Guest Author: India Grey

Winners: Thanks for the great discussion everyone. I've run the random numbers and the winners are listed below. Congratulations!! Please email me your address at nalinisinghwrites AT gmail DOT com so I can pass it on to India.

Chelsea B (Mistress: Hired for the Billionaire’s Pleasure )
Manders (Spanish Aristocrat, Forced Bride)
Marilyn Shoemaker (Powerful Italian, Penniless Housekeeper)

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I posted a couple of weeks ago about how much I enjoyed India Grey's novel Powerful Italian, Penniless Housekeeper. And as you all know by now, when I love a book, I find ways to stalk contact the author ;-)

India was gracious enough to agree to guest on the blog today, and she's come bearing gifts. Please welcome India to the blog everyone!

Fairy Tales
by India Grey

Each year as Valentine’s Day looms I usually find myself doing interviews with journalists who are after some kind of ‘expert comment’ on the whole soft-focus hearts-and-flowers-and-chocolates thing. I’m absolutely not complaining: writing is a seriously lonely business and usually my day is broken up only by conversation (mostly one-sided) with the cat, so the opportunity to talk to a real person is always hugely welcome. The trouble is I often feel a bit of a fake. These poor journalists, harassed by editors and struggling with deadlines and word count are mostly under the impression that I write stories about swooning heroines being swept off their tiny feet by identikit strong-jawed heroes and carried into the pink sunset. Along a beach. With violins playing in the background. And I hate having to disabuse them.

I think of the books I write as being modern day fairy tales for grown ups, and as anyone who has ever read a genuine, un-Disneyfied fairy tale knows, pink and fluffy just doesn’t come into it. In fact, it’s pretty bizarre that the term ‘fairy tale’ has become some kind of shorthand for airbrushed, rose-tinted perfection (celebrities have ‘fairy tale’ weddings and live in ‘fairy tale’ houses) because perfection was the last thing I expected as a little girl when I opened my book of fairy tales.

Cruelty, loss, pain, suffering; those were the things that hooked me in and kept me turning the pages. It wasn’t so much Cinderella’s beautiful dress when she went to the ball or Rapunzel’s envy-inducing hair (although I did desperately want to grow mine that long) that brought me back to those stories time and time again, but the shivery horror at the thought of being orphaned and banished to the cellar as a slave in your own home, or sent to the forest to have your heart cut out as a punishment for being too beautiful. It was the tormented roar of the Beast and the yellow glint of the wolf’s eyes… and the strange mixture of feelings they stirred up that made me a seven-bedtimes-a-week fairy-tale junkie.

As an otherwise well-adjusted child I’m not sure exactly what it was about those things that gripped my imagination so fiercely that I can still feel its hold all these years later. Perhaps it was the way the stories played powerfully on the most basic fears all children have, of being abandoned and unloved. Perhaps it had something to do with the illustrations of the kind of dramatic, gothic settings which I now love using in my books – a huge, dark mansion with its miles of shadowy corridors, a crumbling stone tower in the middle of a lake, a house in a forest of silent, towering pine trees. Perhaps it was the whisper of sex – an echo of the explicit x-rated elements that were part of the stories hundreds of years earlier and which still curl, smoke-like, between the simply-written lines, so that I instinctively understood why the prince climbed Rapunzel’s hair to get into the tower and what drew Beauty to the compelling, disturbing beast. (And wanted to know more!)

Or maybe it was the seductive promise of the Happy Ever After that turned me into a fairy tale addict and fledgling romantic novelist. Society has changed beyond recognition since the days when stories were recited around the fire on endless winter evenings – when darkness and illiteracy meant people couldn’t read to entertain themselves, and a lack of central heating and Desperate Housewives ensured they were a captive audience – but people are essentially the same. We might live in an age of science and street lighting but deep down there’s a part of all of us that’s still afraid of the wolf and the dark woods. And still so wants to believe in happy endings.

In the books I write the Happy Ever After has nothing to do with magic wands and miracle cures – in fact, you could almost say it’s the antithesis of the fairy tale because it has to feel utterly, absolutely real. It’s about being accepted and loved as you are, flawed and vulnerable. And feeling whole and invincible through being loved.

What’s your best-loved fairy tale, or the element from one that made the biggest impression on you as a child?

I’ve raided my bookshelf and pulled out three of my books with fairy-tale influences to give away* to three random commenters (because three is the magic number!) Mistress: Hired for the Billionaire’s Pleasure (Beauty and the Beast), Spanish Aristocrat, Forced Bride, (Rapunzel), and Powerful Italian, Penniless Housekeeper (Cinderella).

Thanks for having me Nalini!

India's Website: http://www.indiagrey.com/
India's Blog: http://indiagrey.blogspot.com/

*Giveaway closes Wednesday 24 Feb, 2010 @6pm New Zealand time. Please make sure to check back to see if you've won!