Welcome to Fantasy Magazine! We’re so pleased to bring your story “A Princess With a Nose Three Ells Long” to our readers. Can you tell us how this story came to be?

Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book left its mark! The original fairy tale is the perfect thing of its kind, a cascade of snowballing quests and nonsense assertions. I can’t imagine anything better to hear from a toothless grandmother in the middle of a sixteen-hour winter’s night. Even if I personally had it from a very Victorian Scotsman. The vaguely evil, nonspecifically trollish princess set to marry the thoroughly useless prince is a bit of a nonentity in the original, and only stuck in my eight-year-old head because of her single identified characteristic, a nose three ells long. I read it as eels when I was very little, which made for a great mental image I didn’t completely escape until the advent of search engines let me work out what an “ell” actually is. It wasn’t until I saw illustrations of Norse trolls later that I worked out what it was supposed to mean, and by then I’d developed a fondness for the long-nosed princess such that I had to work out what her experience of the story might be.

I recognized the title immediately; “East O’ the Sun and West O’ the Moon” has been my favorite fairy tale since childhood, and I was delighted to discover the story of the troll princess. Do you often explore fairy tales in your work? Do they influence your writing in indirect ways?

I grew up on fractured fairy tales and dissected tropes, which was the style at the time. Being left to one’s own devices in a 1990s Midwestern library will do some funny things to a person. Dagrun’s tale is the most straightforward retelling I think I’ve written, which says a lot, but I play with folktales directly every so often, usually in inversions and mash-ups. I’m more likely to use those elements as a handy toolbox, though. I have a weakness for stories about stories. Concocting the folktales for secondary or far-future worlds is an exercise I employ when I want to understand a society or a character I’m creating, though they rarely make it into the text. The anti-logic of a good fairy tale in its original form and the clever, well-interrogated, what-ifs of my own postmodernist upbringing are two sides of the same coin. I can’t believe that some long-ago Nordic farmer wouldn’t have been as likely as any of us to ask what the troll princess was doing there.

What was the most difficult part of writing this story, and what came easiest?

Finding the ending took some time. I’m what is diplomatically called a discovery writer, but I did go into this one thinking I knew the ending, which involved the princess sabotaging her wedding so she could marry the sun instead. This motivation was rolled into a broader wanderlust and pining after freedom that suited the character better. Since Frida wound up being a more prominent character than I’d expected, I didn’t even steal Dagrun’s romantic resolution. It took some work to smooth out, though.

I had the most fun fitting stranger elements of Nordic folklore back into the sanded down story I’d already learned. Huldra and the fossegrim and subterranean, sneaky elves and properly trollish trolls are excellent toys. I drew on everything from academic folklore, to other fantasy writers playing in the space, to my college roommate from Norway, to my baby brother’s copy of D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths.

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about this story?

I don’t believe in walk-on roles. If a character’s in a story, they have their own reason for being there. Every story is richer for knowing what that is.

What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

My short fiction plays all across genre, and I’m as likely to pop up again in a spaceship or haunted house as a nebulously intelligent castle. My current biggest project is, as one might expect, playing with story elements. I love the tension and trickery of a court drama or an epic conflict, but I am sick to death of emperors (and have only a little leftover affection even for princesses). I’ve been working on ways to tell stories with those stakes about the file clerks and mechanics of the world.