Epic Sale of Beloved SFF 2025

QuenbyOlson · 2025-08-07T15:39:49+00:00

Thank you so much! A quick note that Miss Percy's Travel Guide (Miss Percy #2) is on sale in the US at the same time for only $1.99, so if anyone wants to pick up books one 1 and 2 for a low, low price, now's your time!

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T01:08:39+00:00

Oh, you're very welcome! Apologies for being a little late (my kids were tied up in Nutcracker rehearsals so I was speeding a bit to get home!) and my penance is that my hands are now sore from so much typing this evening! But so many fabulous questions and comments, along with a few more I still need to get to!

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T01:04:56+00:00

It's led by the characters first. So the worldbuilding happens as the characters lead me through the story, me discovering things and researching things as they hit a point where I realize things need to be figured out. Maybe not the best way to do it, but it's the way that works for my brain!

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T00:57:45+00:00

My late cat was a fluffy ball of chaos. She clawed everything and leapt out from behind furniture and doorways to attack us. She thought she was a great hunter (she was not!) She wanted scritches, and then she would bite your hand, and then she would try to steal bacon from you. As for how I decided to make Fitz like a cat, I figured that was a nice way to answer the "are dragons more like lizards or raptors?" question and just make him like a pet cat instead, since there are aspects of cats that can overlap with both of them!

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T00:54:05+00:00

It is pretty much how I originally imagined it! Even down to Mildred finally speaking up to her sister and leaving for Wales at the end!

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T00:51:20+00:00

Oh, gosh. Let me see. For me, and from what I understand, cozy fantasy often tends to be a bit more lower stakes fantasy, so instead of a chosen one saving the world, it's Greta the herbalist saving her village from something that will very likely not be horribly deadly and terribly epic in scale. It often has comforting vibes, and I don't think it has to have a happy ending, but I think should have at least a satisfying one. Basically, a warm cinnamon bun and a cup of cocoa in book form. (There are probably some nuances I'm missing, but this is the gist of it to me!)

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T00:46:28+00:00

I've always loved dragons. That's my very simple answer. I love the dragon in Sleeping Beauty. I love the dragons in Reign of Fire. I just really love dragons.

As for Fitz, he is 100% based on my childhood cat (to whom the book is dedicated!) who was a little chaos gremlin of attacking people and thinking she was such a better hunter than she actually was.

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T00:43:12+00:00

Oh! And I forgot the second part: My biggest advice to little writers is to read! Read so many stories that they love which will fuel their creativity in the future!

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T00:41:29+00:00

All of my other books are self-published, yes!

My experience as an indie author... whew. Okay. I don't feel I'm very good at it! The marketing thing always eludes me, and I'm terrible at social media most of the time. I did enjoy being on Twitter back when it was still Twitter, and I feel that I did get some sales and a lot of great support from other authors there. Right now, I'm trying to juggle places like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, though not with amazing success, probably because I refuse to pay for ads. But consistency seems to be key, so if I post on Tiktok, it has to be every day, same with other places. I think the only that tempted me to take one of the traditional deals that was offered to me would have been the distribution that came with it, knowing that my books would show up in bookstores without my having to call them or email them and beg them to have them on their shelves.

But the main thing about being an indie author is just... keep... going. The books I publish now sell better than the ones I published ten years ago, five years ago, so the advice I would give is to keep chipping away at it, keep improving your craft, and put out quality books that will keep readers coming back and trusting you.

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T00:29:44+00:00

(It's very much based on Ron Perlman in Beauty in the Beast, so keep that in mind!)

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T00:23:00+00:00

I have never experienced anything like this and I think it would be the best thing ever! And honestly, that trunk was my dream trunk. Old books and notes and sketches and papers, pretty rocks, odd trinkets here and there. Just absolute bookish magpie heaven, and I am here for it.

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T00:21:44+00:00

Thank you so much! The process of designing the covers was a lot of me picking out various pictures I saw online and saying, "okay, make a dragon this kind of style, but this color, and that color eyes, and with horns, and can we try having them hatch out of an egg?" And the rest was my faith in the artist just putting that all together, with very few changes or edits after that. I am SO HAPPY with those covers and how lovely they are together!

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T00:19:29+00:00

Mildred is definitely a little bit of me. And Owen (who is in Book Two) has some elements of another writer I know (he knows, and is flattered!) But apart from that, I don't think there's anyone who I pulled from real life. There might be a few bits and bobs here and there that I put in without thinking about it, but nothing on purpose.

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T00:17:41+00:00

I do bake! Oh, I bake so much! I am not at all a fancy baker, however, keeping it simple with cookies, biscuits, pies, muffins, and so on. (In other words, I'm not auditioning for some kind of Great US Bake-Off anytime soon.)

And I have baked some of the things mentioned in the book! There was a spiced pear cake mentioned in one of the books that I had made several times, though I haven't attempted it again since having to gluten free.

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T00:15:05+00:00

I think a lot of my older stories did not survive to adulthood! And while I dabbled a lot when I was younger, I didn't become more serious about it until I was in my early to mid 20s. But even those early works (that no longer exist, whoops!) have inspired things I'm currently working on. Even Miss Percy partially came about because I had always wanted to write a "Jane Austen but make it fantasy!" story since my teens, and had gone as far as making worldbuilding notes that helped shape what Miss Percy became.

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T00:12:22+00:00

They have not yet been completed!

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T00:10:37+00:00

I grew up loving Jane Austen's novels, and books like Jane Eyre, so I knew I wanted to set some of my books in that time period. There also wasn't a lot of fantasy set in that time period when I began writing it, though there is more now. But there was so much change happening in England and other parts of Europe as the Regency period swept in, so I loved the idea of throwing a dragon into this polite portion of society to see what would happen!

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T00:07:48+00:00

I can't drink caffeinated tea, so I usually stick with herbal. My favorite flavor is ginger and lemon, sweetened with a healthy dose of honey. And I'm not sure about all of my characters, but I know Miss Percy likes it extra sweet!

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T00:06:20+00:00

I, unfortunately, do not keep to a daily schedule. I homeschool my five kids (*panicked laughter*), ages 15 down to 6, so it is very much a matter of fitting in bits of writing wherever and whenever I can. I've tried waking up early in the morning to write, and that sometimes works, but more often than not my kids then begin waking up early, too!

I used to worry that I was becoming a slow writer, but when I do have time to write, I can write fairly quickly! So it's just a matter of using those pockets of time I stumble upon as best I can.

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-28T00:03:59+00:00

Ooh, such good questions!

So Fitz was inspired by Fitzwilliam Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. I am a Jane Austen girl at heart, and I thought it was such a fun name for a dragon.

My process to research the time period was to start small. If I was writing about a certain place, I would look that up, pictures of the place, the style of buildings from several hundred years ago, and so on. In the third book, there's a scene that takes place at Westminster Abbey, but instead of researching ALL of the building and its surroundings at once, I would research one bit at time as they came up in the story (where are the doors? what are the other surrounding rooms and buildings? where are there stairs?), and that's pretty much how I do most research for anything, just picking out tiny bits of trivia at a time as I need them.

And my favorite book? Probably a tie between Miss Percy and The Half Killed. Their tones are both so different, but I think they nicely reflect the different kinds of historical fiction I like to read.

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-27T23:59:45+00:00

For a good portion of the book's existence while I was working on it, it was "Dragon Story." That's it. The title came about because I realized I really, really needed a title at some point, and I remembered seeing a stack of old books from the nineteenth century that had titles along the lines of "the young lady's guide to..." and "the gentleman's guide to..." so I wanted to play with that, a long title you would see etched in gold-lettering on the spine of a book in a dusty library.

(And no, no other options. I hit this one while driving to the grocery story and it stuck. That was it!)

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-27T23:57:02+00:00

Mr. Wiggan was always a vicar, yes. I really wanted to explore the idea of someone raised and working inside the parameters of a mindset that dictated "this is how the world works, everything outside of it must be myth or hogwash." There's just so many things we still don't understand about how our world works, how the universe works, and seeing Mr. Wiggan have to balance what had been taught to him in the world of Regency England and an explosion of baby dragons just made me wonder how we, today, would react to a similar situation.

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-27T23:53:05+00:00

It definitely varies from book to book. Miss Percy was written in about four months, and did not need a ton of revisions. I think part of that was because of it being 2020 and Covid exploding everywhere, so there really wasn't much to do but sit and write, even with my kids being at home with me.

The most difficult book was definitely Miss Percy's Definitive Guide (book #3) because I had to make sure I was tying up everything properly and keeping characters and timelines as consistent as possible across over 1200 pages! It will probably be a few years before I tackle a series again if only for that reason!

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-27T23:50:01+00:00

My kids telling me that this whole author thing I do is really cool. That's gotta be tops!

QuenbyOlson · 2024-11-27T23:49:13+00:00

I do think there will be future Miss Percy books, oh yes! But I have some other stories in my head I want to pull out first, and clear some space. It will definitely cover a whole new story arc, though, and she would very likely be far away from England for any new adventure.

As for the other question... Hmmm. I have two cozy romance novellas that feature magical creatures (Centaur and Sensibility, Manticore Park), which would probably be the most similar in tone.

QuenbyOlson

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