Interview and Giveaway: ...and They All Lived Happily Ever After!: A Smorgashboard of Atrocities by Crystal Connor

Description: 13+

Once upon a time, in a dark & scary place, in a frightening land way too close to home…

Crystal Connor’s …And They All Lived Happily Ever After! is a collection of short fables not meant for children; but for those who enjoy the madness of nightmares.

In the ‘Queen’s Pawn’ you’ll visit a magical kingdom full of wonder and splendor only to come to the sickening realization that when the Queen had a message…she sends her pawns.

The perils of eating forbidden fruit have been cautioned against since the Book of Genesis, but will our urban princess in ‘The Apple’ heed those warnings?

Embark on a mystical and treacherous quest to reach ‘The Ruins’, located in place so sacred that is should never be visited by mortal man.

These are just a few of the adventures you’ll have as you explore the dark imagination of Crystal Connor. Fourteen short stories of horror, science fiction, and fantasy; 65,306 words of terror by a single author who clearly intends to one day be known as a Master in the genre.

Monsters, Women, and Villains (oh my)!

MB's INTERVIEW

Thank you, Mrs. Crystal Connor

How different is for you to write novels and short stories and which ones are more challenging to create? 

That’s a really good question, and I think that they are the same. In my opinion the most important part of a story is the ending, and with shorter stories you can grab the reader by the throat at the beginning and then leave them with their imagination running wild at the end. I like the short story because you don’t have to start at the beginning, for example the very 1st story in …And They All Lived Happily Ever After! is just two paragraphs long. You have an idea on how the story started but I don’t wrap everything up in a pretty little box, what happens next is totally up to you. 

And They All lived Happily Ever After is an anthology of short stories so you don’t have too much time (or length) … how did you make us, the readers, to care about the characters? 

I try to create an uneasy atmosphere and then I immediately put that character in peril but sometimes the way a story is told you don’t meet the character right away, so again I try and create that uneasy atmosphere or give the reader a WTF moment so that they keep reading to see what’s going on. 

You learn about Africa, Asia, Middle East “culture’s monsters and nightmares”. Are there any similarities, some common fears between these cultures and how different are they? 

It was really interesting because some stories you recognize, like little red riding hood for instance. In the Middle East the story stars a boy because women and girls don’t wander off alone, in Africa it’s not a wolf, it’s a hyena and like the older versions of the tales they don’t have a happy endings. 

Here in the West we have the angel on one shoulder and the demon on the other, both of whom are trying to influence our decisions but in the Middle East the angels don’t interfere. What they do instead is record your deeds. One angel writes down everything good that you do, the other chronicles everything bad. Whichever book is the largest at the end of your days will determine where you’ll spend your afterlife. 

Having the possibility to find at firsthand about Africa, Asia, Middle East’s “culture’s monsters and nightmares” you discovered a great (and fresh) source of inspiration. How did you use it? 

I fold it into to the story by having the characters share it. My latest release, The End is Now, a book I co-wrote with Lori Titus is built upon religious mythology and Jewish folklore. The main character is a Jewish woman and she uses the told tales to try to explain and understand the things that are happening. And the angels in the story share even older accounts. That way the reader is introduced to the stories the same way I was. 

They said to not judge a book by its cover. But still… how important is a cover or a trailer? 

But people do judge a book by its cover or trailer and because of that for me it’s a big deal. I want a cover that is going to make someone pick it up, turn it over to read the blurb and then flip through it, I don’t know if that’s half the battle but it’s a step in the right direction. A book trailer should make the person watching it say ‘Wow!’ But sometimes a trailer can be tricky. I loved, love, love the trailer for the Evil Dead remake but have no intention on seeing that movie because for one I’m not a gore hound and secondly I have little patience for stories where the characters do incredibly stupid things and then seemed surprised by the consequences of their actions 

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About the author: 

Washington State native Crystal Connor has been terrorizing readers since before Jr. high School and loves anything to do with monsters, bad guys, rogue scientific experiments, jewelry, sky-high high heel shoes & unreasonably priced hang bags. She is also considering changing her professional title to dramatization specialist because it’s so much more theatrical than being just a mere drama queen. Along with inducing insomnia within her readership Crystal also reviews indie horror and sci-fi movies for HorrorAddicts.net

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Author's Giveaway

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