Recently, my friend, Isabella, and I were given the opportunity to interview B. R. Myers, author of Runaway Princess! It’s a beautiful sci-fi novel: a gender-swapped retelling of Cinderella! We loved the story, and it was so awesome to have the chance to speak with Ms. Myers and learn a bit about the behind-the-scenes of her book!
Without further ado, here are some highlights from the interview:
Rosie: So how did you come up with the idea for Rogue Princess? I know it builds on that classic fairytale of Cinderella — but how did you initially think of doing a spin-off story?
B. R. Myers: In the beginning, I think I just wanted to do something different from the few contemporary novels I had already worked on. And coincidentally on Twitter, Pitmad was going on, which is when authors get to pitch their ideas for novels in a very limited number of characters. I noticed that there were a lot of retellings amongst the pitches, and I found that really cool! Cinderella is also my favourite fairytale, so that was the first thing that popped into my head when I first thought about possibly doing a twisted fairytale. So I started to think about how I could make it more unique, and gender swap came to mind. Then I joked about “oh, how about I set it in space!” and what do you know?
Isabella: That’s so funny that it started as a joke! Yes, I’ve read many Cinderella retellings, but I’ve never encountered a gender-swap version, so I thought that was awesome! My next question is: what do you like best about being an author? What don’t you like?
B. R. Myers: What I love the most about being an author is meeting my readers, like you two! Connecting with other authors, other readers, is definitely my favourite part. As for what I don’t enjoy as much, I would have to say the “waiting” portion. When you’re trying to get published, there are so many external factors that take a long, long time to work out! For example, after I wrote Rogue Princess, I was super excited and I wanted to share it with the world, right away! But I had to wait for almost a year before the actual publishing because so much work goes into it, so that was definitely a test for my patience.
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