I simply do not have enough fingers to count the many, many reasons why I love being a Sassy Minx, but one that I know fo’ sho’ is that I get to hook up with the sassiest, most awesome members of grown-up girl-kind and today, well today is NO exception.

Meet Carolyn Turgeon. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Carolyn is author-girl of Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story which is set in a modern day NYC and is a breathtaking story of love, loss and redemption. It’s a re-telling of the fairytale Cinderella, but with a touch o’ Enchanted, a li’l Charmed and a whole lot o’ Wicked – it’s by far my favourite read of the year, s’far. Fact. Carolyn also hearts all things 1940s, is a sucker for Urban Decay cosmetics, loves Burlesque and the musical fabulousness that is Pink Martini and most importantly, she’s now a Sassy Minx – hurrah – look out for features o’ fabulousness from Miss Carolyn v.soon. Til then, come meet her – she’s simply de-voom!

Describe Carolyn in five words…
Dreamy. Wordy. Glittery. Imaginative. Sweet-as-pie.

Your new book, Godmother, is the untold story of Cinderella’s fairy godmother – what made you want to uncover her secrets, to give her a voice and create her back-story?
I started out just wanting to write the Cinderella story straight, in full-on fairytale mode and with all kinds of wonderful, dazzling detail, and I’d settled on Cinderella because my first book was so difficult to finish that I wanted to do something much more light and easy for book two (that was the plan, anyway!). I switched to the fairy godmother’s perspective pretty quickly, mainly because that let me write in first person and also tell a third person story about Cinderella and the prince and the stepsisters, etc… It was only later, when I began going to a writing workshop run by the novelist Jennifer Belle, that I decided to put the godmother in modern day NYC. Members of the workshop seemed resistant to the fairytale stuff, and I thought I could make the book more accessible by putting Lil in modern NYC and the Cinderella story in flashbacks. The rest of the book evolved—very, very slowly!—from there.

The ending is NOT what I expected – did you consciously decide the ending in the planning stage or did it develop as you got creative?
Godmother didn’t really have a planning stage. I just wrote and experimented and let the story slowly come together. I spent a lot of time brainstorming and reading over what I’d written and trying to figure out how to make the whole thing work. In fact, I probably spent about three years working on the book before I had an inkling about how it might end!

I would not recommend this approach, by the way…!

Everyone needs a li’l magic in their lives and this book definitely sprinkled a substantial amount in mine – I LOVED it – what inspires you to create magical prose and how do you create magic in your own life?
Hmmm. Well for whatever reason I really like art, all kinds of art, that creates a sense of wonder, making you see something ordinary in an entirely new way. Like at the beginning of One Hundred Years of Solitude when the gypsies show up with ice, which no one had seen before, and it’s the most dazzling thing in the world. I like that kind of wonder and magic combined with intense emotion. Like in Wings of Desire, the beautiful girl on the trapeze with white wings on her back, swinging back and forth, and it’s so gorgeous and wonderful but it’s so sad, too, because the circus is leaving and any minute she’s got to come back to earth.

As for creating magic in my own life… I really think it comes down to perspective, having a certain kind of vision… There really is a lot of beauty and mystery in the world, it seems to me, but I think it’s easy to miss it when you get too caught up in your own daily life, all the tasks you have to do, your own little dramas, and all the while there are full moons and thunderstorms and rivers and water turning to ice… Not to mention the people surrounding you, brimming with secrets and dreams and passions and stories. I think it’s easy to forget how full the world is, how many ways there are to live, and I think that it’s a magical feeling, when you remember, and when you see and learn something new.

That’s one reason I’m so enamored with Joseph Cornell, actually, the American assemblage artist who took bits of ephemera—found objects and images, coins and vials and pipes—and combined and juxtaposed them to create the most stunning, haunting pieces of art. Showing you a brand new way of seeing the world.

Plus I do really like witchy things, candles and herbs and oils and spells—all of it!

What five tracks would be on a Godmother soundtrack?
“Is That All There Is?” by Peggy Lee
“Dearly Departed” by Devotchka
“Water and Air” by Cat Power
“Let’s Never Stop Falling in Love” by Pink Martini
“Some Velvet Morning” by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood

Can you tell us a li’l bit about your creative process Carolyn, how did this book o’ awesomeness actually happen?
When I was writing Godmother, I was living in NYC and working at a full time job, so I did a lot of writing on the weekends or in the evenings (sometimes meeting my friends Joi or Eric in a coffee shop for writing dates) or on the bus in the mornings (for my last two years in NYC I was living in Glendale, Queens, and took an hour-long express bus to work!), and was motivated a lot by being in a weekly writing workshop with the novelist Jennifer Belle. But I wasn’t all that disciplined; a lot of times I’d just scribble the 7 pages I needed to workshop and that’s all the writing I’d do for the week. And sometimes I’d just skip workshop.

What do you do when you’re not creating books o’ awesomeness, did I read you bellydance? – how cool is that?!
I really want to get back into bellydancing! My friend Barb and I took private lessons with this most lovely bellydancer last summer (after I quit my job and left NYC that spring), and I loved it. But then our fabulous teacher moved away, and then I started moving around a lot, and now I have all these gorgeous hip belts I’m not using! I also bought an accordion last summer and was taking accordion lessons, and last fall I sat in on a class in dark room photography. I would love to be doing all three things all the time, and at some point I’d like to have a little house with a my own dark room in the basement. But for the past weeks I’ve been staying in a farm house in upstate New York, in Cornwall, and here I’ve been taking some classes on magic at the local metaphysical store, and then this fall I’ll be in Berlin, Germany, where I hope to find somewhere to bellydance!

What do you love about being a woman, Carolyn?
Wearing makeup and jewelry and perfume and pretty shoes. Being intuitive and witchy and powerful just naturally. Being able to shimmy.

What’s your motto for life?
I am very partial to these lyrics from a Malcolm Middleton song:
I think I’ve cracked it, we are what we do. We’re made up of actions and there are no rules. But don’t stand on head to get higher, listen to your angels and move through life like a fire.

What makes you jump-in-the-air happy?
Oh I love all kinds of book things—getting a scene just right, getting a book deal, getting a great review, seeing something you’ve written affect other people… All the ways that all those hours in front of a computer screen get validated… Also, falling in love, getting a massage, hearing wondrous news, smelling cinnamon and cloves and apple cider, sitting on a porch as it rains, arriving in a new city, opening a present, finding a gorgeous new dress or pair of earrings, tasting a perfect bite of steak or fish or chocolate…

My ‘must-do before I die’ is to take a roadtrip across American-o – you’re actually doing it – PLEASE tell me all about it!
Actually it was in April that my friend Joi moved from NYC to Kansas (for true love, after living her whole life in New York) and asked me to help her, so we rented a U-Haul and I planned out a route that took us down to Dollywood, then to Nashville, Memphis, up through Arkansas and into Missouri horse country, and to Kansas. I’d done a similar route with my sister years before, though we went all the way from New York to Los Angeles on that one. I love road trips. I love driving, I love motels and truck stops, I love the freedom of it and all the unexpected things that you come upon. This is one big, weird, beautiful country and there’s nothing like being in a car with a long stretch of highway in front of you and something great playing on the radio. It just feels like anything’s possible when you’re out there like that.

Carolyn’s Sassy List – what’s your favourite:
Book: One Hundred Years of Solitude
City: New York and Florence, Italy
Shop: Sephora. And any fancy stationary shop.
Website: I’m addicted to Facebook, I’m not gonna lie.
Movie: Mysterious Skin
Place to hang: I love the lobby bar at the Algonquin Hotel
Food: I could probably eat sushi every day.
Make-up brand: Probably Urban Decay, though I’m a sucker for alluring packaging and anything especially glittery, so don’t have a whole lot of brand loyalty!
Era: The 1940’s. Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck and James Cagney and Lauren Bacall….. I love the films, the music, the fashions…

What’s next in the world o’ the awesome Carolyn?
Well, right now I’m finishing my third novel, a retelling of the original little mermaid story that will be out next summer. I’m alternating between the mermaid and the princess’s story and it’s set in medieval Scandinavia. There’s war and passion and heartbreak and all kinds of wondrousness. It will change your life!

And next week I’m heading to a big fairy festival in Oregon to promote Godmother, and then I will be in Pennsylvania for a bit, and then I will spend the fall in a friend of a friend’s apartment in Berlin, working on the next book and maybe a play. And I might spend a week in November working on an olive farm in Tuscany, just to see what it’s like. After that, who knows?

Carolyn has an amazing website and her blogginz is a deffo must-have in your google reader, go check it out at: www.carolynturgeon.com