Leslie Conzatti is not just an author, but a blogger too. She is an avid enthusiast of all things, which are related to books. Her blog, 'The Upstream Writer' , is running since 2013. Here Leslie posts original serials, excerpts from past and current projects, also featured reviews of independently published titles. She released her first fairy-tale re-telling, 'Princess Of Undersea', in 2016. It is a twist on the tale "The Little Mermaid". Since then, Leslie has published more stories in various antologies.

If you want to know more about Leslie Conzatti and her works:

https://www.amazon.com/Leslie-Conzatti/e/B08C1G68S3

https://www.facebook.com/LeslieConzattiWriter

https://upstreamwriter.blogspot.com/

The interview:

1. First of all, I would like to congratulate, that on October 17, your new book was released! Can you tell me about it?

Princess of Undersea is a fantasy re-telling of "The Little Mermaid." It is the story of Ylaine, the mermaid princess with a magical gift that is more bothersome than helpful--she feels kind of taken for granted under the water. Her chance to mean something comes when she discovers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to turn her scaly tail into a pair of human legs, so that she can find answers to all her questions and prove to her revenge-seeking father that not all humans are awful--at the cost of the gift she's had since birth. 

On the surface, life isn't all that idyllic, either. The human kingdom is mired in tragedy, and Prince Nathan would rather not dwell on such serious subjects as his prospective kingship and being responsible for the well-being of so many people. Then he meets a mysterious stranger from somewhere outside the island kingdom, but before the two of them can get deeply acquainted, a plot unfolds that has been a long time in the making--one that threatens not just the human kingdom, but the lives of all the Merfolk as well. Can the two royals unmask the true instigators before it's too late?

2. You are not just an author, but you have a blog too. Is it easy to balance between writing your stories and keep your blog also constantly updated with new posts?

I started The Upstream Writer with three goals in mind: First, as a way of sharing stories I'd written long before, just to see what people thought of them, and perhaps get some feedback to motivate me to polish them up; second, as a way of encouraging and supporting the indie author community, with reading list recommendations and featured reviews and the like; third, as a platform for new story ideas or thoughtful discussions on my favorite topic, writing.

Seven years later, and I still manage to come up with things to blog about, whether it's just continuous serials updated every Saturday, with the odd featured review coming on Tuesdays, or something else that I decide to post on another day. 

Right now, I'm finishing up getting Princess of Undersea all self-published, while dealing with editing a third draft of another fantasy novel, and generating the story for two different serials in order to keep my blog consistent. It's a lot, but I'd really rather not have it any other way!

I find it easy to keep the balance between writing stories and blogging for the simple fact that the stories are my blog's content most of the time! I'm posting at least once a week, perhaps two or three times if there are important things that can't wait another week--but the blog posts are usually short-lived things that I don't hammer and tweak and polish as much as I would those stories I aim to publish.

3. Since your first published book, you published stories in more anthologies. What do you prefer and why, to create more, shorter story, or a full book?

This is a very good question! I used to think that I couldn't write a short story, actually--every idea that I came up with tended to be very complex and I didn't think I would ever write something short. 

Then I started a writing challenge on my blog called "The Suggestion Box." I figured that the least I would need to come up with a premise for a story would be a name, a place, a time, and an object. Then I reached out to people around me and asked them for a list of those four things, as random as they liked, with little to no context. When I received a list, I would then have to incorporate all four things into a scene or two. When I had all four things, I could end the scene however I liked. 

This exercise really taught me how to write short. When I only have four things to create a story from, I really had to prioritize the character. I couldn't dive too deeply into the world-building or make things too overblown because I only had those four things to deal with. And since the objective was not to "make a complete story" but just "include all four items," it still gave me a sense of accomplishment, even if the story was left on a cliffhanger.

Which do I prefer? It's hard to say.

Short stories are a lot of fun. They're quick little things that don't require a whole lot of set-up and "built-in lore", not too many conflicts and problems for the hero to overcome.

Meanwhile, I love writing novels and crafting series because when you're sticking with one group of characters in one "universe" with one set of "rules" for so long, you tend to find out fascinating things as you go along, little tricky ways to "make the impossible, possible." 

I feel as though if I decided to prefer one and forego the other, I'd end up in limbo between the two anyway. My philosophy is: I go where the story takes me. If it's a long one, great; if it's a short one, awesome!

4. Do you have a favorite classic fairy tale? If yes, why that? 

My favorite fantasy story to read growing up was Peter Pan. I was fascinated with all the different sorts of fairies, the existence of Neverland, and the way fairies had the means of living in secret here in the real world and traveling between here and this other fantasy world, which, the way it was described, seemed so close to being within reach of one's imagination ("that space between awake and dreaming", I think it says at one point) made for an adventure that I really loved. As far as fairy tales, I tended toward a few of the obscure tales from the Brothers Grimm, like the one where the girl is sent by her stepmother and two lazy stepsisters to pick strawberries in the snow, and she is rescued by a bunch of dwarves for her kindness and found by a prince who falls in love and takes her far away from that horrible home; I liked the ones where the wicked swindlers and manipulators get their comeuppance; the tale of Mother Hulda, who rewards the kind, industrious, selfless daughter, and sees through the lies of the one who is lazy and spiteful. 

I like the tales that serve more as fables, and espouse a positive moral message, more than just "and she was just so good and pure and everybody loved her except the evil people and she got everything she wanted and lived happily ever after." 

5. Is there any genre you prefer for writing and reading?

For writing, I definitely go more for genres such as fantasy and cyberpunk--sometimes, like with my "Suggestion Box" series, or if I'm putting together a short story, I can write in basically any genre that I read in--but as far as developing longer novels and more complex plots that require a bunch of meticulous research... Let's just say I'm more comfortable when I have the freedom to make up my own details!

As for reading, there are far fewer genres that I tend to avoid or refuse to read altogether, than the number of genres I actually do read! Fantasy and all its subgenres; sci-fi, everything from classic "hard" sci-fi and thrillers to cyberpunk and every other kind of "punk"; crime thrillers and mysteries are great, too--even some historical fiction, though not as much and here's why: I don't tend to go for romance, and I am pretty sure I'm too squeamish for most horror (as distinct from murder mysteries, or books from the generic paranormal/supernatural category; those I can handle! It's the creepy, bloody, oozing stuff that makes my skin crawl!), so anything that has romance as the sum total of the plot, or relies too much on the "shock value" of the "grossness"--chances are good I'm just going to leave it on the shelf! But if it's got vivid characters, immersive world-building, fascinating ideas, and a compelling story, I'm there!

6. Fairy tale re-tellings are quite popular nowadays. What do you think about them?

I absolutely love a good re-telling! My favorite are the stories that respect the original story, while at the same time, creating something new and unique that stands out on its own. I especially like the ones that take the expected tropes of a certain story and completely flip them around, or they mess with our understanding of the "conventional" tale and change it just enough to make a whole new story out of it! That's exactly what I am endeavoring to do with The Undersea Saga, of which Princess of Undersea is only the beginning. I've got four different fairy tales that I'll be drawing inspiration from, but each time, I'll be trading out "normal" things in the story for my own original ideas!

7. Do you have any new, or ongoing projects? If yes, can you tell a secret, or a little teaser from it?

Always! On my blog, I have the end of one series kind of overlapping with the end of another.

The one just coming to and is called Priscilla Sum, and I've been working my way to the end of it essentially since January. It's the story of a college student from Chicago who's been studying for a degree in Archaeological Sciences--only to find out that her adoptive parents are, in fact, a pair of minor gods "disguised" as mortals in order to hide from a vengeful demon intent on using them to control the entire minor pantheon! First of all, the title "Priscilla Sum" comes from the Latin phrase "procella sum"--literally "I, storm" (referring specifically to a storm at sea) which led me to conclude that the parents are a god of waves, and a goddess of wind; Second, the whole premise came out of a picture somebody posted on Tumblr or something, of Jason Momoa, Gal Gadot, and Emilia Clarke, talking about how it looked like the poster of a YA adventure novel in which a bubbly college student finds out that her parents are secretly deities--so of course, I kept the "head-casting"!

The series I'm just starting is actually a continuation of the one I started back in 2016, titled The Clan of Outcasts. It was based on a series of really cool "character inspiration" pictures shared in the fan group of an author I follow--I thought it was just going to be something simple with a handful of characters that manage to cross one another's paths, and unite against a common enemy. I set it in a rather generic fantasy kingdom (literally called it "The Realm") and had a lot of fun exploring the different "superpowers" these characters had: electricity manipulation, charisma, water manipulation, healing, and illusions, to name a few; of course, the longer I wrote it, the more ideas I came up with, and brought side characters out of the woodwork to deepen the plot and expand it--I wrote two "seasons" of the series, the first one coming to a "close" at the end of 2016, and the second one lasting for about the entirety of 2017, and I thought that would be all... But then I started seeing more of these "magical" pictures popping up back in March, and that led to me coming up with a premise for a third "season", and that's what's happening now!

Off my blog, with the re-release of Princess of Undersea, I have been planning and prepping to start writing the sequel, Fugitive of Crossway, starting in November. The idea for this one came out of a short story I wrote to explore the notion that a certain character "presumed perished" in a boating accident from the first book may have actually survived, and what could have happened to him--and to my surprise, he wasn't the only "presumed perished" character to show up in this story! Here's a secret about that one: I originally wrote the story as a "publicity stunt", after I said that "the first ten people to review Princess of Undersea would get characters named after them/attributed to them in a tie-in short story!" Ten reviewers happened, so most of the main cast of this short story (and thus the novel) are fictionalized versions of these people who reviewed my book!

8. In fairy tales many interesting, mysterious creatures exist. When you create a story, do you use any folklore, or legendary animal, place for your universe, as an inspiration?

I am fascinated by legends and folklore, and the vast array of amazing creatures that exist there.

For example, I use mermaids in my book Princess of Undersea, and it even mentions fairies--but then there are some key ways that I changed things up to make even those popular concepts unique in my story!

For mermaids, I wanted to avoid the whole "half-human/half-fish" standard of describing mermaids, mostly because the question of whether or not the top, human half "should be" naked or covered always bothered me--and I didn't want to have to come up with some convoluted justification, myself! 

Instead, I decided that merfolk would be their own unique hybrid kind of creature, "too fish-like to be termed human, too human to be dismissed as mere fish." Their bodies are scaled all over from top to bottom and streamlined like a fish, yet their arms and their faces and their hair are the human-like traits that set them apart from fish. I liked the idea of having the capacity for multiple types of hair color, tail color, and a variety of "skin" tones (from the top of the tail to the scalp) ranging through shades of blue, green, or grey; they have gills in the middle of their face instead of a nose, and the average length of a merperson is much longer than the average human is tall. For example, my main character Ylaine has a black iridescent tail, blue skin, purple hair, and aquamarine eyes; as a human, her hair fades to a dark black (like her tail), and she stands at almost 6 feet tall.

As for the fairies, I mention in the first book that there were once three types of fairies in the world, for the three main elements: Air, Earth, and Water. In the book, it does say that Air-fairies were the ones who could bestow magical Gifts on merfolk and humans, and there is mention of Water-fairies possessing knowledge of magic in the form of spells and potions--but as for Earth-fairies, it's only in planning for the rest of The Undersea Saga that I figured out what magic/knowledge those might have, and that I will keep to myself for now, except to say that there will be a tie-in short story at the end of Fugitive of Crossway that will kind of reveal everything, and the Earth-fairy influence will become most obvious in Book 3, Fury of Outwest!

9. Do you have any favourite and less favourite fairy tale creature, or character? If yes, why those?

In addition to the ones I've mentioned before in my answers to previous questions--fairies and mermaids--there are a few other fantasy creatures I'd like to mention that I definitely enjoy writing about at every available opportunity!

The first is dragons. A fantasy story becomes objectively better in my opinion if there's a dragon in it. I've enjoyed every story I've ever written with a dragon in it: from one of the characters in Clan of Outcasts being turned from a half-dragon scarred from Dragon's Blood to a full-on dragon-shifter, to the re-telling of Cinderella I wrote and posted on my blog that involved dragons, called The Dragon's Mark; to the fun twist on "Jack and The Beanstalk" I wrote and published in my first-ever anthology opportunity, Dreamtime Dragons, called "Arthur and The Egg" where instead of selling the family cow for five magic beans that grow into a mighty beanstalk he climbs to find gold, my character Arthur abandons his father's old pickup in the middle of a forest next to a rock he and his friends would climb, refuses a payment of five gold pieces from a "dragon's hoard"... and ends up discovering that the "rock" is really a dragon's egg, and the dragon hatches and immediately bonds with Arthur!

Another creature I enjoy reading and writing about is the unicorn. They're always such reserved, aloof, and noble creatures, so pure and delicate--though I did write a story about a particular unicorn who kind of had a little too much self-importance and needed to learn how to work together and rely on others, instead of just thinking that he knew all the answers all the time. I do love reading books that involve them, though! Also gryphons feature heavily, wherever I can make them exist. I just love imagining meeting one of those, and feeling that super-soft combination of fur and feathers, and riding them as they glide through the sky!

10.  If you could live anywhere, as anything, in what fictional, or real universe would you live, as what? Why?

Oh gosh! So many different worlds I've ever experienced in books--most of them are just too incredible to not want to live there after I've read the book! 

In the real world, I'd love to go to Great Britain as a best-selling author, to just take a retreat and write and enjoy the marvelous countryside and the unique sights and exquisite landscapes the four countries of England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland have to offer! 

As for fictional worlds, I'd probably live on Attilath, from Kelly Blanchard's Chronicles of Lorrek, as a dragon. She has very specific lore for the dragons in her series, and I absolutely love it, and I want to be one. To be so grand and imposing and powerful and immortal (or at least long-lived!), to be able to travel between worlds and universes at a whim, to be so influential in the affairs of so many different races, to oversee their welfare and watch the noble kingdoms thrive and strengthen, and the selfish, wicked kingdoms utterly collapse under the weight of their own deceit and self-importance. 

Thank you for your answers! And you, dear Reader, what would you ask from Leslie Conzatti? 🙃