It Started in the Group Chat: A Guest Post by E.B. Asher
There’s nothing like curling up with a cozy romantasy — especially when it comes from the minds of three great authors. Friends first and co-authors second, Bridget Morrissey, Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka teamed up to write Our Monthly Pick This Will Be Fun under pen name E.B. Asher, and this charming story is one you’ll want to share with all of your friends. Read on for E.B. Asher’s exclusive essay on how this collaboration came to be.
Paperback $17.99
This Will Be Fun: A Novel
This Will Be Fun: A Novel
By E. B. Asher
In Stock Online
Paperback $17.99
The quest was won and the victors lived to tell the tale. What happens now? This Will Be Fun is a charming fantasy about friendship, redemption and what it really means to be a hero.
The quest was won and the victors lived to tell the tale. What happens now? This Will Be Fun is a charming fantasy about friendship, redemption and what it really means to be a hero.
This book started where so many great things do—in the group chat. Having met as debut authors, we’d all been friends for years, and we’d become each other’s biggest fans. We have an ongoing text thread where we love to make each other laugh with a meme, a movie reference, or a ridiculous story from our personal lives. Add in movie nights where we’ve watched things like Shrek and The Princess Bride, and somewhere along the way, the idea for This Will Be Fun was born.
Seeing as we are three friends, we knew we wanted to do a story about three friends. None of us write fantasy in our individual careers, but all three of us love it, so this was our chance to finally dip our quills in ink and craft our own magical realm together. For a while, we developed this story in our usual text conversations. To borrow from the world of improv, we have a real “yes and” culture in our group. When someone says something a little outlandish, we’re all game to see the idea through, adding onto it until it becomes something viable. At a certain point, the characters of Beatrice, Elowen, and Clare became so real to us that we knew we needed to write their book in earnest. This Will Be Fun finally made it out of the group chat.
We graduated to working in a shared document. Once a week, we’d outline three chapters together over Facetime, incorporating our favorite tropes and storytelling elements until we came up with a cohesive plot. When we finished that step, we wrote our respective characters’ POVs separately, pasting those finished chapters into the document for all to read.
With three authors writing at once, it was such a delight to see our book grow seemingly overnight. There is no experience quite as unique and satisfying as getting to read someone else’s contribution to your own book. We got to continue our little game of “yes and”, grabbing elements from each other’s chapters to use in our own. Reading each other’s work always impressed us and made us want to step up our own chapters. We were inspired every day, and it was incredible to watch our new E.B. Asher voice develop from all three of us. In the end, everything we wrote really was for each other. We wanted to make each other laugh, but we surprised ourselves by managing to make each other cry too.
We’re so blown away by what This Will Be Fun has become. It’s an even greater joy to now share in its release together. We hope readers love our characters as much as we do, and we are thrilled to offer up the first E.B. Asher novel into the world.