SP: Hi Caitlin! Welcome back to the Spinning Pen! Before we get into book stuff, we’d LOVE to know a bit about you and your writing journey! Where did this all start for you? What has your writing journey been like? What other books have you written?

CS: I’ve been writing since I was in middle school, though back then it was more like advanced plagiarism, since I would just rewrite stories I really liked, only badly (Alanna the Lioness, anyone?). I never considered writing stories as a thing I could do in a professional capacity, since it seemed like writing in school was focused on really boring stuff I wasn’t interested in, and all the books I read were so, so perfect, it didn’t seem like actual humans could write them.

But then after I’d already graduated from college, my sister got a book deal and it suddenly clicked in my mind that people write books and that I could potentially be one of those people. I had just read The Hunger Games series and immediately began writing a YA dystopia, which I eventually got agented and sold to Simon and Schuster, which became my first published books, the Last Star Burning series. While I was writing those, I had a secret backburner middle grade project I’d work on between deadlines called A Baker’s Guide to Robber Pie because my first love in books has always been fantasy and I couldn’t not try to write fantasy even if I went dystopia first.

SP: Hi AJ! We’re so excited to have you here on the Spinning Pen! Tell us all a little bit about you and your writing journey.

AJ: Hi!  Thank you so much for having me!  I think I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl.  I’ve always dabbled in writing stories, and I tend to be a voracious reader as time allows.  As I got older, I majored in English and became a high school teacher and didn’t have a lot of time or energy to write, but still wrote in my spare time. 

SP: Hi Tanvi! We’re so excited to have you here on the Spinning Pen! Tell us all a little bit about you and your writing journey.

TB: Hi, thank you for having me! I’m Tanvi Berwah and I write books that will send you into some kind of existential dread at least once. I used to run fansites during the peak Twilight/The Hunger Games fandom time and an alarmingly huge part of my personality comes from being terminally online during those years lol. I have been writing since I was a kid. Many awful and some not-so-awful manuscripts later, I got into Pitch Wars in 2019 and that really got me to where I am now: happily writing books about angry girls and monsters, figuratively and literally.

SP: Hi Tamara! So glad to have you here on the Spinning Pen! You have an incredibly exciting four book deal with a unique release model. People are saying it’s like Netflix but with books! We’d love to hear more about how this exciting model works!

TG: I love that comparison! And hello to you 🙂 Thanks for having me. I love Wise Wolf Books’ rapid release model! They are releasing all four books in the sports series this year! Release dates are scheduled for early March, June, September, and December. It’s been a flurry getting all of the manuscripts in shape, but I appreciate this model so much as an author and a reader. As an author, I’m connecting with readers frequently with new material. As a reader, waiting is not my strong suit. When I read a good book, I want to binge with the sequel immediately. I love that this model allows readers of the series to do that this year! I’ve also signed with Wise Wolf for a two-book series in 2023, so stay tuned for more on that!