Today marks the 50th episode of Fable and the Verbivore and we are excited to share our latest author interview! In this episode, we get the chance to speak with indie author Stephanie Ascough.

Stephanie is an active member within the Instagram writing community, where we first connected with her. Her independently published debut novel A Land of Light and Shadow was released on May 24th of this year. This middle grade fantasy story follows the journey of the character Ardin, Princess of Sedonia, as she strives to forge her own path while uncovering secrets of the past that, unless brought into the light, could destroy their future.

While reading A Land of Light and Shadow, Bethany (Fable) and Laura (the Verbivore) connected with the engaging visual storytelling elements and the intriguing myth-like tales from Sedonia’s past that helped to underpin Ardin’s story of personal transformation and struggle to find out the truth of her people’s history that has been lost.

In this conversation, Stephanie shares a sweet memory of the first childhood story that she created and illustrated about an anthropomorphic ant, talks about how the theme of the journey of Ardin to push through and find her voice was mirrored in her own winding writing path, and demonstrates how being connected and engaged with a community of writers and creatives can help you support one another and learn from each other in unique ways.

Stephanie gives some great advice about embracing and navigating the self-publishing process, as well as provides some fantastic tools and resources that helped her along the way. She also discusses the need as creatives to give ourselves permission to create and share our work, to go at our own speed, and to stop comparing ourselves to others and do what works best for us.

Stephanie has a lot of wisdom to share about the writing and self-publishing journey. We highly recommend checking out her work and connecting with her on her Instagram account @stephanieascough.

We hope you enjoy this episode, we immensely enjoyed our conversation with Stephanie and left with a lot of helpful tools and advice to consider! Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

Stephanie is an active presence within the Instagram writing community and you can connect with her on her account @stephanieascough.

In this episode, Stephanie discusses several resources she discovered as part of her Self-publishing journey. Here are some of those resources she mentions:

• Helping Writers Become Authors Blog by K. M. Weiland for writing advice - https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/

• Inkarnate Website for creating world maps - https://inkarnate.com/

• IngramSpark’s Self-Publishing Podcast for advice on the self-publishing process - https://www.ingramspark.com/podcast

• Vellum Website to help format eBook and Paperback print interiors - https://vellum.pub/

Stephanie also discusses several of the individuals from the Instagram writing community who contributed to the finished product of her debut novel A Land of Light and Shadow. These individuals are as follows:

• Artist Dawn Davidson who created the character design as well as designed and illustrated the book’s cover - https://www.instagram.com/prydainartcreative/

• Writer and editor Brooke Bohinc who completed several rounds of edits on the manuscript - https://www.instagram.com/brookebohinc/

Books Mentioned:

• A Land of Light and Shadow: A Tale of Decamonde by Stephanie Ascough

• 101 Dalmatians (Puffin story books) by Dodie Smith

• Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success by K. M. Weiland

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
’Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)