Ask the Author: Victoria Leybourne
Answered Questions (4)
Victoria Leybourne
I feel like I should give a really imaginative answer to this but actually I've always thought it would be lovely to live in PG Wodehouse's world. Nothing really bad ever happens to anybody (the stakes are all things like "you might have to give a speech at a school prizegiving event!"), everybody's rich, and the women can all strike fear into the hearts of others with the merest glare. Paradise.
Victoria Leybourne
There certainly will! I'm working on The Murano Glass Slipper right now and I'm hoping to release it later this year. It's a retelling of Cinderella, featuring Faustina's friend Chiara (whom you met at the beginning of The Rose and the Mask) and a guy called Domenico, a not-quite Prince who's about to regret making a bet with Giacomo Casanova. I'll announce the release date on my blog/Twitter/Facebook/mailing list as soon as I have it, so do follow one of those if you'd like to :)
Thanks so much for your question, it was great to hear from you!
Thanks so much for your question, it was great to hear from you!
Victoria Leybourne
I’m glad The Rose and the Mask ended up being my first novel, because if you’d asked me this question about anything else I’ve ever written I’d probably have shrugged and said “Uh, I don’t know, the shower?”
But I know exactly where I was when I got the idea for TRatM. I was on a boat, going from Venice back to Marco Polo Airport, in 2014. There are a lot of little islands in the lagoon around Venice, besides the main ones that make up the city. It struck me that they’d be surprisingly good places to be alone—considering their proximity to what was once a European trading hub. And, because of who I am as a person, I guess, that quickly became “Hey, what a great setting for a Beauty and the Beast retelling!”
I have another memory associated with this idea, though. I mean, I’ve been obsessed with Beauty and the Beast since I was about 13—and, relatedly, The Phantom of the Opera, and really anything where men have angstfeels among an unnecessary number of candles—so I’d been turning ideas over in my mind forever. The whole masks-and-gothic-architecture thing is why I went to Venice in the first place. But it was about ten years before that, riding the bus to school, that I had the idea for a Beauty who was a thief.
I tried writing it at the time but never really got it off the ground—I think because the Beauty character met a magical spirit of some kind in the castle who turned out to be much more interesting than the Beast. (Writing tip: don’t do that.) But I always thought there was something in it. The thing about Beauty and the Beast as a romance is that there’s plenty to hold Beauty back: the Beast threatened to kill her father, he’s holding her prisoner, he’s, you know, a Beast—but the Beast pretty much just adores Beauty right from the start. I thought giving *both* of them good reasons to hate each other, *then* locking them in a castle (or palazzo) together… well, that would be a lot of fun. And it was :)
But I know exactly where I was when I got the idea for TRatM. I was on a boat, going from Venice back to Marco Polo Airport, in 2014. There are a lot of little islands in the lagoon around Venice, besides the main ones that make up the city. It struck me that they’d be surprisingly good places to be alone—considering their proximity to what was once a European trading hub. And, because of who I am as a person, I guess, that quickly became “Hey, what a great setting for a Beauty and the Beast retelling!”
I have another memory associated with this idea, though. I mean, I’ve been obsessed with Beauty and the Beast since I was about 13—and, relatedly, The Phantom of the Opera, and really anything where men have angstfeels among an unnecessary number of candles—so I’d been turning ideas over in my mind forever. The whole masks-and-gothic-architecture thing is why I went to Venice in the first place. But it was about ten years before that, riding the bus to school, that I had the idea for a Beauty who was a thief.
I tried writing it at the time but never really got it off the ground—I think because the Beauty character met a magical spirit of some kind in the castle who turned out to be much more interesting than the Beast. (Writing tip: don’t do that.) But I always thought there was something in it. The thing about Beauty and the Beast as a romance is that there’s plenty to hold Beauty back: the Beast threatened to kill her father, he’s holding her prisoner, he’s, you know, a Beast—but the Beast pretty much just adores Beauty right from the start. I thought giving *both* of them good reasons to hate each other, *then* locking them in a castle (or palazzo) together… well, that would be a lot of fun. And it was :)
Victoria Leybourne
Honest answer: Very poorly. I am, as my editor has pointed out to me, prone to hyperbole (which was THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS ACCUSATION I HAVE EVER HEARD… oh, wait) so when I get writer’s block I usually just stare at my computer for a few hours, convinced that I’ve peaked, that I’ll never write again, that I never should have started writing in the first place, and then wander off to play video games.
Productive answer: Of course, I do get out of the slump eventually, and usually it’s by forcing myself to be ruthlessly sensible. Step one is to figure out what the problem is, what’s stopping me from writing. Usually, it’s that I’ve plotted my characters into a corner, and I can’t figure out how to get them from where they are to where they need to be for the story to continue. Fixing that often requires deleting a scene or two to get them back on track – and I usually discover that, deep-down, I already knew that and just didn’t want to believe it. But actually finishing a book is so much bigger and better than any one scene so, in the end, my darlings get killed and I’m back to work.
Productive answer: Of course, I do get out of the slump eventually, and usually it’s by forcing myself to be ruthlessly sensible. Step one is to figure out what the problem is, what’s stopping me from writing. Usually, it’s that I’ve plotted my characters into a corner, and I can’t figure out how to get them from where they are to where they need to be for the story to continue. Fixing that often requires deleting a scene or two to get them back on track – and I usually discover that, deep-down, I already knew that and just didn’t want to believe it. But actually finishing a book is so much bigger and better than any one scene so, in the end, my darlings get killed and I’m back to work.
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