Wicked Fairy Tales Author Spotlight – Annabeth Leong

I loved East of the Sun and West of the Moon. It's a version of the animal bridegroom trope, which is a favorite of mine. I like stories of transformation, and this particular story impressed me with vivid imagery -- the candle wax dripping onto the bridegroom, the girl's journey with the various winds. You can hear the deep poetry of the story even in the title. I've wanted to write a retelling of this story, but have never felt I had a way in -- to me, it feels perfect as is, and seems to need nothing. How long have you been reading and writing erotica?

My favorite as an adult is Bluebeard, which is convenient, since that's the story I wrote for Wicked Fairy Tales. As a child, I was fascinated by this story, but also terrified. I often skipped it when reading through a book, because it felt overwhelmingly dark and evocative. This is exactly what I love about it as an adult. I always come up with new ways to think about Bluebeard's motivations for murder, whether he wants the wife to open the door or hopes she won't, and so on. A story like this, so full of questions, is begging for retelling, and I never get tired of reading them.

Traditional fairy tales very much shaped my understanding of story -- romance, quests, magic, the rhythm and pace of a journey. It was formative for me, and I like going back to my roots. I went through an adolescent phase where I felt they were too nonsensical, but when I got a bit older, I started to see that life made a lot less sense than I thought it would. Fairy tales began to seem very true to me, the way they had as a child.

The unknown is erotic, and fairy tales are all about the unknown. What's in the cave? What's beyond the edge of the forest? What happens if you break the rules? What happens if people aren't who they seem to be? What would you be if you could be something else, or if you were forced to be? These questions become very sexual very easily. Beyond that sense of magical roleplay, however, fairy tales in their original form have a deep sense of eroticism. Many of them are about marriage, which means they're about sex. They're about risk. People do strange things, and some of those are sexual. In the original version of The Six Swans, for example, the mute princess for some reason climbs a tree and throws her clothes down to the king's servant a garment at a time. I've never understood quite what she was up to, but it's an undeniably erotic action, and it's there in the original version.

 

My writing process changes all the time, but I'll describe what I've been doing recently. I warm up by free writing in a notebook, tossing out ideas about the kind of thing I want to write. I go all over the place at this point. If I'm looking for a fairy tale story, for example, I might start on page one saying I'm interested in The Frog Prince, but then by page three I might be plotting what I could do with Snow White and Rose Red.

 

Once that settles down a bit, I take a stack of notecards and write down the images most vivid in my mind. Going back to my notebook, I develop those into scenes. I shuffle the notecards around until I like the order they're in, then I fill out notes about what the scene needs to be, particularly in terms of what changes need to occur in the course of the scene. I estimate length and how long it will take me to write them, which gives me a word count budget and time budget.

 

Sometimes, I am going for a certain target, and sometimes I let the story tell me how long it needs to be. Once I have all that, I write a draft, again by hand in a notebook, following what I laid out in the cards, in pretty regimented half-hour sessions. After this is done, I like to put the draft down, at least overnight. Then I use the same regimented half-hour sessions to type the draft into the computer, revising while I do. By this point, the thing is usually quite different from what I had in the notecards. Once I finish the type-in, the story's pretty much done. I might read through and fix some minor things, but I usually don't do much after that until I get specific edits from an editor. Sometimes I shorten this process a bit -- doing both drafts on the computer for example, because the handwritten step is slow. It's best if I have time to do what I'm describing, though, because I've found that the type-in helps me to do the right amount of revising in my second draft. If I'm typing anyway, I don't resist changing things as much as I otherwise would, but I also tend not to suddenly take on overly drastic changes when I'm staring at all my handwritten pages.