Danielle Monsch – Author of Entwined Realms Series & Fairy Tales & Ever Afters

Good morning, Danielle. Thank you for stopping by to speak with us today.

It’s a real pleasure to be here and I’m very glad to have the chance 🙂

Your author information declares you to be a geek. What makes you such a big geek?

Let me just whip out my geek credentials 🙂 To me, being a geek is being unashamed in openly admitting your hobbies and pursuing them without caring what others think, and I love the way the word has been reclaimed and repurposed into something so positive, because I am old enough to remember when that wasn’t the case.

For me personally, I am a die-hard otaku (someone who enjoys Japanese pop culture, most often the comic books and cartoons). I enjoy superheroes, many of the geeky cult (and not-so-cult) television shows, I have a doll collection, I am a huge fan of Mel Brooks, Monty Python, and MST3K, I have been in several role playing campaigns, and finally, in what should be a shock to no one, I am huge into fantasy and paranormal stories of all types and across all medium.

You definitely have to come over for movie night!

As well as writing paranormal and fantasy, are you a big reader of that genre? Who do you like to read?

I suffer from what seems like a common writer problem (at least from talking to the writers in my circle) in that I don’t tend to read a lot in my genre – at least, not since I began writing it. I guarantee everything I’ve ever done or ever will do has been thought of by at least one other writer before me, but that doesn’t mean I want to be confronted with proof of that fact. I don’t want to have what I think is a brilliant idea only to come across another writer with the same idea and see their take on it, and then have a debate if I should use that idea now or not.

Having said that, I’m a huge fan of Kresley Cole and her Immortals After Dark series. I will be squeeing with everyone else later this year over Lanthe and Thronos’ story!

You have both a Fairy Tales & Ever After series and your new Entwined Realms series. Is it more fun to write a story when you create an entirely new world for your characters?

It is for me. I have a dear friend who’s a historical writer, and I tell her all the time, “I have no idea how you do it, being so constrained and knowing if you get a fact wrong there will be a couple dozen fan mails pointing it out.” Just thinking of writing like that makes me go bleh. Maybe I’m a bit megalomaniacal, but I like being the god of a whole new world 🙂

Your Fairy Tales & Ever After series are fractured fairy tales where you add your own twist to the well known stories. Your upcoming release Loving a Perfect Princess twists the Snow White fairy tale. I love that you have not only changed her romantic hero from Prince Charming to the Huntsman, but instead of being a large, strapping fellow, he is a dwarf. What inspired to you to shrink your hero?

Thorin Oakenshield. I wish I could give you this well-thought, enlightened reason, but it comes down to I was watching The Hobbit, saw Thorin, thought to myself, “If Snow White had dwarves who looked like that, she wouldn’t have been waiting around for the prince,” and BOOM! – a story idea was born.

Can you tell us a little about the world you have built in the Entwined Realms series?

I love fantasy – big, bold fantasy. I love magic, and I’m not talking small, subtle spells here. I want magic that can change worlds! I love fantasy creatures such as elves and unicorns and dragons and dwarves and centaurs and gargoyles and phoenixes. And I love settling battles by swords and arrows – even cooler if the weapons are magic. But I don’t like dirt. 🙂 And I don’t like the lack of indoor plumbing, and I would cry if I didn’t have my television. In short, anything historical (or quasi-alternate-historical) doesn’t interest me because I’m such a wimp. I wouldn’t want to live like that, so I had no draw to write the traditional *high fantasy* story.

But I still wanted to write fantasy somehow, always have, and in my struggle to reconcile those two conflicting feelings, I came up with the idea of what I call in the series *The Great Collision*. Basically, I ask what would happen if our universe/dimension and a sword & sorcery dimension somehow (not yet explained how or why) crashed into each other – and instead of causing the destruction of both universes they merge together, with the end result being a world that looks exactly like ours, but runs on magic, you can go to the park and see a unicorn, and people fighting with swords is not out of the ordinary.

And I adore writing in this universe. To me it has everything. I have modern life mixing with fantasy, and there is a lot of cute and fun stuff you can do with that, and I’m doing my best to write it all. On the other hand though, this is technically a dystopian series (though it doesn’t look like it because there are still video games, texting, and high-priced lattes). There was a huge cataclysmic event that caused destruction and death on a worldwide scale and changed everything. When you start going beneath the surface a bit, you start seeing the damage and the scars. Just because the cities aren’t all cars aflame and Molotov cocktails doesn’t mean there aren’t real and lasting consequences, and it’s interesting (to me) to see how the various characters deal with that reality.

Your first story, Stone Guardian, introduces such great characters including several members of the Guild and Larissa Miller’s friends and family, but especially your awesome hero Terak, who is the leader of the Gargoyles. Will we be seeing a lot more of these characters in your future stories?

Absolutely! The Entwined Realms series is a romance series and I’m proud of that, cause I love romance so much, but there is this big, huge, overarching good vs. evil plot that’s apart from and in addition to the romance aspect. So while every book will have a different couple figuring out their feelings while they are doing their part in this fight, showing these other characters is important to the story as a whole, and not just as future love interests (though yeah, that as well!) And just because a couple has found their HEA, that doesn’t mean there is nothing more for them to do storywise.

All right. No more messing around. How long will you tease us before you get to Fallon and Reign? Reign is super-scary and super-sexy and perfect for the warrior Fallon. There is definitely some serious history there and we need to know their story.

See above quote about being a megalomaniacal god 🙂

Thank you, Danielle, for stopping by to talk about your series. We are looking forward to more from these great worlds that you have created.

Thank you for having me, and I appreciate you taking time to check out my stories!

Born to the pothole ridden streets of Pittsburgh, PA, USA Today Bestselling author Danielle Monsch started writing in a time long ago, a time when there were not enough vampire stories to read and she had to write her own to fill the void. Yes, such a time of darkness did indeed exist.

Danielle writes stories full of fantastical goodness and plenty of action, but always with lots of romance (and a bit of woo-hoo!) mixed in. Vampires and Werewolves and Demons and Angels, Sword & Sorcery, Fairy Tales, Updated Mythologies and the like – if it’s out of the ordinary, it’s fair game for her stories.

When not writing, Danielle reads comic books and watches cartoons (though she says she reads manga and watches anime, because saying it in a different language makes all the difference.) She listens to music, plays D&D, follows XKCD, watches movies with the Rifftrax on, and is mom to two amazing little girls and wife to her favorite guy in the world.

You can find Dani at www.DanielleMonsch.com, www.facebook.com/DanielleMonschAuthor, www.twitter.com/Danielle Monsch, and can email her at [email protected]