This week, we bring you Part 2 of Deborah's "miniseries" (see what we did there? :) on how (not) to write a series of books.

This post and its Part 1 originally appeared in Deborah's blog.

This post originally appeared in Deborah's blog.

​Today, I’m going to be talking a bit about things that ruin (or at least bring down) a book series . . . when I loved the first book. These aren’t absolute rules; but I do think they’re things to consider when writing. Thinking about them has certainly prevented me from doing some things I really dislike in other authors. All of the examples I use below are from real books by good writers.

​For every book we release, we'll be sure to post a review of it right around the time the book comes out. Our latest book, Sand to Glass by Remy Apepp, came out this Monday, November 1st. This review comes from Anna Winslow.

​For every book we release, we typically feature an interview with one of its major characters. This week we were going to sit down and chat with someone from Sand to Glass by Remy Apepp, but something . . . a bit unusual happened. Read below to find out what it was!

Every time we release a book, we’ll post an interview with its author during the month before the book is published. Our next novel, Sand to Glass, comes out on November 1st. Sand to Glass is a dark literary fantasy about a kingdom on the edge of destruction, and we are interviewing Remy Apepp, who loves to explore characters’ psychology and transformations.

​Let me chat about my serial novel Surviving in Horror, because it perfectly demonstrates one method of getting ideas.  (And how you can get them, too.)
 
But let me go back and explain.
 
Last November (2020), I decided to do National Novel Writing Month.  Only, instead of a novel, I would get myself out of my writing slump by writing short stories to prompts.  My prompts went like this: each day, I would go to the alphabetically next part of my bookcase and look at the first three authors.  The first book I owned by each author was my prompt; the author’s name of the third book was the name of my character:

This post first appeared in Katherine Vick's blog.

​A friend asked me lately – what’s the perfect place to write? And I found that an interesting question. It certainly isn’t one that any two people are likely to give the same answer to. Everyone has their own preferences and their own ideals – as is typical with life, everyone is different. For example, ignoring for a moment current world circumstances, I can’t imagine writing in a busy coffee shop. I would imagine most of us have seen – or indeed, some of you may have been – that person sat in the corner on the big, comfy leather chair with the laptop and the rapidly cooling cappuccino, beavering away at the keyboard to create their latest epic. And it seems to have worked for J.K. Rowling.

We're excited to announce that our Redbubble shop is open - and it is full of lovely designs that come on a variety of products from stickers to shirts to mugs to mouse pads, tote bags, and more!

We officially launched the store on September 1st, which Harry Potter fans will know is the day that Hogwarts students go back to school. Our favorite design so far is Never Interrupt a Reading Dragon (shown above on the far left; find it here) - which would be Thinklings' version* of Hogwarts' motto!

We just released another epic fantasy, The Merry Band, so we thought we'd give some advice on writing epic characters. This post originally appeared in Deborah's blog:

Recently, I read a novel about a woman who suddenly became queen after growing up in near-isolation, and her struggles to keep her throne and her life. Most of the book was from her point of view, but maybe two-thirds of the way through, we switched to a pair of minor characters’ POV for a page-long exchange that went about like this:

This post first appeared in Katherine Vick's blog.

There is something I feel the need to address.
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I have been chastised. Gently, it is true. But chastised I was, by two different persons on the same matter upon their reading my beloved opus, The Disposable. And I felt I had to take heed given they had both offered up the same complaint – why, oh why in creating my masterpiece had I not provided them with any decent places to stop reading? Because, as you may have noticed, The Disposable is on a roll. It has no chapters.