Let me share a secret with you: authors steal. We like to call it inspiration, because that sounds better, but every retelling of a story, every remaking of a narrative, we steal a few things here and there, put our own twist on it, tell the story in our own voice.

Unlike the common thief, I would suggest authors steal because they admire the original. Really, it’s a confession of a reader’s love (and all authors are readers first) when an author takes a piece of fiction and reshapes it with their own voice.

Which is the long winded way of telling you I really love Shakespeare, and one of my favorite plays is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s hilarious, it’s romantic, and it shows off Shakespeare’s skill at seizing up human nature in characters that are relatable, then as now. And it is my inspiration for writing A Midsummer Night’s Demon.

It’s also a romance, and I like writing those. It made it easy for me to have two couples in one book, it gave me a good direction in which to go, and it might have inspired a flower bower, though mine became a bower hidden in the Midnight Garden, a place that knows no sunlight, that is eternally stuck in the mode of Midsummer Night.

Another thing about A Midsummer Night’s Dream that I love is the actors who are trying their hardest to put together a play inside the play. I don’t have actors, but I have side characters that I hope are just as entertaining. The only thing that I somewhat regret is that I didn’t get an ass (as in donkey) into my book, though I hint at that.

When you set about your literary thieving, you get to arrange your plunder in a way that suits your own taste. This is why I also have witches in A Midsummer Night’s Demon. There’s three of them, and they are wicked; one’s a clean freak, the other likes pizza, and the third, well, the third fell in love for reasons she can’t quite comprehend.

I hope you can appreciate that when we as authors say we get inspired, we mean we loved something enough to take it and make it into something that it wasn’t, something new and different and entirely our own. When an author does this, she hopes for nothing more than that you–the reader–will enjoy the final product. And I sincerely hope you will.

A Midsummer Night’s Demon is the third book in the Fairview Chronicles. Do give it a read!

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Author Bio:

Alexa Piper writes steamy romance that ranges from light to dark, from straight to queer. She’s also a coffee addict. She loves writing series, and her Fairview Chronicles follow a ragtag gang of supernaturals who try to make their city safer. Mostly. Her second series, Dusk & Dawn, explores banter and the trappings of a world in which Vampires, Werewolves, and the Fae live alongside humans. Connect with Alexa on Facebook or follow her on Twitter, and subscribe to her newsletter!