The Fairy Godmother

"The Five Hundred Kingdoms series is a little older… I don’t want to think about how old they are, because then I’ll have to calculate how old I am. But they were a set of fantasy romances before fantasy romance books were big. I’ll be honest: these are popcorn books, they are light and fluffy. These are not life-changing, deep books, but they are fun. And I firmly believe that there needs to be room for fun in the world. It’s about a magic system is ruled by ‘the Tradition’, a sort of mindless force that is trying to cause fairy tale stories to occur. This is actually something that Pratchett talks about in Witches Abroad , that idea that story is a force that wants to follow familiar channels. This first one is about an apprentice fairy godmother, who is charged with caretaking the Tradition and making sure that the really horrible stories don’t happen; ‘Rapunzel,’ for example, is a terrible story with a high body count. As soon as it looks like one of these is starting to come true, it’s her job to push it into a more acceptable channel – make it more of a ‘Cinderella’ story, or something. The overall story is, in fact, ‘Cinderella’; but instead of becoming a princess, she becomes a fairy godmother. It’s fun, it’s light, it’s fluffy. But there is the real sense that fairy tales are dark and scary, and they’re also stories that will want to happen. We’ve been talking about fairy tale plots that just keep coming up – ‘Beauty and the Beast’ gets repeated all the time, and all the variations on ‘Blue Beard.’ So, she’s a fairy godmother, and her eventual relationship is with someone who turns out to be a champion – you know, the dragon-slayer-knight type. These books are a great choice for when my brain is tired, and just I want to sit down and read wish-fulfilment happy popcorn. I am all for books like that, because when I’m writing a horror novel , it’s about the only thing I can read – because I can’t read whatever genre I’m writing. Yes! The fairy godmothers do a lot of work. They’re running things behind the scenes, they’re trying to orchestrate things. And they usually have to do it usually while being a frumpy, middle-aged woman – possibly with wings. As, myself, a frumpy, middle-aged woman – though not with wings – I can say that fairy godmothers are tired, dammit! Maybe that’s just the Gen-X fairy godmothers, I don’t know. But I feel like it needs to be acknowledged that these people are putting in a lot of work. In Nettle and Bone , Agnes the fairy godmother was my favourite character and certainly the one that I related to the most. Oh God, I am Agnes."