Welcome to the first stop on the Encircled Blog Tour! I’m excited to be hosting Tori V. Rainn today, the author of the lovely Beauty and the Beast retelling “A Heart’s Desire.”

Thanks so much for being here today, Tori! My first question is: why did you choose Beauty and the Beast as your fairy tale to retell?

It’s been so long I really need to search for this one, lol. Aside from being such a fan of Beauty and the Beast, there was one strong reason why I jumped on this story. If I remember correctly, I had a vivid dream about Beast being swept away by creatures. (We’ll just say creatures for now without risk of spoiling it.) I thought the scene was too cool. Then out of order, another scene came. It was about how a character could be related to or have connections to the one who cursed Beast. I thought it would be a nice twist. After I woke, I immediately jotted down the ideas as I remembered them and then told a writer friend. I told her I wanted to do a Beauty and the Beast book retelling. Yup, at the time I had planned to do a whole novel. I wasn’t a hundred percent confident in starting it, so maybe that’s why I never did. Then so much time went by, other projects came up, and the next thing I knew, the Ever Afters proposed we do an anthology of fairy tale retellings. Lightbulb went off! I knew right away I wanted to do Beauty and the Beast. I already had scene ideas jotted down that I had shelved so long ago. And now I would have the chance to bring it to life!

That’s so fascinating! I’m often inspired by dreams as well; it’s amazing how vivid they can be. Speaking of vivid, I loved how you incorporated the roses in the lake–what inspired that imagery?

Thank you! That was one of my favorite scenes. I will give all the credit to Pinterest. Despite what I said about having many ideas already jotted down, there were still so many blanks. I knew I wanted a different and greater scale of displaying the roses, but I just didn’t know how. So I turned to the good ole Pinterest for inspiration. There’s a digital artwork I saw of a man knelt down on a field of glass-encased roses. Then I stumbled across another pic of a frost-covered rose. Then two and two came together, and pow!