Blog Tour + Excerpt - The Princess and the Dragon and Other Stories About Unlikely Heroes by Francesca Burke

 

 Find the links to other stops on the tour here.

 

 

 

Title: The Princess and the Dragon and Other Stories About Unlikely Heroes

Author: Francesca Burke

 

Short Blurb: 

On the magical island of the Three Kingdoms, disparaged teenagers quest to save their people from dragons, duplicity and dictatorship. This is a book of fairy tales, but not of happy endings. Don’t expect to fall asleep to sweet dreams when you’re done.

 

 Longer Blurb:

  Princess Amelia’s home, the Kingdom of Mirrors, is on its knees, ravaged by the cantankerous Sapphire Dragon. She must find a way to rid her country of its unwelcome guest and work out how to restore its fortunes before her parents marry her off to clear the kingdom’s debts. Prince Richard of the Valley of Dreams knows he’s not very heroic… he’d rather read about quests than actually go on one. But when he finds himself travelling to a haunted tower, he discovers a treacherous conspiracy that could rip the Three Kingdoms apart… and learns there might be some heroism tucked up his sleeve after all. Esme Delacroix is a psychic living in Stormhaven, the only part of the Three Kingdoms where magic is taboo. A terrifying vision sends Esme and her friend Violet on a perilous quest that shakes Stormhaven and the Three Kingdoms to its core.

 

Originally published on the author's Patreon, the novel is now available as an ebook:

Goodreads | Kobo | Amazon

 

 

Excerpt:

 

Prologue 

Not all fairy tales have happy endings. Some end with a marriage, which could be a happy ending or a happy beginning, depending on how you look at it. Some end neatly, which could be a happy ending or a sad ending but is more often quite a boring one.Then there is this fairy tale, which ends neither happily nor neatly. 

The island of the Three Kingdoms is tucked away at the edge of nowhere and surrounded by violent sea on all sides. It slightly resembles a crescent moon and greatly resembles the sort of place you find silver-tongued elderly ladies with a tendency to cast enchantments and witty young men with a tendency to embark on valiant quests and declare themselves heroes.There are surprisingly high levels of hygiene and health and safety given the lack of electricity and standardised paperwork.

Several thousand years before the witty men and the hygiene standards, the Three Kingdoms was merely a small, volatile, pocket of ocean. One afternoon the earth sneezed, accidentally spewing out a handful of magical creatures, a variety of poisonous plants and four strains of the common cold. The ocean viewed all these things as the unfortunate natural by-product of a sneeze and made to clear them away, so the earth hastily spat out a spectacular island of mountain ranges and beaches and lush green valleys, offering its exiles a comfortable prison. Magic seeped through the earth and out into the sea, calling out for humans to come and look and stay a while. This was probably where things went wrong.  

The islanders promptly set about harnessing the magic and taming the creatures and figuring out which plants could be eaten if cooked properly.They also named the Three Kingdoms the Three Kingdoms of something, but they kept claiming one another’s thrones via wars or marriages (or a war disguised as a marriage) until specifics faded away and all that remained were three royal families and three tenacious nations, mutually enjoying the eternal bonds of shared history and common culture. 

Well, three royal families and three tenacious nations with a lot of shared history.

 

 

 The Princess and the Dragon

Chapter One

The Kingdom of Mirrors, the loudest, southernmost and most magical of the Three Kingdoms, filled the bottom third of the crescent moon with olive trees, fishing boats and about ten thousand mirrors. It was ruled by the Durante line of the House of Stars, whose family tree was dotted with the types of people whose exploits are written into ten-minute songs about burning cities, eccentric fashion sense and enormous acts of courage in the face of fire-breathing dragons. Princess Amelia, the youngest of the Durante family, knew from early childhood that she, too, would one day have to defeat a dragon. 

Nobody initially expected Amelia to facethe dragon in question, partly because she was a girl and partly because she had been born second in line to the throne. Her older brother, Prince Nicholas, was both dashingly handsome and perfectly capable of embarking on such a heroic quest by himself. Unfortunately for Amelia, by the time she reached her teens Prince Nicholas found himself indisposed, so although most people were too polite to mention it, the task of dragon-slaying ultimately fell to her. 

Amelia was fourteen, and in happier stories she would be learning how to dance or dabble in magic. In this story, Amelia was in charge of olive oil production. She was also kingdom treasurer, head of the royal family’s public relations department, occasional fisherwoman and part-time carer to her ailing father, the king. For someone born into a centuries-old dynasty, she spent a lot of time with ancient legal documents and recently gutted fish.

 

 

 

About the Author

 

Born in Rochford in 1995, Francesca Burke decided at an early age that the worlds inside books and television were infinitely preferable to the real one. Initially put off the idea of being a writer because it requires one to sit alone and ignore people, she now finds sitting alone and ignoring people to be the most satisfying parts of the job. She lives in Southend-on-Sea.

 

 Author Links: 

 Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Tumblr | Blog | Patreon | Ko-Fi | Website | Stories Blog

 

 

Read a Q&A with Francesca here.

 

 

Q&A with Francesca Burke, Author of The Princess and the Dragon and Other Stories About Unlikely Heroes

Today I am hosting an interview with Francesca Burke, author of The Princess and the Dragon and Other Stories About Unlikely Heroes.

Francesca is posting her novel on Patreon one chapter at a time.

You can find her Patreon page here. 

On to the interview . . .

 

When did you start writing?

I first started writing fan fiction when I was 12 (hi, Maximum Ride/Camp Rock/Twilight fandoms circa 2007) and gradually began trying to write original stories as well. 

 

Why did you decide to release The Princess and the Dragon and Other Stories About Unlikely Heroes chapter by chapter through Patreon?

Initially I wanted to be traditionally published; I pitched to agents and heard either nothing or rejections. After undertaking much-needed edits, I decided that I could either re-pitch or have some fun and put it out myself. I have my own stationery business and I’m self-employed, so I’m used to undertaking projects by myself. I was already on Patreon, so I thought that putting the book on there over a long period of time might be a sustainable way to build a writing career, as well as being a fun way to fund an ebook. Part of patrons’ money goes to me, part goes to the Make The Princess and the Dragon and Other Stories About Unlikely Heroes an Ebook Project, and all patrons get little extras as well as the chapters—I name characters after patrons, send them videos and things I’ve made. Having that sort of close relationship with readers isn’t necessarily as possible with a traditional publisher.

How have you found using Patreon in this way?

Slow! Patreon is a really slow burn for me as I don’t have a huge following on my blog or social media. The hardest bit has been convincing people to read the opening chapters, which aren’t even on Patreon—they’re available for everyone to read here. Once people read the opening chapters, they’re often quite into the story and the idea of creating an ebook, and they’re happy to join in. But getting people to pay attention, in a world with 82727262 different demands on people’s time, has been even harder than I expected.

Who is your favourite character in The Princess and the Dragon and Other Stories About Unlikely Heroes?

Don’t make me pick! Possibly Violet, who we meet in the third part of the book. She’s kind of an enigma and quite hard to write but I like her a lot. I really like the witch in the third part of the story as well.

What was your favourite part of writing The Princess and the Dragon and Other Stories About Unlikely Heroes?

Finishing it. Kidding, kidding. Ish. I really enjoyed writing the final couple of chapters; in the initial drafts of the very end of the novel, the whole story kind of came together as I was writing.

Do you have any works in progress/a sequel in the works?

Nope! People who have read to the end want to know what happens precisely after the final scene, but for now I’m not telling anyone… not unless the BBC wants to make a six-part Sunday night drama about it.

What are your hobbies?

Most of my hobbies (writing, designing sarcastic stationery) have become part of my everyday life with the aim of being financially viable; I don’t exactly make a lot from them though, so really they are hobbies with the potential to be lucrative in the long run. I would still do them for free if no one was paying any attention, so I suppose they are still hobbies. No one’s ever going to pay me to read, so reading is probably my last true hobby!

Do you have a favourite book or author?

Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Cycle is probably my favourite series; she’s a fantastic author whose skill you can see improve from her first novel to her most recent. I absolutely love The Raven Cycle and really admire Maggie as a person. I also love Khaled Hosseini novels; they make my stomach hurt but in a really good way.

Do you have any advice for new writers?

I think I am stealing this from Neil Gaiman, who himself probably learnt it from someone else (it’s something I think all writers learn from experience, whether we want to or not): you can’t edit what you haven’t written. Even if you’re stuck on a scene or plotline or character, write to the end of the scene or the paragraph or the chapter. You can always come back and change it or polish it or use it as reference material. But if you don’t write, you don’t have anything at all.

Also, expect to write approximately two thirds more than will end up in the final draft. Most of the material from The Princess and the Dragon and Other Stories About Unlikely Heroes was just me figuring out the story and my characters. A few years ago, I hated being told that I would write more than would end up in the final draft (I’ve heard a couple of authors say that). I thought that all the extra words were a waste of time—and I have repetitive strain injury in both hands, so I don’t like to waste time at my keyboard—but they all contribute to the finished story.

 About the Author

Born in Rochford, Essex, in 1995, Francesca Burke is a writer, stationery designer, marketing consultant and enthusiastic collector of My Chemical Romance albums. She's written about travel, dogs and quarter-life crises on her blog, Indifferent Ignorance, since 2009. It’s statistically likely that as you read this she is thinking about making a cup of tea.

She lives in Southend-on-Sea with her MCR albums, a several bottles of nail polish and a passport she likes to mention has quite a few stamps.

Website