find one of the Fae and end his curse one way or another.
A hundred years later, Princess Rosanna learns she is the princess destined by the Highest King to wake the legendary sleeping prince. With the help of the mysterious Daemyn Rand, can she find the courage to finish the quest as Tallahatchia wavers on the edge of war?
One curse connects them. A hundred years separate them. From the rushing rivers of Tallahatchia’s mountains to the hall of the Highest King himself, their quests will demand greater sacrifice than either of them could imagine.
2019 Realm Award Finalist – Fantasy
It’s Interview Time!
So Tricia…what life experience do you think has had the biggest impact on your writing life?
My family went on a lot of road trips while I was growing up. We never visited places like Disney world or other amusement parks. We focused on historical places, like Gettysburg, or national parks. I developed a love of road trips and have traveled across 47 of the 50 states in the United States.
All that road tripping and hiking in a variety of landscapes has influenced the settings of my books. I tend to think of them as “American” fantasy, since I have based all my settings on the geography in various places in the United States. In Beyond the Tales, my fairy tale retelling series, my fantasy kingdom of Tallahatchia is loosely based on the Appalachian Mountain region (if you tossed a few castles into the mountains).
What was your inciting incident as an author? Share the moment or catalyst that made you say, “Okay, I’m doing it. I’m going to write a novel.”
I started drawing picture books when I was two years old, telling stories about a family of talking horses. When I was 6, my family visited Mansfield in Missouri, which is where Laura Ingalls Wilder spent the last decades of her life and where she wrote the Little House books. I very clearly remember standing in front of the desk where she wrote her books and deciding that, yep, I was going to be a published author someday. It only took me 19 years, but I eventually did it.
What fairy tale sidekick do you need in your life?
I actually have my fairy tale sidekick already! I have a big white horse named Shadow who is the spitting image of Maximus from Tangled, complete with a love of apples. Shadow loves to show off, and he adores children (mostly because they always feed him lots of treats and properly adore him as he rightly deserves).
What’s your Myers-Briggs personality type? How does it show up in your author life?
I am an INTJ with a few INFJ tendencies. For my author life, it means I am very self-disciplined, and I love to set deadlines for myself (and ruthlessly make myself meet those deadlines). I am also great at writing stoic guy characters, but I need my early readers’ help in making my female characters feel real. Not a problem I should have, given I’m a girl. *shrugs* Apparently INTJ is the rarest personality type, and even rarer in women. So I guess I should feel honored?
What’s your go-to beverage while writing?
Mountain Dew. I know. Not a healthy habit. But I have yet to find a coffee or tea that actually tastes good to me.
What other genres do you write in?
I also write Kingdom Adventure, which is nonmagical fantasy with no fantasy creatures or anything that doesn’t exist in our world, yet the kingdom and world itself is made up. It’s a very small, niche genre.
What is the craziest (or most fun) thing you have done as research for your novels?
I once washed my own mouth out with soap. I was the kind of sweet, innocent girl who never had my mouth washed out with soap, so when I was writing a character who washes out his own mouth, I knew I would need to experience it myself. It honestly wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, though the soap taste ends up filling your mouth and nose for a LONG time afterwards.
Describe the premise of your fairy tale series or one of your novels using only pop culture references:
The Beyond the Tales series is a mash up of Disney’s Pocahontas meets a Disney princess movie meets the old Davy Crockett TV shows, complete with keelboats and river pirates.
Describe your approach to fairy tale retelling. How you decide where and how to twist the original or keep it as is?
My favorite approach is to spin the stories so that they examine the themes from a different direction. Much of the fairy tale remains recognizable, but the setting is unique and a few major elements are changed.
For Dagger’s Sleep, my Sleeping Beauty retelling, I decided it would be fun to see what would happen if the prince was the one cursed to sleep. For Midnight’s Curse, my Cinderella retelling, I played around with the idea of insta-love and true love and figuring out why the prince searched for her the way he did.
How did you come up with your fairy tale fantasy world? What details were the most fun to write about?
I wanted a fairy tale world that wasn’t the stereotypical, medieval European world, as much as I love reading fairy tales set in those type of worlds. As mentioned earlier, I settled on the Appalachian Mountain area, but a medieval meets Appalachia version. I ended up with a world where people live in castles but also travel by canoes and wear buckskin. It’s a crazy blend, that’s for sure.
Are there any “Easter eggs” in your books that readers should keep an eye out for?
Midnight’s Curse especially has a lot of subtle “Easter Eggs.” There is a line that is based on something from Romeo and Juliet. Small references to the Once Upon a Time TV series. Some nods to the Princess Bride. And, of course, nods to the original fairy tale.
Want to connect with Tricia? Here are her website, blog, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram links!
Stay tuned…more author interviews coming soon!