When Stevenson rediscovered a digital copy of that old manuscript five years ago, he immediately fell back into the setting and his childhood obsession. He drew on that story for the new novel Scarlet Morning, about a world of magic and monsters. When the dread pirate Scarlet Morning murdered the beloved Queen Hail Meridian, a mysterious storm followed, turning the ocean to salt and warping the natural world into unnatural horrors. Viola and Wilmur, young castaways in a dark, isolated town, wind up in the hands of the pirate captain Cadence Chase. The adventures that follow start out as familiar middle-grade storytelling, with some of the dark humor of a Lemony Snicket book, and elaborate world-building that feels a bit like Garth Nix.
But as the world expands and Viola and Wilmur begin to understand the differences between real history and the stories they’ve been told, Scarlet Morning becomes more and more distinctive and specific, with character beats and plot surprises (and illustrations!) that could only have come from Stevenson. Polygon spoke with the writer about the book’s evolution, a possible series adaptation, and the planned sequel, Evening Gray.
And after the interview, read on for an excerpt of a particularly creepy chapter from Scarlet Morning.
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
How Scarlet Morning evolved from a childhood project
Polygon: How much has this book changed from the version you finished when you were 17?
ND Stevenson: When it comes to the prose and much of the world-building, it’s almost totally new. But the opening line is the same. There were lots of things I just couldn’t change. like, This feels so central to what this story is. So I approached it the way I would anything else I was adapting, where I tried to identify what about it makes it what it is, and follow those marks as a compass, while also being colder about killing my darlings in other ways.
I tried to keep a really open mind about the path, the direction that I wanted to take this in now. Because it’s not just that I am older, it’s also that the world has changed a lot. So I had to ask, What is this trying to say? What do I hope people take from this now? And so in that way, it does feel somewhere between an adaptation and a collaboration with my teenage self.
The world of the original draft was a lot more standard Age of Sail. There was some magic, and some of the same plot devices with how weird and mixed-up the world is. But the idea of the ocean being turned to salt, and the world-building around that, and the way Dickerson’s Sea is being erased bit by bit — I really fleshed that out from the original draft. A lot of things in the old version were starting points.
There’s an emotional sophistication to the relationships in this book that I recognize from She-Ra, from Nimona, and that I think has been one of the hallmarks of your work. Was any of that present in the childhood version? Is that something you came to as an adult, or was it always central to stories for you?
I think that’s what actually drew me back to this story as an adult. It was interesting reading it again, but the experience very easily could have just been nostalgic, like, Oh, look what I did! I certainly feel that way a lot about some of the work I find from my past, without any real desire to revisit it. But at the heart of this one, there was something really interesting with the relationships that I still really connected with.
The one I was most compelled by is the relationship between Viola and Chase. There are others that are touched on a little in this book, and will be explored even more in the next one. But I think it’s always interesting reading something from before you were maybe fully self-aware. To go back as an adult and be like, “What was I trying to express then? How has that affected me in my life since then?”
With Viola and Chase, there was this idea of this generational connection, of finding someone you look up to, and viewing them as a potential future for yourself. That’s a lot of being a teenager — you kind of latch onto people and you’re like, “All right, I could be like you.” I was really interested in that. It still feels like something I haven’t seen explored in media as much as I would like it to be.
One thing I would really expect to see in a story originally written by a 12-year-old, no matter how sophisticated, is a self-insert character. But there are so many cool characters in this book that none of them feel like they’re at center stage in that way. Is there a character you identify with now? Was there a character you identified with when you first conceived this book?
Yeah, that’s actually a really interesting point. This world kind of started because I was hyper-fixated on pirates as a kid. The main characters, Viola and Wilmur — I did not see myself in them originally. Those were parts I wrote for my friends to play, and I sort of told them what to do.
And Chase has been around a long time in my imagination, but she wasn’t a self-insert character. She was kind of mythological. I was very interested in her, in sort of the way that Viola is in this book. I was focused on the adults in my life, and what they were doing, and why. And I had lots of maybe romanticized ideas about what it was like being an adult, and that went into her. But she was always this mysterious character to me, and that’s what I liked about her.
So it is interesting that there wasn’t really a self-insert character. But in the process of fleshing it out, I realized that being in my 30s now, I’m a lot closer in age to Chase now than I was then. So while she was this larger-than-life figure to me when I was a child, now I get her in a lot of ways — that loss of mystery that just comes with, “Oh yeah, this is just a person.” But then I also relate more to Viola than I ever did back in the day. I didn’t think I was a child at that age, I thought I was a grown-up. Now I actually do see myself more in that childlike way. So I now have more of a personal connection with those characters, but at the time, I don’t know that that was there.
Next steps for the series — a sequel and a TV show?
You mentioned what’s going to happen in the next book — what’s the plan in terms of the scope of this series?
The plan at the moment is for two books, which will cover the arc of the original 600-page teenage draft. But the story certainly isn’t confined to that. I want to continue this story. I am, at the moment, not looking past finishing that second book, because I’m in the thick of it right now. But it is a world that keeps unfolding the more time I spend with it, and I really would like to follow it as far as I can. The second book will be out as soon as I finish it. It’s called Evening Gray, and it’s really going to be in conversation with the first one. They will function as a duology, and the second one will answer the questions laid out in the first one.
Given your experience as a showrunner, are you working toward a series adaptation of these books?
There have been talks around that. I’m definitely open to it. But I try not to think too much about adaptation, especially at this stage, before I’ve finished the story in the form that it exists at this moment. I do know that with this one, if it is going to be adapted, that will be someone else’s vision. Because it is so close to my heart, because it’s been in my head for so long, I think I would really struggle with adapting it in a way it would need to be adapted. So that will be someone else.
It just is not super on my mind at this point. I really, really want the books to be everything I know they can be, and really finish what I set out to do. And then I would be open to that conversation. But I don’t really like when you can tell something is written with the idea of it being adapted. I really think everything should take advantage of the medium it’s in as much as possible. But then I also think adaptation is an amazing, beautiful thing that so many cool things come out of. So we’ll see.
What did it look like when you were running your friends through this story and telling them how to play your characters? It sounds a lot like you were DMing them in an RPG without thinking of it in those terms.
It was a little bit like DMing. I was homeschooled, so I had a lot of time to play. We were part of a homeschooling group in my area that’s pretty large, so I was surrounded by a good number of other kids, and I was not very self-conscious. I thrived in that environment, and my social currency was, I would play these imagination games with my friends. I spent a lot of time at church, I spent a lot of time attending these homeschool classes, and there was a lot of boredom to be negotiated, so storytelling took different forms. I would literally pick up clothespins and act something out for whoever was there, or it would be Barbie dolls, or action figures, or just playing on a playground.
That was a lot of where the pirate game first started. It was kind of mishmoshed together from different inspirations I had at that time. It was really, really dramatic and exciting: There was a lot of death and betrayal and mystery and intrigue. I’m like, “Wait! But we are divorced! And you are dead! And what is that? It’s really me in disguise!” All of that. I remember being moved to tears over it, although I can’t remember now almost any of the plot at the time. But if you were close with me, if you were a friend of mine, I would drag you into this story. I would give you a part. The character of Queen Hail Meridian came about because I had two friends who were both playing viola, and there came a day where we were all playing the Pirate Game together at the same time, and they couldn’t both be Viola, so I came up with this other character.
The game ended up becoming a serialized story. As I was writing the first draft, I was sending chapters to my friends, some of whom were in Singapore, were on the other side of the world and were kind of following along. The whole thing felt collaborative — I was doing it to entertain my friends. So it felt so much like a world that existed, with other people there with me, even though I was kind of telling them what to do, and what direction the story was going to take. So a lot of my goal in revisiting the story as an adult was to try and bring even more people into the world I shared with my friends, and become a kind of archeologist of that world, dusting it off to see what I could recover, and what was still there.
An excerpt from Scarlet Morning
The Bleachfields were a strange place, and strange things were always happening there — whether it was blue fire flickering from the mastheads on creepy-wet nights when the sky hung so close you could wear it as a hat, or whole weeks where the sun never seemed to set, or the crew waking up to find that everyone’s right boots had mysteriously turned into left ones. Once, while getting up in the middle of the night to have a pee, Viola had even glimpsed a massive white bird watching her from a passing berg with something that eerily resembled a human skeleton tangled about its neck, though Clem had declared this nonsense.
“Nay, girl,” she’d said solemnly. “If it were one o’ them, we’d all be dead now.”
It was not very long after that when something even stranger happened.
They’d left the diamond pack behind for freer waters, though it had a consistency more like congealed bacon grease than water, sucking at the Calamary Rose’s sides as she forced her way through with agonizing slowness. Still, the crew was in high spirits with anticipation for their next stop: an outpost called Old Bottle, the first real island they’d seen in weeks.
“’S not much t’ look at — just a wee heap o’ rocks, is all,” admitted Clem, “but ’twill seem a paradise after such a place as ye came from. They make a bluebuck jerky tough as leather and ripe as a pair o’ unwashed bloomers, and ye’ll love every moment of it.”
Viola and Wilmur joined the crew in crowding against the gunwales, eager to catch a glimpse of their first island besides Caveat. But their excitement was soon dampened, for they passed into a chilly bank of fog littered with saltbergs twice the size of the Calamary Rose, laying a treacherous maze to be navigated. All hands and the cook were called on deck, and even Chase emerged from her cabin at last to join Clem at the helm. Viola couldn’t see her very well at a distance, but she could tell that the captain was in a much darker mood than she’d been those nights ago at Christmas.
They sailed around for hours in search of Old Bottle, the sailors sniffing the air hopefully for a whiff of jerky, but finding none. Every promising rock that came looming through the fog turned out to be just another saltberg. The longer it took, the more unsettled the crew became, nervous rumbles rolling across the deck fore and aft, and those that carried weapons gripped at them anxiously. Even Wilmur’s joyful abandon had turned to nervous energy, and he had taken to picking splinters off of the rail and flicking them into the sea. “It should be here,” muttered Jacoby, restlessly passing his thumb over the lucky tattoo on his forearm again and again. “We moored here not three weeks past. It should be right here.”
The air had gotten a lot colder, Viola noticed, and everything had gone quiet — much too quiet. Caveat had been quiet too, but this was different. On Caveat, a small sound could carry for a mile, but here, the silence was a hungry thing that swallowed up every sound until even the Calamary Rose with her ceaseless groaning of timbers and creaking of ropes seemed to be holding her breath. All Viola could hear was a strange droning hum, so soft and low-pitched that she could not be sure if she really heard it at all or if it was being emitted by her own frantic imagination; still, it tickled deep within her ears and echoed in her skull until it ached.
“I see it!” called Young Teazer, his voice oddly muffled in the hush. “Old Bottle, ho!”
A chorus of relieved sighs and chuckles rippled across the assembled crew. Viola and Wilmur craned their necks, raking the fog with eager eyes, but all there was to see was fog.
“Enough o’ that, Teazer,” said Clem wearily. “We’re in no mood fer yer pranks.”
“It’s no prank,” said Young Teazer. “Can’t you see it? Look — it’s right there, right in front of your noses.” He pointed confidently at nothing at all.
No one said anything. It was so quiet that Viola thought she might throw up.
“It’s there, it’s right there!” Young Teazer was yelling now. “I see the lanterns on the pier, and the masts all sticking up like winter trees in the mist. Fomka! You see it, don’t you? Allis, tell me you see it!”
“About ship,” said Chase to Clem. “Put this Cod-blamed place in our wake, and hastily.”
The crew moved uneasily to their stations — all but Teazer, who was growing more and more agitated. He threw himself against the rail and shook it, reaching toward the island only he could see. “No, no, we can’t turn back now — not when it’s so close! Why can’t you see it?”
“Easy there, Teazer,” said Chase. “You’re all right.” Her voice was cool and measured, but Viola saw that her hand was resting on her knife.
Young Teazer let out an awful howl that did not so much break the silence as magnify it. His face was very red, his eyes bugging out like they might pop. “I’m going to Old Bottle!” he shrieked. “I’m going to Old Bottle, and you can’t stop me!”
In the split second that it took the others to react, Young Teazer had hurled himself forward and over the bow; just like that, he was gone.
They sent out the jolly boats after him, but they could not find so much as his hat. The ocean was deadly still and deadly calm, and the silence weighed so heavily that the very air seemed thickened by it, making it hard to breathe. Finally, Chase called off the search.
“Enough,” she said. “He’s gone. You have your orders — about ship.”
Even the bravest, most grizzled salts seemed relieved. Not until that awful silent place had faded into the mist behind them did any of them begin to breathe easily again.
Later, some of the crew huddled around the capstan, staring dully into the mugs of hot flip that Clem had made Laddie pass around.
“What was his name?” said Fives softly. “Does anyone remember?”
“What are you on about?” spat Jacoby. “’Course I know his name. It was—” He hesitated, his lips forming one soundless syllable after another until he finally gave up.
Viola racked her brain. She knew his name, of course she did. She’d stood in the mess line with him and shelled pearly mussels with him, and there was a joke he’d liked to tell about a banana in someone’s ear. But now she couldn’t remember the joke, and she couldn’t remember his name, and she couldn’t even remember his face.
Whoever the lost sailor had been, he was gone in more ways than one.
