Author Crush Friday: Shonna Slayton
Glitter girls, you have pressing questions for your favorite authors and we have their answers. Welcome to our weekly segment, Author Crush Fridays.
We love asking questions and we love the answers from some of our favorite authors. Today we’re talking to Shonna Slayton, author of Cinderella’s Shoes (October 6, 2015; Entangled Teen). Thank you for talking to us today, Shonna! We’re honored!
GLITTER: Tell us about your journey to becoming a writer.
SHONNA: I got my start writing technical manuals. Funny, but now that I think about it, the very first one I wrote was as a teenager! I had a summer job as a Parks and Rec leader. Going into the job, I was somewhat clueless, and was handed a pile of “ideas” but no tips on how to put together a summer program, including answers to necessary questions like: how much glue should I buy? By the end of the summer I had a manual put together for the next summer’s leader. I did the same for a summer university program, and then after I graduated with a business degree, I eventually found a job writing computer help files for an educational publisher. But my deep love has always been novels, and after many starts and stops I decided it was time to get serious and really try to make a go of it. Persistence is key.
GLITTER: Where did the idea of Cinderella’s Shoes come from?
SHONNA: To talk about Cinderella’s Shoes I have to back up a bit to talk about book one, Cinderella’s Dress. I was reading a book about department stores (more fascinating than it sounds!) and learned that department store window dressing was primarily a male occupation until WWII. Having experimented with window dressing when I worked at a clothing store, this tidbit caught my attention. Around the same time I was looking at picture books with my daughter and saw a book called Cinderella’s Dress and immediately thought it was about Cinderella passing her dress down to her granddaughter….it wasn’t, so I started thinking about that idea, too. The two story sparks merged and I thought it would be fun to try and get Cinderella’s real dress into a department store window display. That leads us back to the sequel, Cinderella’s Shoes where my girl Kate goes on to search for the missing shoes in the hopes that if she finds them, she can use them to find a missing loved one.
GLITTER: In Cinderella’s Shoes, what was your favorite chapter/scene to write and why?
SHONNA: My favorite scene lands near the end of the novel. I don’t want to talk too much about it because of spoilers, but it is set in the early morning between two characters who were destined to meet. It’s an understated scene and might not even stand out to some readers, but it is so vivid in my mind. As I was writing it I felt like I was making these two characters so happy for giving them this moment.
GLITTER: This is your second book. Can you read Cinderella’s Shoes as a stand-alone or should readers read Cinderella’s Dress first?
SHONNA: Personally, I always like to start at the beginning of a series, but for readers who don’t have a preference (!) there is enough backstory woven in to bring people up to speed on what happened in the first book so that Cinderella’s Shoes will make sense. One of my editors on this project hadn’t read Cinderella’s Dress, so whenever she was confused, she flagged the section for me to explain for readers new to the books.
GLITTER: How much research went into writing both books?
SHONNA: History is so fascinating to me! I’m not as interested in the larger movements (like the battles of WWII) as I am the every-day life of a girl like me living back then. For Cinderella’s Dress I did a ton of research, partly because there was a lot available, and partly because I wanted to make sure I got every detail correct. If you are reading Cinderella’s Dress and wondering if a point of history is real, it probably is. The 1940’s were not so long ago as far as history goes, so you can still easily find primary sources like books, magazines, and movies.
For Cinderella’s Shoes, however, the research was a lot harder to come by, and the story slips into a little more fairy tale than the first book. My characters travel into post World War II Eastern Europe which has until fairly recently been somewhat hidden behind Communism. Plus, my research was limited to what has been written in English. I learned a lot about what happens after a war—how the war may be over, but there is an adjustment period which looks a little bit like chaos.
GLITTER: What has been the toughest criticism given to you as an author? What has been the best compliment?
SHONNA: Oh, tough question. You know, the whole path to publication is filled with people telling you what is wrong with your writing! It’s all part of the process of improving your craft. Which is actually a good thing, because when you are published, your work becomes public and so does the criticism. The best compliment I’ve received came from a super-fan who told me my book is one of her favorites ever. Since I have several books I treasure on my bookshelf and know how I feel about them, I find that a high compliment indeed.
GLITTER: What are you working on now?
SHONNA: I’m loving this project I’m drafting now. It’s another historical/fairy-tale mashup that’ll be coming out next fall. I’m taking the magic spindle from Sleeping Beauty and moving it forward to a cotton-mill town in the late 1800’s.
Thanks, Glitter Magazine! I enjoy your Author Crush feature, and it’s fun to be a part of it!
SHONNA SLAYTON is the author of the YA novel, Cinderella’s Dress, which released on June 3, 2014 with Entangled Teen. She finds inspiration in reading vintage diaries written by teens, who despite using different slang, sound a lot like teenagers today. While writing Cinderella’s Dress she reflected on her days as a high-school senior in British Columbia when she convinced her supervisors at a sportswear store to let her design a few windows–it was glorious fun while it lasted. When not writing, Shonna enjoys amaretto lattes and spending time with her husband and children in Arizona.
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