Author Interview: Eilis O'Neal






Earlier this year, I reviewed The False Princess by 2011 debut author Eilis O'Neal. While not directly a fairy tale, it has a lot of fairy tale roots and will appeal to fans of authors such as Shannon Hale. Eilis was sweet enough to take the time to do an interview for Fairy Tale Fortnight with me! Here's' a sneak peek at the interview:

Was it hard coming up with your own lore when you began world-building for TFP? How did you bring everything together?

It’s always such a balance when you’re world-building. With THE FALSE PRINCESS, there are quite a few elements of the world—the oracle of the Nameless God, the way magic works, the tension between commoners and nobles—that are essential to the plot. The reader needs to understand them and how they work to really get into the book. But TFP also has heavy doses of mystery, adventure, and romance, and so the pacing has to move along at a pretty good clip. So it was sometimes a challenge to balance fleshing out the world and its rules and keeping the book moving. I want the information to be there, but in a way that feels natural and keeps the book going, rather than a ten page diatribe on exactly how magic functions in Thorvaldor. So that was what I tried to concentrate on: getting the needed information into the book in a natural way.

The Book Rat and Books From Bleh to Basically Amazing are both hosting the interview in its entirety on their respective blogs (click their names for access!). I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, especially the sneak peek at what Eilis is working on next!

Eilis, thank you again for a great interview. I can't wait to see what you come up with next. Hopefully, one day we'll get a full-fledged fairy tale from you! :-)










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Comments

  1. Thanks for the interview! Everything in TFP seemed spontaneous to me. I hadn't really though how hard it must be to come up with a world that's so natural and yet so different from the real world.

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  2. I want to read The False Princess SO freaking bad!!!

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  3. You're welcome, Chel! Isn't it amazing to see how much hard work goes into coming up with a world? World-building is the hardest part of writing for me!

    Bookish Brunette: You need to! It's absolutely WONDERFUL! I forget, are you doing The Story Siren's Debut Challenge? If yes, make TFP a MUST!

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