V. E. Schwab

Yeah.

I was at a conference a couple years ago and V. Schwab was one of the headliners.

And I love all of her work.

And she said, I live for the creation.

It's much easier to digest that way.

But the moment you step into the world of V.E. Schwab's Villains series, that lightning bolt looks a lot more like a raging, entirely uncontrolled fire.

Yeah, a fire is definitely the right word for it.

And I am so excited to get into this because today is October 19, 2026, which means V.E. Schwab's highly anticipated novel, Victorious, just hit the shelves a couple of weeks ago on October 6th.

Which is just a massive cultural moment for fantasy readers.

It really is a juggernaut.

The publishing landscape at that time was vastly different.

It was a completely different world.

But I'm loving the book that I'm reading at the moment, so I'm just like, I haven't been used enough reading it.

It's called Very Hard Buns in the Midnight Soil by Victoria Schwab.

It's vampires.

It's always vampires or witches with me.

My bad.

So my, my favorite author is V.E. Schwab.

I literally will read anything she writes.

[laughs] She...

And I grew up reading lots of, you know, lots of the big books that we read back in the day, and so those were always impactful.

But yeah, I...

V.E. Schwab, Alex Harrow, Rachel Gillig, Leigh Bardugo.

Like, love.

I don't know much about it, but so far, cha- three chapters in, it's great, and people have been raving about it, so I had to check it out.

Uh, another book that I would read again, this is also V.E. Schwab, Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.

Listened to that again.

Audiobook for this is great.

Yeah

... and knowing the authors like you, but also, uh, V.E. Schwab famously said, like, she is six books-

Mm-hmm

... ahead of what she currently has-

Thank you.

And so now...

Do you know that, um, V.E. Schwab, uh, we were, well, it would've been for my book Under the Whispering Door that came out in 2021.

So this is like pandemic-y times, and V.E. Schwab, Victoria, was hosting one of my tour stops-

And so it's like, she's new, newer compared to the other authors on this list, but she's still like coming off the back of a bestselling trilogy.

Then we've got V Schwab's new book, Jeffrey Archer's new book.

For some reason, another version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, illustrated by Levi Pinfold.

Okay.

She has fundamentally rewired the publishing industry's financial expectations for what a fantasy novel can achieve in the mainstream market.

And V.E. Schwab is dropping Victorious on October 6th, concluding the highly acclaimed Villains series.

But beyond these absolute titans, it's the hyper-specific microgenres within romantasy that reveal how the algorithmic bento box is functioning.

The microgenres are fascinating.

I love it a lot.

Um, and then V.E. Schwab.

She's like amazing.

Oh, my gosh.

But my go-to answer is, uh, Invisible Life of Addie LaRue-

Oh, yeah

... by V.E. Schwab.

I have that.

So today, we're getting into the craft of trilogies and just how that craft has evolved over time, how you know a story needs three books, what changes as a writer from book to book, what happens when years pass between them, and what it's like to come back to a world you've been carrying around in your own head for a very long time.

Victoria, welcome back to "No Write Way." [laughs]

Thank you so much for having me.

Such a good introduction.

Two really different ones

... two super different ones, and you wrote them really, really differently in different, in different timelines, and we will definitely get into that.

But the first question I wanna ask you, Victoria, is how do you know when you start writing a book that it's gonna be a trilogy? And this is, this is a weird question maybe for this one because you wrote, out of the two trilogies, the first books are "Vicious" and then "A Darker Shade of Magic," and you wrote those back to back.

Yeah, so like, I mean, people always think that "Vicious" was originally a standalone.