Sofiya Pasternack: Hi, my name is Sophia Pasternack and I am the author of Anya and the Dragon. Growing up, I had a favorite fairy tale that was something that still not a lot of people are familiar with. And I just one day was like, you know what? I want to turn this into a book. I've written books my whole life. There was something about writing things down and making up stories that I just loved as a kid. And when I got older, I wanted to turn this fairytale into ... Retell it. And I tried and I tried to make it a more YA adult, older characters, and it just wasn't working. And then one day I said, I'm going to age them down and so I aged them down and it was perfect.

So, at its core, it's a retelling of my favorite ... I want to say it's actually Scandinavian, it's not even, Slavic fairytale, but Scandinavians and the Rus' at the time, the Slavs at the time, they traded and they lived in the same place and they intermingled. And so, what we have today is kind of a mix of both of them. So, that's why there's a lot of Slavic folklore and Scandinavian folklore all tied together because historically speaking at this point in history, that's what it would have looked like.

I am a big history geek and I don't have a degree in it or anything, it's all just me being a geek. And I really liked the constraints that writing to somewhat of a historical accuracy ... Because it's not 100% historically accurate. I will admit that outright. There are some things that I edited to make it more relevant to a modern audience, but I really wanted to make it historically accurate in the sense that there's a lot of people from the time period that are historically accurate. And it's actually set in an actual year. It's not just in a, oh around this time. Nope, it's in 999, that's the year. And that was my favorite part, was making it accurate and having to research things. And I have so much research just to make sure that their house looks like it should, even though I doubt anyone reading it really noticed, but it was still very satisfying for me, was making sure that I made it as historically accurate as I could without damaging the relatability to a modern audience.