front and center by catherine gilbert murdock

My daughter is nine and the way she describes this book is: “You know Cinderella? Well, in this book she throws her shoe at the Prince.” Everyone has their favorite little moment. My favorite is her buying the cow for the beans. She kisses the prince he’s in the glass coffin. In Princess Ben you turn a lot of fairytales on their heads. The thought that it was a fantasy story had never occurred to me. When I sent it to my agent, she mentioned something about the fantasy market. The whole time I was writing it, I was thinking of it as a fairytale. A lot of fantasy stories are very plot-driven. It has a moral, which to me is a very important element to fairytales. I’m not an expert on fairytales by any means, but it has all these fairytale elements and references to other fairytales. Was part of the idea behind the book to write a personal take on fairytales? I’m a much better cook than I am a screenwriter. I’m actually a frustrated cookbook writer turned novelist.Īnd I thought you were a screenwriter before this.

We watch crops being grown and cows being milked. So it was really exciting to be able to tap into that and use it for some of the scenes in Princess Ben.įood and cooking play an important role in Dairy Queen.

I wrote my dissertation on women’s drinking in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and because of that I had accumulated all of this information on menus and food rituals that was just gathering dust in my brain. I did notice that there are a lot of eating scenes in the book. I was having some big battles with my kids about table manners and why they matter. That and the desire to write a book about table manners. I immediately thought, “Maybe I can turn this into a book so I won’t have to write the sequel.” And that was what triggered the writing of Princess Ben. But I was daunted by the whole process: by the medical research and by the huge responsibility that comes with writing a sequel, especially when your first novel has been well-received. It just so happened that I was on deadline to write the sequel to Dairy Queen. So when it happens, it’s kind of exciting. I have to say I very rarely have dramatic dreams. And that became the centerpoint of Princess Ben, when she flees the castle.ĭo you keep a notebook by your bed to write down your dreams? I had a dream about a girl jumping on a broom and leaping out a window and she was being chased by a very scary woman.

Front and center by catherine gilbert murdock