Dear Clanmates,

After nearly four years of the Warriors Hub being live, we couldn’t be more thrilled at how it’s become a place for loyal readers to immerse themselves in the world of the Warriors series, and we have long striven to provide as much extra (and hopefully, enjoyable) content for all of you to consume. One of the ways we’ve opted to do this has been through regular features written by members of the Story Team, which have focused on particular characters, pondered alternative plot outcomes, and delved deep into the mythology underpinning the Clan cats’ adventures.

Occasionally, these features are prompted by queries, thoughts, and suggestions that the Story Team find among emails from readers — however, the sheer volume of emails we receive sometimes makes it difficult to respond to them as quickly as we’d like to.

For this reason, we have decided to make a change to our regular feature on the Hub. Starting this month, we will use this space to post answers to some of the questions and comments we receive by email. Since it is often the case that multiple readers contact us making the same suggestions, or asking similar questions, we hope that this will be an efficient and democratic way for us to reply to as many emails as we can in a timely fashion.

Without further ado, let’s get to answering!

1. A good number of readers were very keen to know which titles are currently being developed, and whether there will be new graphic novels in 2023. Readers have also asked whether the series of WARRIORS novellas have been discontinued.

A. Recently, the indomitable Cherith Baldry and Kate Cary have been hard at work on manuscripts. Cherith turned in a draft of A STARLESS CLAN #3, which has been edited and sent to the publisher. Right now, Kate is working on the manuscript for the next super edition, which focuses on Riverstar. After that, she will immediately jump on to A STARLESS CLAN #4. In addition, the Story Team met for the first time this week to start hashing out the details of Book #5 and will begin writing up the storyline very soon. Once the outline is complete (hopefully by the end of this year), it will be sent first to the publisher for approval, and then to Cherith, so she can begin writing the penultimate story in the sprawling seventh arc!

As for other titles in 2023, we’re afraid there are no plans for new novellas at the moment, as our creative focus is on the manga titles. The A THIEF IN THUNDERCLAN manga will publish in June 2023.

We’re crossing our paws that we might be able to announce other exciting titles very soon!

2. Some readers wrote in to express their concern that an ableist line about Briarlight still appeared in a recent edition of SQUIRRELFLIGHT’S HOPE, and that perhaps there were no plans to correct it.

A. Fear not, Clanmates! Unfortunately, reprint corrections can be a slow process. This correction has been in the works since the line was brought to our attention, and will finally appear in the next printing.

A number of readers pointed out an error in ONESTAR’S CONFESSION regarding Morningflower and Ashfoot, and this will be corrected at the first opportunity.

3. Returning to publishing plans, we were asked if there was anything on the horizon to commemorate the 20th anniversary of WARRIORS.

A. TWENTY YEARS!!?? It’s sometimes hard to get our heads around. A number of ideas have been suggested and discussed  with the publisher, and we have a feeling that we will be receiving a sign from StarClan very soon.

4. There was some curiosity as to the featured cat on the cover of THE BROKEN CODE #5.

A. Ashfur is the featured cat on the U.S. edition of this title. The smaller cats on are Rootspring and Willowshine. Some fans have also asked about the featured cats on the German editions; we are waiting for confirmation from the German publisher and will update this post soon!

5. Readers are, as ever, super-keen to know what titles are in development, and what can be expected in the future.

Our tireless writers, Cherith Baldry and Kate Cary are most certainly keeping busy right now. Kate is working on the manuscript for the sixth book of A STARLESS CLAN, which will bring this arc to an exciting conclusion.

Meanwhile, Cherith is revising her manuscript for the 17th super edition. This is a book that the story team is very excited about, for a number of reasons: It’s always somewhat freeing* to step away from the arc-based stories to tell a longer standalone narrative, and the 17th super sets that stage for the 18th super edition, and that’s a story about which we’ve all been very excited ever since we came up with the idea (about a year ago!). We really wish we could say more about what the 17th super edition will be about, but readers hopefully won’t have too long to wait to find out!

[* Well… we say that doing the supers is freeing, but we’ve just remembered, the 17th super edition was actually quite tricky to plot, since it is taking place at the same time as the sixth book in A STARLESS CLAN!]

We’re also very excited to announce that the story team will be having our very first brainstorm for the ninth arc this week.

6. Will future books take place in unexplored eras of the series?

This is a suggestion that is being made more frequently by readers in recent correspondence, and it is something the team has been very keen to look into for quite some time. The world of WARRIOR CATS is very rich, but there are still great chunks of time between our DAWN OF THE CLANS prequel/origin series and the beginning of INTO THE WILD that are yet to be explored, and we are certainly excited by the possibility of exploring these times, filling in these gaps. We believe it could be a thrilling new chapter in the WARRIOR CATS mythology. The key consideration for the story team will be the question of whether readers will readily invest in our hypothetical protagonists, being cats to whom they have yet to form an attachment (assuming these stories focus on cats who have never been mentioned before)? [Then again, we had the same concerns about the DAWN OF THE CLANS series!] But as long as the story team remains excited about the possibilities, it will hopefully not be too long before readers get their wish…

7. How far in advance are the books plotted?

[Reader warning — the answer to this question touches on events from THE BROKEN CODE in a slightly spoiler-y fashion, so please tread carefully if you have not read this arc.]

In the run-up to beginning the brainstorming process for a new WARRIOR CATS arc, the story team will generally jot down ideas in emails (So. Many. Emails!), or refer to the many, many saved Word documents we have, which contain long lists of ideas for scenes, new characters, plot twists, problems, prophecies, and action beats that we have come up with over the years but have yet to find a place for in the existing books. In sharing these ideas among each other, it is usually fairly obvious which of the ideas excite us most, and these become the key ingredients in our early discussions. As the ideas being bandied around begin to settle into something resembling a starting point for a narrative — a central problem/threat/dilemma to the Clans — it is often not long before an ending point to the storyline suggests itself.

To give an example [and this is the LAST Spoiler Alert for any Clanmate who has not finished THE BROKEN CODE]: Early on in our discussions for LOST STARS, the first book in THE BROKEN CODE arc, we came up with a set-piece where two characters get into trouble on the frozen lake. We knew this was going to be the beginning of a (then) possible romantic arc between those two characters. It was such a dramatic, key event with which to kick off a new cycle of stories, we knew that it could be very effective, dramatically, if the key event that brought the arc’s main story to a resolution also involved a possible drowning, because we knew there would be a horrible, gut-wrenching irony in the characters facing up to a terrible fate, in more dire circumstances, for a second time. From that point on — even though we did not know the first thing about what would fill books #2, #3, #4 and #5 at that stage — we had the end-point toward which we worked… for two-and-a-half kind of sad years, as we all dreaded getting to the point where we had to write this difficult scene. Generally, we try to make big decisions early on, so that we have a narrative destination in mind, as opposed to leaving ourselves scratching around for ideas later on. Although, the time between our first brainstorm and our last can stretch up to two and a half years, which means that not all Big Decisions hold — but more often than not, we discover that our early instincts were the right ones.