❄Elsa Frost❄ asked E. Kaiser Writes:

How many books will there (approximately) be in the Thaw series?

E. Kaiser Writes Hi Elsa Frost! (Love your user name, by the way! :-) )
Thanks for asking! That is a great question...!!! ;-)

...And it gets a little complicated in answering, but we're all clever folks here, right? We can take multiple choice solutions!

Okay, in the Thaw series proper, there is scheduled to be 4 (or 5) books, depending on how you count them.
#1 is Winter's Child, #2 Winter Queen, #3 Prince of Demargen, #4 Reindeer King. These four are all very closely knit, and about mainly the same four main characters. At the end of Reindeer King a whole lot of the plot threads are all tied up and most of the angst and mysteries are resolved.
Then there is #5 Princess of Noran. This could be considered part of Thaw along with the first four, but it takes a slight change in setting and MCs. Girta (of course! She's our Princess of Noran!) gets an adventure on her own, into a land that is quite a lot different than the snowy/northern/high mountain/type setting we've been mainly in with the first four books.
So although it is still (in my mind) part of the Thaw Quintet, I can see how some folks might say that the first four are actually the Thaw Quartet, and that Princess of Noran belongs in more of a "spin-off/stand alone" type category.
But it still carries through the same story, and keeps relecting back on what has already happened in the earlier books to find its drama, conflict, and riveting resolution!

And... here's where it gets really interesting, and when I say interesting, I mean tangled and twisted like a knot gone wrong. :-)

What started as "Thaw" has grown to include a whole slew of stories; back-stories, and side-stories, and 'after-Thaw' stories... which are all superbly fun takes on an ever-multiplying collection of other fairy tales.
So the timeline of THOSE books starts right about the time that Hess is born, (concurrent with the beginning of Winter's Child, when Ilise is about 2 yrs old up in Noran)
...but will center around his older Demargen brothers and their adventures.
(Up until just about when the Thaw: Winter Queen, etc. books start, and then even beyond when Princess of Noran ends.)

I am currently working on (in chronological order)
The Beaded Slipper (Asgar @ 18 years old- Cinderella retelling)
Twelve Dark Knights (Albrecht @ 20-something- 12 Dancing Princesses retelling, but with 12 princes instead! ;-) )

... as well as bringing Reindeer King along as fast as it will oblige me! (RK is at nearing that tricky "mostly done but not quite" spot, where the story will sometimes just bulk on me, so I hop over and give some attention to another of it's siblings until it decides to co-operate.)
Not to worry though, this is how I usually work... I'm not a plotter 'per se', so having multiple projects in play actually helps keep me and my creative muscle from burn-out! I wrote WC, WQ & PrD pretty much simultaneously... so have no fear as to Reindeer King's arrival! It will certainly come, though I'm not close enough to "the end" to safely predict a date for it's release... after all, we just came off the first 3's release in January, 2015!

So... here's my question for you!
Should Princess of Noran be a "original Thaw" book, or in the "spin-offs"?
And should the other books, (all dealing with Hess's family, and some with the Noran's relatives!) be considered "Thaw spin-offs" or have their own name, or be "Thaw books" too?

Please tell me!!! As the author, I feel like I'm to close to them to have an objective opinion. I'd love, Love, LOVE a reader's input on this!!! :-)

Again, thanks for asking, and I really hope you can help me out with how things look from your perspective! :-)

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