Art & Creativity Quote by Lynn Abbey

Abbey’s line lands like a rueful inside joke about the book industry: writers don’t just create stories, they create categories, and sometimes those categories get abandoned. “Sets of books” signals a career built on series culture, the commercial and artistic logic of returning to a world readers already know. Series are promises: consistent tone, recurring characters, the comfort of continuity. They’re also contracts, marketing plans, and sales expectations disguised as imagination.

Then comes the twist: “orphans.” It’s a deliberately loaded word, yanking the conversation from product to person. An “orphan” book is the standalone that never becomes a franchise, the first installment that doesn’t earn a second, the side project that doesn’t find its audience, or the manuscript stranded when a publisher pivots. Abbey’s phrasing treats those works with a kind of parental guilt and tenderness, acknowledging how authors can care deeply about the projects that the market, timing, or sheer bandwidth won’t let them “raise.”

The subtext is a critique without a manifesto. She’s admitting that productivity isn’t the same as completion, and that a writing life is shaped by forces that don’t always reward the most interesting risk. Calling them “orphans” also reframes perceived failure as something more structural than personal: these books didn’t die because they lacked worth; they lost their support system. It’s gallows humor for creatives who know that not every story gets to grow up.