Most of us learned the formula pretty young.
Princess meets prince. Something goes terribly wrong. Prince saves princess. Wedding. Castle. Happily ever after.
Heather Petitpas kept wondering about the girls who didn’t quite fit into that story.
Girls who were independent. Girls who didn’t need rescuing. Girls whose lives might turn out beautifully without following the script they’d been handed.
That question eventually became Not Your Average Fairy Tale, Heather’s new illustrated book about Maggie, a teenage princess who has her own ideas about what she wants her life to look like.
Heather joined Charlie Levin on The Munn Avenue Muse to talk about Maggie, publishing her first book, working with an illustrator halfway around the world, and a subject that goes well beyond fairy tales:
How much of our lives do we spend trying to become the person we think we’re supposed to be?
The story we’re handed
Heather grew up with Disney princesses and traditional fairy tales like everyone else.
Over time, she started noticing the same pattern.
The women were usually waiting for something to happen to them. A prince arrived. Somebody saved them. Romance solved the problem.
Heather started thinking about the girls she knew who simply didn’t operate that way.
She’s a licensed mental health counselor in Massachusetts, and some of Maggie came from the teenagers and children Heather has worked with over the years. Some came from friends. And some, she admits, came from Heather herself.
Maggie has opinions. She makes choices. She walks to the beat of her own drum.
She also happens to be a princess.
That part makes the story fun.
The rest feels pretty familiar to anyone who has ever looked around at the life everyone else seemed to be living and thought, I’m not sure that’s mine.
There are a lot of versions of “supposed to”
Heather talks in the episode about the “cookie cutter” life people can feel pushed toward.
For authors, there’s another version of it.
You should have started younger. You should already have an agent. You should know what you’re doing. Your first draft should be better. Your book should sell faster. Everyone on Instagram appears to have figured out something you missed.
Heather’s book took more than a year to produce.
The manuscript went through rounds of editing. The illustrations went through multiple versions. Her illustrator, Nabila Anu, was in Bangladesh, roughly 12 hours away, which made a quick back-and-forth anything but quick.
And still, they kept going.
That’s probably the more useful version of a publishing story anyway.
A book gets finished through hundreds of ordinary decisions made over a long stretch of time and persistence.
Then Maggie has to tell her parents
One of the biggest scenes in Not Your Average Fairy Tale comes when Maggie tells her very traditional parents that Rebecca is the person she wants to get to know better.
She’s anxious about telling them. Of course she is.
Their expectations for her have been clear, and Maggie knows she’s about to say something they didn’t see coming.
Heather wanted young readers to see a character who was nervous and still told the truth about who she was. And there’s a line from the conversation that stuck with me.
Heather says what Maggie really wants from her parents is simple:
“I want you to be happy.”
That sentence covers a lot of ground.
It works for the kid who wants to study music instead of medicine.
The teenager trying to understand who they’re attracted to.
The adult changing careers at 45.
The 70-year-old finally writing the book they’ve talked about writing for 30 years.
We spend a surprising amount of time wondering how the people we love will react when our lives stop looking the way they expected.
“I needed this book when I was a young girl.”
After Not Your Average Fairy Tale came out, one of Heather’s friends read it and sent her a review.
She told Heather she wished she’d had the book when she was young and trying to figure out who she was.
That’s about as good a reason to write a book as I can think of.
Writers rarely know exactly where their words are going to land.
Someone may read your book because the cover caught their eye. Someone else may pick it up years from now at precisely the moment they need what you wrote.
You don’t get to control that part.
You do get to write it. And your book could change lives.
A very fitting last name
There’s a small detail near the end of the episode that feels almost too perfect.
Heather explains that her last name, Petitpas, translates roughly to “small step” or “small foot.”
And that’s how she describes the whole process of making the book.
Small steps.
Write the manuscript.
Revise it.
Find the right illustrator.
Review another drawing.
Make another change.
Wait.
Try again.
Keep going.
Eventually, there’s a finished book sitting in your hands.
Heather had wanted to write and publish a book for years. It was one of those bucket-list things she knew she’d regret leaving undone.
Now she gets to say she did it.
And somewhere, a young girl may open Not Your Average Fairy Tale and see a princess whose life looks a little more like her own.
That’s a pretty good happily ever after.
🎧 Listen to the full episode of The Munn Avenue Muse featuring Heather Petitpas on your favorite podcast platform.
📘 Not Your Average Fairytale, the book, is available now at:
Bookshop.org
✍️ ✍️ If you are working through your own story, whether it is personal, professional, or somewhere in between, Munn Avenue Press can help you shape it into something lasting. If you are ready to publish your book or audiobook, or are just beginning to explore the idea, visit MunnAvenuePress.com to learn more.
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Happy Writing,
Charlie Levin, Publisher & Founder
