feature image photo by JC Olivera / Stringer via Getty Images

Long before creating Nimona and showrunning She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, ND Stevenson had the idea for what would eventually become his illustrated middle grade fantasy novel full of friendship and pirates, Scarlet Morning. When he was just 15-years-old, Stevenson spent many years developing a story about two teens on a wayward western adventure with pirates. But alas, throughout his prolific career, the transmasc multihyphenate had to place the characters and their story on the back burner.

In 2020, he found an old draft and decided to return to his writing roots and give that teen his dream by materializing his characters into a YA book. He imparts his adult wisdom and inspiration in their humorous, heartbreaking, and thrilling swashbuckling pirate adventure with Scarlet Morning, the initial installment of a planned duology.

Wilmur, a tall and lanky boy who yearns for adventure, and Viola, a shorter, more sensible yet fierce girl, are two orphaned sibling-like best friends who hope their parents will return to the desolate town where they grew up. All they know of the world is through their storybooks in their home. But all of that changes when a tatted-up baddie pirate captain, Captain Cadence Chase, breaks down their door searching for a mysterious book they possess. They strike a deal in which she receives the book in exchange for accompanying her on a grand ship-sailing adventure. Thus, the eager Wilmur and a somewhat apprehensive Viola depart from their hometown of Caveat and board the Calamory Rose. On their journey, they encounter a colorful array of spirited pirates, face off against classy foes, and uncover the secrets between the book and the captain who wants it.

I spoke with Stevenson about returning to their world after many years, the childhood and adulthood inspirations for the book’s unique pirate world from history and media, subverting common gender tropes and exploring complex relationships like found family and sibling-like bonds. And, of course, potential fan art AU. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Rendy: What was the first memory you had upon returning to your world that you made as a kid?

ND Stevenson: In terms of first memory, I think it’s something that never really left my head. It’s always kind of been there. These characters go back pretty far in some iteration or other. I think especially Chase is one who’s kind of been knocking around in my head for a long time. I want this cool woman pirate captain, just really kind of obsessed with that character archetype. Even when they were on the back burner, they were always there. I never forgot about them, and I was just kind of waiting for the opportunity to bring them back out. I think specifically what pushed me in this direction was just coming off of She-Ra and wanting to do something really different, but also old and nostalgic for me as well. So that was the first place I went, and it was just this kind of like, oh, this love and these characters and these feelings are still there. I should lean into that. So that’s how it happened.

Rendy: What were some of your inspirations upon crafting this pirate realm?

ND Stevenson: I think inspiration wise, I’ve been a huge lover of pirate stories for a long time. So I think there’s the obvious Pirates of the Caribbean, Muppet Treasure Island, Treasure Planet even, which has that sort of sci-fi and fantasy at the same time.

But then I think the less obvious ones are more from my adult life. There’s a show on AMC called The Terror, which blew my mind when I watched it for the first time. It does such a great job of merging both historical fiction, these were real people, and then kind of combining it with this sort of subtle magical realism in just a location that feels supernatural. It’s wild that these places exist that are so hostile to humans, and so the magical elements feel like they mesh really well.

So I was really inspired by that, and it’s pretty dark. It’s pretty adult, but I was like, “I bet I kind of want to find a way to do this for kids.” So there was that, and then there was Mad Max Fury Road, which I consider a pirate movie. Instead of an ocean, it’s the desert. Then also the Coen Brothers True Grit. I see westerns as having a lot in common with pirate movies. So that was sort of what I was drawing on.

Rendy: What was one of the most radical changes between your first go at writing the story and redeveloping it to where it is now?

ND Stevenson: So the original draft that I wrote all the way back in my teens, I think it was a little bit more standard Age of Sail. There was magic in it. I still considered it a fantasy story, but when I revisited it, I really wanted to find something that set it apart, that made it really specific and unique to this world that I wanted to create. Coming off of She-Ra, our schedules were so intense that the world-building was very seat of the pants. It was like: you have an idea, you draw it, you do the best you can, but I didn’t really have time to sit down and do all the research and all the reading and really flesh anything out. And so with a book, I wanted to do that.

So the first thing that happened was I turned the ocean into this desert of salt. So that was when the idea of the ocean kind of solidifying and this salt that looks like snow and ice starts sweeping in and burying stuff. And I had this image of Violet and Wilmer navigating what looks like a polar landscape, but they’re barefoot and in short sleeves. And so the question is just like, what is this? Where are we? And I just found that image really compelling. And then from there, it was just kind of trying to build a world around that of just what would it be like in this world where the ocean is a desert now? How would this place that’s mostly ocean adapt to that or fail to adapt to that? I think was the biggest change that came very, very early as I was revisiting this story.

Rendy: When it came to writing, how was it to re-explore that side of yourself after working on so many different visual media?

ND Stevenson: I mean, on the one hand, it was maddening. There was a time I felt pretty comfortable with prose, but revisiting it, it was so hard. It was so hard just kind of trying to get my mind around this different medium. And I wrote four drafts before I started to feel good about it or start to fall into a rhythm that felt natural for me. It was just a lot of relearning and learning for the first time with prose. It feels very vulnerable, almost kind of naked. Your words are just right there on the page, and you’re really asking the reader to come meet you halfway with the images in their head. And so I think there’s also a contract with the reader that’s just like, it’s nothing like I’ve ever done in any other media.

It’s just so much its own thing. On the one hand, it was crazy-making, and I was knocking my head against walls. But on the other hand, it was so exciting to really set this challenge for myself and just really try to crack the code, figure out not only what makes prose so special, but what’s my voice when it comes to prose? What do I love about prose? What does it do to my storytelling instincts to tell these stories when you can get inside a character’s head, when you can sort of experience what they see and taste and touch and smell and all of these things that are much, much more difficult to capture in a visual medium. And so yeah, it was both this huge challenge and also something that was kind of healing, in the end, because the only limit was: Can I pull this off? And there was something about just chipping away at something and trying to shape it just all by myself without the support of a huge team or without the oversight of a studio. I feel like it really healed a part of myself that needed to get back to basics and just ask myself why I tell stories and what I hope to do with ’em.

Rendy: What were your reference points in crafting Captain, like she’s the absolute coolest. I got a little bit of Carmen Sandiego in her.

ND Stevenson: 

Like I said, I felt like I’ve known her for a really long time, and I am really interested in lady pirates. There aren’t a lot in general, but in fiction, they tend to use their sexuality in this way that’s always this very feminine kind of voluptuous. It is a trope within the tropes of piracy that I was like, why can’t we have filthy swearing, gruff, drunk, all of the other male captains that we know and love, where’s the female version of that character? Like I said, Pirates of the Caribbean is just the obvious comparison in so many ways. So it cannot be overstated how much I was obsessed with those movies as a young teenager.

Rendy: Same.

ND Stevenson: And so, it’s like Captain Jack, he’s so cool and he is able to get out of any scrape. But on the other hand, I think an underappreciated thing about him is his vulnerability that I think I find very feminine coded in lots of ways. In a really interesting way. I think that’s what makes his character interesting.

It’s obviously not just a gender swap version of any character you’d already know, but yeah, so on the other side, I think Carmen Sandiego is like, I don’t know that that would’ve jumped to the front of my mind if you hadn’t said it first, but that is absolutely one thing I find great about female characters who have this kind of mysterious aura; they can do so much while not even being present in the scenes.

For the first half of the book, Chase is almost not in it. It’s just everyone talking about her and being like, “I heard she’s this. That she killed this guy, and she’s definitely really this person. This is her real name,” all of this stuff. And you kind of build the mythology around a character without them having to do anything at all. That is such a fun and interesting type of female character to me.

I think she’s changed in some ways. She’s changed a lot over the years. In some ways, she’s exactly the same. Yeah, I think also Jeff Bridges from True Grit is another, I just love that movie. He’s someone who has a lot of presence and a mythology around him, but then the longer that he and Maddie are spending time together, she starts to see him as this is just kind of this washed-up guy who’s had a lot of failures in his life and kind of falls from the pedestal in that way to allow them to have a real genuine friendship. And so that was something I was very inspired by, especially coming back to this character as an adult where I’m closer in age to her than I would’ve been as a young teenager writing this book and being like, “Whoa, I don’t know.” I was able to get into her head a little bit more that way

Rendy: You imbue that adult wisdom, like, “Oh, I can do this so much better.”

ND Stevenson: But the panic of like, “Oh my God, this kid really looks up to me. How do I not fuck this up?” Yeah. I relate to that kind of panic for sure.

Rendy: And also when it came to making the characters on the Calamity Rose, what were some inspirations between everybody? They have such an Our Flag Means Death-type of camaraderie.

ND Stevenson: I’m like a connoisseur of pirate stories. I will read or watch any pirate story, but I have strong opinions about them. I don’t even love most of them. And in my opinion, one of the ways that pirate stories go awry is not having a really distinct crew who are instantly recognizable that you can tell them apart. They all have their own personality. Our Flag Means Death is a great example of that. Another one, this one is a little bit underappreciated, but it’s The Pirates! Band of Misfits.

Rendy: I knew you got to say that!

ND Stevenson: That one does not get enough love. It is a great movie. But yeah, those are the ones. Muppet Treasure Island, of course, is also great about this, that there’s a reference to all the pirates introducing each other, and their names get more and more absurd as you go on. And I love that movie. So yeah, I wanted the pirates to be as unique as possible. You just hear their names, and you already get who this person is, or you get that little bit of a thrill of what’s that guy’s deal, what’s going on? I sort of looked to other genres, too. Some of it was Western, because I find that those are two genres that actually really compliment each other, and it’s pretty subtle, but technically they’re sailing this ship across the desert, so maybe they will have more of a cowboy bent to them.

And so I was looking at a lot of historical photos of just people who kind of occupied the verges of society. So there’s cowboys and vaqueros and gauchos in Central America, and even Mongolian eagle hunters or Inuit trackers and hunters with their snow goggles. And they’re just these people that have this sense of total autonomy. You kind of see them out in the middle of these hostile environments, but this is their preferred ground. This is the place where they sort of thrive and where they are the most free, and they get to define who they are and how they live, at least in the romantic ideal of that. And so I drew a lot from that. I also looked at a lot of queer people through the ages, so there were the drag queens in the saloons in the middle of nowhere. I sort of curated a Pinterest board of these kinds of characters that I found complimentary to the pirate genre, and I tried to pull from those as much as I could and just just try to make this feel like a group of people who all made a different decision to end up in the same place and at least imply what that decision might have been.

Rendy: My favorite out of all of them is the non-binary pirate who survived every natural disaster.

ND Stevenson: I love it. As soon as someone says, “Don’t kill gay people,” I’m like, all right, but what if I did everything? But then they miraculously survive anyway. But just protecting them with the magic of insane good and bad luck at the same time. Give ’em a little bit of plot armor.

Rendy: And also such cool mythos.

ND Stevenson: Yes, everything that happens just makes them more attractive and more good at things and more interesting.

Rendy: When it came to the dynamic between Wilmur and Viola, what are some changes that happened, especially with everything they go through in that story?

ND Stevenson: I think that looking back, I wasn’t as interested in them in the teenage draft. It was sort of, these were the orphans who were swept up in a big adventure. I’m not sure I really questioned that all that much back in the day, other than just finding it fun. It is kind of a fantasy to be like, I want to be a child alone in the world without ever really thinking that through. But when I came back to it as an adult, I really wanted to know who they were and how they viewed this world that they were getting sucked up into. And so I really set out to get into their heads and push that as far as I could. And the first thing that came out of that was this sibling dynamic. These are two people who, as far as they know, are not related, but they might as well be. They’ll never question that. We’re basically, we’re family. We’re the only family we’ve ever had.

But then I come from a big family. I’m one of five, and my extended family is larger, and there is something about you going through stuff together and you kind of beat the shit out of each other, and then there’s a certain point where you’re like, actually, you’re the only one who can really understand certain things about me. And vice versa. As soon as I moved out, my relationship with my siblings got that much deeper, and I appreciated it more because we had all been through something that no one else has. We all talk like each other. We have the same inside jokes.

It was also looking back at the friendships that I’ve had. The parts where they were fighting, that was actually new. When you have two people who mean the world to each other, but also their insecurities, they have the ability to trigger each other in that way, in a way no one else can. And so I really wanted to explore that they basically had no other options. They love each other so sincerely, but also they were the only people for a while, and now that they’re out in the world and they’re starting to change in different ways for the first time, it’s not just the two of them in this codependent relationship. How do you drive them apart and how do you bring them back together? I was really interested in just exploring that.

Rendy: After you did Nimona, you did a fun little Gay Dads AU.

ND Stevenson: Yes.

Rendy: Would you possibly be doing a specific AU for the Scarlet Morning?

ND Stevenson: Oh gosh. I totally should. That actually sounds really fun. Yeah, because with a serialized work like this, the next book is all I want to talk about. And I realized that I can’t for another year at least. But that was why I did the Gay Dads AU, because I could sort of make fan art of my own thing without spoiling where I was going with it, and I could talk about the characters without literally showing my hand too soon. So I hadn’t actually thought about it for this, but now I’m feeling like I should, because that sounds really fun. I would like to see their style in contemporary clothes. That’s a great idea. I might just do that and credit you.

Rendy: HA! Yay. I’m so glad.

ND Stevenson: I need something to let off the pressure of like, oh, why can’t people read the book that I haven’t finished writing yet?

Rendy: If you were to do a little fan-casting, who would you have as some of your characters?

ND Stevenson: Obviously I was part of the casting for She-Ra, but I really rely on the casting department to bring me ideas, and then once I see them, I can be like, “Oh my God. Of course, it’s this person. They were born to play this role. This is so them.” But when it comes to just dream casting, I’m not that good at it. Every time I throw it out, I’m like, “Disclaimer, I’m probably totally wrong about this.” And then I also kind of halfway cheat this by being like, if I were casting this as a movie, I would want Viola and Wilmer to be unknowns. I would want this to be their first thing.

When it comes to Chase. On the one hand, I’m like, she seems really hard to cast. On the other hand, I’m like, maybe this would be a really interesting role that any number of people could put a really unique spin on. I think that one actor who I sort of was inspired by at least her physical type was Claudia Black, who’s in Stargate-SG1. She does a lot of smaller sci-fi shows, but I always really love her face. She’s got these really strong features, and I looked to her when sort of figuring out the structure of Chase’s appearance, but then when it comes to casting, I had a thought that it was maybe a little bit Aubrey Plaza. Her eyes are so described, and I really, really want something with those dark eyes that can both be really expressive, but also really kind of dead and scary. And when I think about it, I’m like, Aubrey Plaza is so good at that. She can have her eyes go totally vacant while doing so much with the rest of her face and vice versa. She can be totally stone-faced and have her eyes really, really communicating so much. So I was like, yeah, there might be something there.

Scarlet Morning is out now. 

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