In Which I Interview the Fantabulous Bettie Sharpe

I’ve been enormously lucky in my critique partners — all three are smart, insightful and adore romance as much as I do. What’s more, their writing reflects it. The fantabulous Bettie Sharpe, whose latest creation is the short “Each Step Sublime” in Agony/Ecstasy, is no exception. Her updated fairy tales are clever and delicious. In this interview she answers the questions I’ve always wanted to ask her.

Lily Daniels: When did you first know you wanted to write for publication, and when did you start writing? Was the road to publication a long one for you?

Bettie Sharpe: I’ve wanted to write ever since I was a kid, when I used to buy Barbara Cartland paperbacks for $0.10 at the used bookstore. Some of them had photos of Dame Cartland on the back, with her fluffy hair, lapdogs, and penchant for pink clothing. I liked the photos better than the stories. I thought it would be the coolest thing in the world to one day be old and crazy–er, eccentric and make a living by writing down the stories in my head.

I always wrote. I wrote picture stories in preschool, mysteries in elementary school, poetry and essays in high school. I even won my high school’s Golden Pen (it’s sitting on my keyboard right now). The road to publication wasn’t long, but the road to submitting a story for publication took decades. I was always that writer who flitted from one idea to another, never finishing anything unless I had a deadline. I didn’t finish a story on my own until 2007, when I wrote Like a Thief in the Night. I’ve been fortunate enough to find publishers for almost every story I’ve finished. I just don’t finish all that many.

Lily Daniels: Like a Thief in the Night (pubbed by Samhain) was your first published novella. What drew you to write about a female assassin and the immortal thief she keeps trying and failing to kill?

Bettie Sharpe: Dionne Galace, who also has a story in Agony/Ecstasy, used to have these writing challenges on her blog, “It’s Not Chick Porn.” In May of 2007, she had a contest to describe a hero and heroine’s first encounter. I wrote three hundred words about a female assassin sneaking through a window and killing her target, even though she thinks they could have been lovers. The kicker at the end of the scene is that the target doesn’t stay dead.

It didn’t win but when Samhain put out a call for their Strangers in the Night anthology, I decided to submit something. I looked through the file of scenes I keep, and decided the one that best fit the theme was the snippet about the assassin. It fit my requirements of needing absolutely no research since it could be both paranormal and futuristic, and I liked the contrast between a character who lived to kill, and a character who couldn’t be killed. It was high drama—life and death—and the hero and heroine would each see the other as a challenge. I wrote it in a month, sent it in, and they picked it.

Lily Daniels: Ember, now available free on your site or dirt cheap on Amazon, B&N and Smashwords, first appeared in a serial format on Dionne Galace’s blog. What was it like to write a work of fiction in the serial format? Was it a challenge to know that once you put a chapter out there, you couldn’t revise it even if something in a later chapter changed?

Bettie Sharpe: Actually, I was halfway done with Ember when Dionne asked me if I had a story I might want to serialize on her site. “Like a Thief” was coming out, and I had just put up a web page that had absolutely no content. I thought a free story would pad out the website. I think I initially told Dionne that Ember would be about 15k. It ended up as 34,000 words, and took a month to finish. I did make a couple of revisions after Dionne started posting chapters, but they were pretty minor, and always to later chapters.

Now, the nice thing about self-pubbing ebooks is that you can make revisions any time you want. In honor of the release of A/E, I’ve cleaned up Ember, corrected typos and grammar mistakes, and added teasers for other fairy tale retellings to the end of the book. When I’m finished with Nieves, the sequel to Ember, I’ll add a teaser for that to the file, too.

Lily Daniels: Ember is a fresh twist on Cinderella, one that manages to keep the trappings of the fairy tale while gleefully turning the moral of the story on its head. This Cinderella is actually a witch, loves her stepmother and stepsisters, who happen to be prostitutes, and the last thing she wants is to be found by Prince Charming. Was this story as much fun to write as it is to read?

Bettie Sharpe: Ember was and is the most fun I’ve had writing anything. It started as something I never intended to sell, so I wrote the whole thing without once stopping to think, “Will an editor like this?” All that mattered was whether I liked it. It was immensely freeing. I strive to recapture the feeling of writing Ember every time I write.

Lily Daniels: Cat’s Tale (pubbed by Carina) is your take on Puss in Boots. Before reading it, I would not have thought of Puss in Boots as a fairy tale that was a candidate for turning into a sexy romantic story, but you pulled it off for me. Why did you choose Puss in Boots? What was it in the original fairy tale that called out to you?

Bettie Sharpe: The idea for Cat’s Tale came to me when I was working on Ember. One of the things I hate about fairy tales is that they often equate beauty with virtue. I thought it would be great to rewrite a fairy tale about a beautiful princess who was vain, mean, and Machiavellian. When I started thinking about those character traits, they seemed very catlike, and then I thought, what if she got turned into a cat? I immediately thought of Puss in Boots. Having the vain shoe-obsessed beauty get turned into a cat answered two other questions I’d always had about the story—Why did the cat ask for boots, and what was it doing at the miller’s house?

Lily Daniels: “Each Step Sublime,” in the Berkley anthology Agony/Ecstasy, is your version of The Little Mermaid. In the past you’ve mentioned the Billie Holiday song “My Man” as being one of the sources of inspiration for “Each Step Sublime.” Can you talk more about this song, the thoughts and feelings it evoked in you, and how they relate to the story?

Bettie Sharpe: The original version of The Little Mermaid is one of my least favorite fairy tales ever (and the Disney version is not much better). The mermaid is an idiot who seems determined to suffer for a man who sees her as little more than a pet. In the original Hans Christian Andersen tale, the prince comes off as either terminally obtuse or a bit of a sadist. And the mermaid dies at the end. Suck! Even before I got the opportunity to write a story for A/E, I used to joke that the story should be called “The Little Masochist.”

My biggest problem with the story was that I had zero respect for the protagonist. The HCA version is supposed to be so sad, but the mermaid make crazy choices for a man who doesn’t love her, and then dies for her stupidity. Before writing my own version of the story, I had to figure out how to turn a character I despised into someone I could respect.

The song “My Man” (”Mon Homme”) is a litany of abuses recited by a woman who chooses to stay in a bad relationship with a terrible man. It’s about abuse, not BDSM, which, I understand, is based on rules and mutual respect at its heart. Most versions of the song inspire a reaction in me similar to my reaction to the Little Mermaid — the heroine is an idiot determined to needlessly suffer. But Billie Holiday’s version doesn’t make me hate the heroine. She sings it with such a determined dignity, such a perverted pride in what she has deliberately endured for “love” — it’s mesmerizing, and she doesn’t come off as a victim. The key to turning the Mermaid into a character I could respect (and write about) was pride.

Pride is a theme in the original—the Little Mermaid’s grandmother flat out tells her “Pride must suffer pain.” So I wrote a story about a woman for whom pride was inextricably bound with love. Pride in her beauty, pride in her strength, pride in what she could endure. And I tried to tell it in the same matter-of-fact way Holiday sings.

Lily Daniels: One of the most striking things about your stories is your heroines. Arden is an assassin, Ember a witch, Catriona a self-serving beauty, and the mermaid may be a masochist but she still refuses the sad fate that the Hans Christian Andersen story dictates for her. These women won’t lie down and roll over for anyone – unless it suits them to do so. What do you think is the appeal of the woman who won’t be molded into a preconceived role?

Bettie Sharpe: Does any woman want to be molded into a preconceived role? Stereotyping is human nature. I don’t think any of us can avoid it, but I do believe most of us strive to maintain the distinction that the way the world chooses to see us is not the sum of who we are. Ember and Cat’s Tale both feature heroines who choose to portray the illusion of what society wants to see while maintaining their own uniqueness and integrity behind the facade. For Cat, finding love and true happiness requires her to break out of the facade she has constructed and reveal herself, warts and all, to the man she loves. For Ember, marrying the man who knows and loves her (warts and all) means providing a socially-acceptable facade.

The balance of power in the two stories is different. In Ember, the country is ruled by a king. In Cat’s Tale, by a queen. I believe that as women gain more power socially, economically, and politically, the strength of society’s preconceived roles for women will continue to fade. But we’re not there yet. Reading about women who buck stereotypes is appealing because bucking stereotypes is something most of us do every day, with varying degrees of success.

Lily Daniels: Do you find it a challenge to reconcile the strong heroines and feminist themes with a genre that can sometimes be traditional in its underlying messages, especially in regard to gender roles?

Bettie Sharpe: Yes. But, at the same time, Romance is a genre that is written largely by and for women. The whole power-structure—writers, editors, agents—is mostly female, as is the audience. I think the genre is inherently feminist.

There’s nothing wrong with traditional gender roles so long as they’re freely-chosen. My mother was a single parent. She supported us. She helped put me through school at a women’s college where feminism was practically in the drinking water. She wore a suit to work every day for twenty years, and three months after I graduated, she retired and became a housewife. She cooks, she cleans, she kicks ass. She’s doing what she loves, and she’s doing it her way—and that’s the key.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a romance novel that ends with the heroine settling into a traditional role as wife and mother because she has no other options or because it is what is expected of her. The key to the Happily Ever After is that women find partners who love and respect them, and that they make the choices that make them happy.

Personally, I wish there was more variety in the characters and types of Happily Ever Afters, but that’s one of the reasons why I write.

Lily Daniels: Let’s talk a little bit about language. One of the things I love about your writing is that it often makes me conscious of the visceral power words can have. Your sentences often pack a powerful punch. For example, there are the opening lines of Ember:

I know you think you’ve heard this story before, but you’re wrong. Some would have it that this story begins with a virtuous virgin, a young woman of honesty and integrity sucker punched by cruel fortune and forced to sleep among the cinders while her moral inferiors lived the life which was meant to be hers. Bullshit.

I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you achieve this effect, and whether it requires leaving inhibitions at the door?

Bettie Sharpe: With first person stories, the voice always comes before anything else. I wrote the first three paragraphs of Ember in a fit of inspiration, and then they sat on my hard drive for a year until I could figure out who was speaking, and devise a story to go with her voice. Since I write primarily in the first person, I do worry about differentiating my narrators’ voices, but as the story develops, their character tends to shape their language. Ember was a drayman’s daughter who rose in the world. She’s educated, but her language can still be as coarse as a teamster’s. Because Catriona was a lady from birth, her language is polite, pretty, and a tad euphemistic. The mermaid experiences a “timeless now” when she is with her lover, so I chose first person present to give that quality to the whole story – though that was a tough choice. The excellent advice of my Critique Partner helped me make the decision in favor of present tense.

Regarding inhibitions—my characters say things I would not say. They do things I wouldn’t do. I don’t always agree with their choices or their morals, but it’s always fascinating to figure out who they are and what they think. When I’m writing, my only rule is that it be fun. If what I’m writing isn’t fun and fascinating, I change it. After I’m done, I may clean up the language. I may tone down the characters a bit to make them a tad more palatable to the reader (obviously, not much, as there are some readers out there who really hate Ember and Cat), but at the start, I just try to write what I love.

Lily Daniels: Why fairy tales? What is it that draws you to them and what is the biggest challenge of retelling them for contemporary readers?

Bettie Sharpe: Fairy tales fascinate me for the same reasons genre fiction fascinates me. They are stories that are told again and again in different ways over the years. Any writer can put her own stamp on them, and a great many do. For me, the draw of the fairy tales I choose to retell is the same as the challenge—turning traditional tales into something that retains the hallmarks of its origins but is also mine.

Lily Daniels: Describe your writing habits. What is a typical writing day like for you?

Bettie Sharpe: Habits? You mean, things I do on a regular basis? I’d probably be a more prolific and successful writer if I had actual habits. Most days, I try to write, and I try to write on the on the same story for as many days in a row as possible. That doesn’t always happen. I flit from project to project. When one stalls, I work on another one. I write in fits and starts. One day I may struggle to write a hundred words. Another, I may top ten thousand. I edit as I go, so it takes me a while to finish, but my first drafts generally look a lot like my final drafts. I tend to be most productive in the morning or at night. I write better before work than after it.

Lily Daniels: Who are some of your favorite authors these days? And which books (besides classic fairy tales) have served as sources of inspiration?

Bettie Sharpe: Always a tough question. I’ve really enjoyed Meljean Brook’s Iron Seas series. Loretta Chase writes dialog like nobody’s business. Sherry Thomas never fails to rock my reading experience. Neal Stephenson is a demi-god to whom I will happily devote a whole weekend’s worth of worship whenever another of his doorstop novels comes out. Dorothy Parker is my inspiration for all things acerbic. I am the only person I know who is a huge fan of the late Kage Baker, but her sprawling, history-hopping, genre-crossing Company series is weird and wonderful. Judith Ivory is amazing—I wish she would write again. Dashiell Hammett is a master of spare prose. Patricia Briggs writes some of the best UF around. Ilona Andrews pretty much own the genres and subgenres in which they choose to write. Megan Whalen Turner is my new addiction. This list could go on for another ten paragraphs, I’d better stop.

Lily Daniels: Lastly, I’d love to hear more about your works in progress. What fairy tale is next for you? And what other projects can we look forward to in the future?

Bettie Sharpe: I have a couple of fairy tale projects on tap. One is Nieves, the sequel to Ember. It was on pause while I let ideas percolate, but now it’s back. I only hope the two Snow White movies coming out don’t get to my ideas before I do. I’m also working on a version of Madame d’Aulnoy’s Serpentin Vert which is kind of like Sleeping Beauty, Cupid and Psyche, and Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld all rolled into one big fabulous poetry-laced romantic mess.

The project on which I spend most of my time is not a fairy tale, and not a romance. Its a full-length Fantasy novel with romantic elements called Rohais that features a princess, a curse, a quest, and the eternal truth that the roles of hero and villain in any tale depend entirely on who tells it.

Lily Daniels: Thanks so much for satisfying my curiosity!