Publishers Weekly - BookCon May 14, 2016

THREE YA AUTHORS
TELL HOW IT’S DONE

If there’s one characteristic that fans of Sarah Maas’s Throne of Glass series, Victoria Aveyard’s Red Queen series, and Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke & Bone series share, it’s this: they can’t read each installment fast enough. And if there’s one characteristic these three authors share, it’s this: they can’t write the next installment fast enough. They’re going to share all the secrets of hooking up books and readers in room W470, 4:15–5: 15.

Maas began writing what was to become the debut
in her Throne of Glass series when she was only 16 years
old. Throne of Glass was published in 2012, and there’s
been a new installment every year since. The fifth novel
in the series, Empire of Storms, will be published in Sep-
tember, and the sixth and final novel in the series is
scheduled for release in 2017. Even though it’s a “con-
stant juggling act,” Maas says, she always wanted to
write a “sweeping fantasy saga” with multiple story
lines that overlap and diverge, like braiding stories
instead of hair. While she won’t say what happens in
Empire of Storms, she did disclose that readers will meet
new characters as well as reunite with older ones, and
that “all hell breaks loose.”
As she looks back on the series, Maas notes, “There’s
so much that I’ve plotted from the first books that
winds up coming back in big ways,” and woven into
newer story lines. But, she says, she also allows her
characters to “guide the series where they want or need
to take it.” Writing what she’s mapped out, while
allowing characters to be true to themselves, she
explains, requires a blend of organizational skills and
flexibility. “But one of the best parts is when the things
I’ve been plotting for years finally come together—
even after letting the characters have free rein,” she
says. For instance, she’s daydreamed for
about 15 years about creating a certain
scene that finally happens in Empire of
Storms. “Getting to finally write it—and the
fact that it still fits—was a bit of an out-of-
body experience,” Maas says.

Aveyard, who recently released the second volume in the Red Queen series, The

Glass Sword, is just as circumspect when asked what’s going to happen in the next installment of the series. She’ll say only that the third volume picks up directly after the last scene in The Glass Sword, and that, because of that, she had to “get a little creative to keep all the characters in play.”