Lauren Shippen Books In Order

Publication Order of The Bright Sessions Books

Lauren Shippen is a writer that is best known for the work she does in fiction podcasts. She is the creator and the writer of “The Bright Sessions”, a popular audio drama, which ran from 2015 until 2018.

Lauren co-produced “Passenger List”, which was nominated for a BBC Audio Drama Award. She was named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 in Media in the year 2018. he was named as one of Austin Film Festival and MovieMaker Magazine’s 25 Screenwriters to Watch.

Growing up, fantasy and science fiction were two genres that were big deals while she was growing up. Especially fantasy. “Lost Years of Merlin” series by T. A. Barron was her main. These were the books that got her started on reading and got her into reading chapter books. She read them when she was about seven or eight or so.

At one point in time, she even found an old notebook with a novel she had written when she was just fourteen years old. Inside the notebook, she realized, was basically just “The Lost Years of Merlin” fanfiction she had written.

While she was in high school, she found television and watched shows like “The X-Files”, “Twin Peaks”, “Angel”, and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, as well as the rebooted “Battlestar Gallactica” (a show that she just adored). What she took from each one of these shows while she was starting “The Bright Sessions”, was taking really human characters and tossing them in superhuman circumstances and looking at how they reacted.

She has struggled with anxiety and panic since she was a little kid, so the idea of talking about panic attacks just bummed her out. She decided to take the framework and added in that her character, Sam, travels through time each time she has a panic attack to talk about it that way was far more interesting.

Lauren grew up in New York, spending most of her youth going to Panic! at the Disco shows and reading books. Now that she is an adult, she does pretty much the same thing.

Shippen was in Los Angeles to work in television, but she was an actor, and had been in acting classes for a few years and going to auditions. The whole time, she was doing the actor hustle of working at a restaurant, and doing short films and web shows, all that stuff.

Soon, she was fed up with the roles available to her, and the breakdowns for females as well as the scripts she was seeing. She had been listening to “Welcome to Night Vale”, an audio fiction podcast and chose to do something on her own and make something on her own. A podcast was something she saw that she could manage by herself, and began writing one herself. Then, she had a ton of fun doing it. She kept on doing more of it and fell in love with writing. Four years after that, she was writing podcasts full time.

Lauren loves love stories and rom-coms, but she was not approaching “The Infinite Noise” in the typical “getting together story” sense. She only wanted it to be about how two people just are together, rather than about how two people wind up together.

Wit the novel, “The Infinite Noise”, she did not want to deviate too much from where the story was already. Changes or tweaks were done because there are things you can do in a book that are not entirely possible in a podcast.

She noticed that it was a big shift going from writing just dialogue to writing prose. Keeping the story in first person perspective helped her out quite a bit she found. Lauren was able to ground the novel in the same type of emotional character writing she is comfortable with. Beyond that, it was quite an adjustment, and she had to focus more on the sensory experience of all of the characters, rather than just the emotional ones.

She found it easy to write Adam’s depressive episodes, because she didn’t have to think too much about how to frame anything or express what she was trying to. She was thoughtful about representing his depression, it just flowed naturally. Lauren has struggled with depression, too, and was able to draw on her own experience a lot to write about Adam’s inner life.

Her first novel, called “The Infinite Noise”, was released in the year 2019 and is from the genre of young adult fantasy. It is adapted from her award winning podcast “The Bright Sessions”.

“The Infinite Noise” is the first novel in the “Bright Sessions” series and was released in the year 2019. Caleb Michaels, sixteen years old, is a champion running back. Otherwise, his life is fairly normal. Caleb begins experiencing some mood swings that are out of the ordinary for even a teen boy, his life starts to move way beyond “typical”.

Caleb is what is known as an Atypical, somebody with enhanced abilities. It sounds pretty cool sure, but Caleb’s ability is extreme empathy, feeling the emotions of the people around him. Being an empath in high school would be tough enough, but Caleb’s life starts getting more complicated after he gets pulled into the emotional orbit of Adam, one of his classmates. Adam’s feelings are all-consuming and big, but they actually fit together with Caleb’s feelings in such a way that he is unable to totally understand.

Dr. Bright, Caleb’s therapist, encourages Caleb to explore this link by making friends with Adam. While Adam and he start to get closer, Calbe starts learning more about himself, his ability, as well as his therapist, somebody that seems to know much more than she is letting on. Not to mention just how dangerous being an Atypical can be.

Readers loved the concept of this book and found it to be incredibly creative. Lauren does a great job of capturing the emotional quagmire that high school can be quite nicely. The characters are not too witty or too brilliant to be believed and all of the relationships felt totally natural.