Sometimes there’s a cute local newspaper article going around, and there was a Scottish sword-smith who was looking for an apprentice, so he could pass on his knowledge to other people and get more people involved in sword-making. This was also inspired by something I saw on the news. I’m definitely not the only person writing black princesses or princesses of color, but this is something that had been in my mind for awhile that I finally found the opportunity to incorporate into a romance novel.Ī Duke by Default is about Portia, Ledi’s best friend in A Princess in Theory, and a Scottish Duke named Tavis – can you give us any other little tidbits or teasers?
I just started thinking - what if this fan mail you got was true and it turned out you were actually betrothed to an African prince? Recently someone posted a screen-cap from one of my historical novellas, Let it Shine, and I saw at the top of the page says something like “black girls can’t be princesses.” I wrote that a couple of years before I had the idea, but this was something in the back of my mind - how we’re never shown as princesses or in these kind of fairytale roles to the point that a lot of young girls might not even think that’s something for them. Nigerian princes were a pretty popular spam mail thing, so I started thinking about that and what situations people could be in where they would be desperate enough to believe it. I was going through a period where I was starting to get a lot of random spam mail, and it was when they were giving more warnings about phishing emails. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You wrote an amazing essay for Bustle about the importance of making the princess narrative more inclusive, but I still wanted to ask where the idea for the Reluctant Royals series came from and what was the moment you knew you had to write it?ĪLYSSA COLE: I got the idea for the series at work.
0 kommentar(er)
