HomeFirst off, Happy Release Day Jim Hines! 
Today, The Mermaid’s Madness hits the shelves of your local book store and if you haven’t yet, I’d like to suggest you run out the door (screaming) and get your copy. No, really. Right now. I’ll wait.
Okay, so you have your copy in hand and I have ADDED CONTENT for you direct from Jim’s fingers to your eyes. See, rather than post the same interview with the same flat questions all over the place, Jim challenged his readers with blogs to send him one good question each to post today. That means the internet is literally FULL of unique questions for the writer. That’s like the best scavenger hunt evar! (Okay, if your lazy and don’t want to hunt all the questions down, you can go here for the round up of links. I can’t wait to read them all.)
I asked Jim, “Before you started writing this series, what fairytale Princess (Disney or not) did you most identify with personally?” Because hey, what’s funnier than asking a grown man what little girl icon he saw himself as. Here’s what Jim sent back to me.
Jim: I saved this one until the last, because it’s a good question and I wanted to come up with an equally good answer. I’m not sure I succeeded, but I tried.
I started writing the series when my daughter was going through her princess phase. To be honest, before she instigated what came to be known as the Great Princess Invasion of 2004, I didn’t pay that much attention to the princess phenomenon. If I had to pick one, I’d probably go with Belle from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Not technically a princess, but if Disney can lump them into the princess marketing machine, I can do the same, right? I can definitely identify with the one who wants to lose herself in a good book. And like Belle, I’ve never really been impressed with the whole testosterone-pitting, pectoral-popping, beer-guzzling idea of what it means to be a real man.
There’s a fair amount I dislike about the story, starting with the perpetuation of the idea that a good woman can “tame” an abusive man if she just loves him enough, but I’ve probably got more in common with Belle than most of the others.
