Interview with ND Stevenson, Author of Scarlet Morning

Today, we're joined by ND Stevenson, author of Scarlet Morning, a heavily illustrated novel that finds two orphaned teens joining a quirky pirate crew to sail across a magically broken sea and unravel the secrets of a world shattered by betrayal and grief.

~

In your author's note, you mention that Scarlet Morning represents over fifteen years of your life, beginning as a childhood game on a playground. How did the core themes and characters evolve from those early playground adventures to the final novel?

I was a very imaginative kid who used stories as social currency, and I dragged other kids into my invented worlds as a friendship ploy…though I was also a little bit of a megalomaniac and had to assign everyone’s part and tell them how to play it. Out of these games came Chase, Viola, and Wilmur, and later (when the part of Viola was double-booked), the tragic figure of Queen Hail Meridian began to emerge. It began as a way to escape the repressive and often very boring world of ultra-religious homeschoolers by envisioning ourselves free on the wide-open sea, then grew into a serialized epic that spanned most of my teenage years, exploring my feelings of loss at growing up and trying to make sense of the world of adults that I was entering into. Fifteen years later, while very little of the original prose remains, the backbone and the emotion of that original draft are still intact, looked back on now with adult eyes, a collaboration across time.

Worldbuilding is such a big part of the novel. Dickerson's Sea is richly developed with its own history, legends, and environmental phenomena like the Great Blow and the salt-covered landscape. What inspired these specific elements?

The very earliest iteration of Dickerson’s Sea was this eclectic place where all the rules of nature had gone haywire and anything could happen, and it had been cut off from the rest of the world for so long that no one remembered what “the rest of the world” even looked like. When I dusted the concept off in 2020, I liked that a lot, but I wanted to build it out more concretely and put a unique twist on the classic “Age of Sail” setting. I came up with the idea of the ocean turning solid and the world getting drifted over with salt because I’m obsessed with mountaineering disasters and doomed arctic expeditions; there’s something so compelling about the juxtaposition of these tiny human figures against this vast, hostile white expanse. The image popped into my head of two barefoot kids navigating what looked like a polar tundra but was really a salt desert that used to be the sea. Scarlet Morning is a story that’s all about the empty spaces left behind when something vanishes, and this all-white world made that blankness literal. But of course the void is never really empty, so I wanted it to be very beautiful and rich too, even in its environmental ruin.

There's a strong thread about storytelling throughout, from Hestur's pirate tales to Viola's love of history books. I love the idea of stories within stories. I imagine this sprang from your own relationship with imagination and narratives (especially since this book is fifteen years in the making)!

I’ve always been crazy about pirates. In high school I wrote all of these research papers on them, and thought I knew everything there was to know. Then as an adult, I started revisiting those stories, and realized that everything I thought I knew about pirates was wrong. Some of my favorites, like Jacquotte Delahaye, probably never existed, and even Blackbeard, the most famous pirate of all, we know so little about—we aren’t even sure of his real name. Fiction devoured fact until it was impossible to disentangle. I found that so fascinating and wanted to dig deeper. What do we lose when we twist truth to fit our narrative? What happens when real people are immortalized as characters for our amusement, often against their will? And what of people who are completely whitewashed out of existence because they don’t fit our preconceived notions of “protagonist?”

The captain character, Cadence Chase, is hard to pin down. She admits she killed someone, has this wild ship with cannons, but shows kindness to the children. I love a character that’s in the gray somewhere between hero and villain. What made you want to write such a character?

Chase is a very, very old character for me—I think her earliest iteration was a heavily scarred, cat-like, androgynous lady pirate when I was maybe eight years old. Look, I knew what I was about even then. She was aspirational for me as a mix of masculine and feminine tropes, as well as a fantasy of the aloof, mysterious mentor character who could kill you in a moment, but doesn’t. And yet, underneath her cool exterior, she’s a mess. She’s clumsy with emotion and sometimes you suspect she wants Viola’s approval as much as Viola wants hers…but every time you think you’ve figured her out, you learn something new about her and her specter is snatched away again. I’m really, really excited for the world to meet her. I love her so much.

There's a strong theme of identity throughout. There’s Chase's multiple names and personas to Hail Meridian's hidden existence as Tal dei Tali. What was there about a pirate’s world that made you feel it was the perfect backdrop to explore identity and reinvention?

I mentioned Jacquotte Delahaye, the probably-fictional pirate. Supposedly she faked her own death, lived as a man for ten years, and then went back to presenting as a woman, so when she returned she earned the nickname “Back From the Dead Red.” Pirate lore is rife with stories of muddled identity like this. I am a person who has always been surprised and a little disappointed about having a singular body and a singular life; it just seems like there are so many experiences I’m missing out on. So stories where people slip between identities have always been very appealing to me. In fact, I think that’s the reason I tell stories in the first place—to try on different faces and live different lives.

The relationship between Viola and Wilmur forms the emotional core of your story. How did you approach developing their friendship, and what inspired you to make this bond so central to the narrative?

When we first meet Viola and Wilmur, their lives are thoroughly intertwined. They love each other so much, but they’re also codependent to the point that they’ve become sort of stunted. Then suddenly, they’re rocketed into a whole new world where they’re forced to figure out who they are without each other for the very first time. I drew a lot of inspiration from my own intense relationships with my siblings and childhood friends. You grow around those people like two trees sharing one pot, and even when you leave to find your own path, the shape of them will always be there in your roots. You made each other…but now you have to go and make yourself somewhere else, and if all goes well, hopefully you find each other again on the other side.

You’ve lived with this story for so long. Was a a celebration to get it on the page, or was it sad to have to let a bit of it go?

I’m not quite sure yet. I always go through an emotional dip when a story leaves my hands and becomes the property of the world, but I don’t think it’s sunk in yet. Still, there’s a big sense of relief, too, getting a hard-to-crack story out of you. I think it will come with a lot of joy too.

What’s next?

Oh god. Book 2 for now. Then more, maybe? More of Dickerson’s Sea or something else, I don’t know. As soon as I find out I’ll let you know.

Where can we find you?

I post autobio comics on Substack at www.www.imfineimfine.com. I’m also on Instagram and (sometimes, rarely) Twitter at @gingerhazing, Bluesky at @gingerhaze.

Snag a copy of Scarlet Morning