Shelley AdinA: Planning and plotting a series

Readers love series … but writing one means more than making up a small town and populating it. You’re building a story world your reader wants to come back to. In this workshop you’ll discover ways in which your people can create foils and contrasts for your main characters, push the plot’s emotional complexity, and then become the main characters for the next book. The author of an 18-book steampunk series, a 10-book Amish romance series, and a couple of shorter contemporary and historical romance series, Shelley will share her strategies and tips for over-arching plotlines, reappearing characters, and interlocking subplots. She’ll also touch on how to use collaborative creativity skills to work up a continuity series or in-world box set with other authors.

Shelley Adina is the author of more than 50 novels published by Harlequin, Warner, Hachette, and Moonshell Books, Inc., her own independent press. She writes steampunk adventure and mystery as Shelley Adina; as Charlotte Henry, writes classic Regency romance; and as Adina Senft, is the USA Today bestselling author of Amish women’s fiction. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University in the UK. She won RWA’s RITA Award® in 2005, and was a finalist in 2006. She appeared in the 2016 documentary film Love Between the Covers, is a popular speaker and convention panelist, and has been a guest on many podcasts, including Worldshapers and Realm of Books. When she’s not writing, Shelley is usually quilting, sewing historical costumes, or enjoying the garden with her flock of rescued chickens.

Shelley Adina has been writing fiction since she was 8. She earned her BA in Literature at UC Santa Cruz, and joined RWA in 1994. After receiving her MA and then an MFA in the low-residency Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania, she became an adjunct instructor there, teaching fiction writing for 17 years. In 2017 she entered the PhD in Creative Writing program at Lancaster University in the UK, and graduated with her doctorate in 2021. Her dissertation was a historical women’s fiction novel set in 1927 in Holy City, California, and its accompanying nonfiction research thesis.

Schedule (Pacific Time)

9:00 am – Zoom link will open for casual chat and networking
9:30–10:30 am Business Meeting
10:30–12:30 pm Workshop