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Katie O'Connor: Hi, listeners. I'm Audible Editor Katie O'Connor, and today I'm excited to be speaking with bestselling author Victoria Aveyard about her new adult fantasy, Tempest. Welcome, Victoria.
Victoria Aveyard: Thank you so much for having me. What a blast.
Thank you for being here. I am very, very excited. I feel like I have been waiting for this book for a very long time, and I'm going to get into that.
Me too (laughs).
We will circle back to that. But for our listeners, Tempest is an epic pirate fantasy exploring the glory days, if you will, of piracy, juxtaposed against the precipice of its apparent downfall and the return of an imperial navy. You have shared that Tempest was born from your deep appreciation of Pirates of the Caribbean. Can you talk about your love of that fandom?
I think like any millennial—Pirates of the Caribbean came out in 2003; I was 13 years old—I remember going to see that movie and kind of going in with not really any expectations. Even as a teenager, I was like, "This is based on a ride at Disney World? Like, what's this going to be about?" And then you were just quite literally swept away. Two hours goes by in a blur, you get to the end, the credits roll, the music comes up. I remember being clawed to the seat of the theater, and I had to go see it like four more times. I was also in the throes of my Lord of the Rings heyday. So, it was all Orlando Bloom, all the time.
Deep fandom moment for you.
Deep fandom moment, deep fan-fiction work moment. But it was one of those movies that locked in me at a very, very specific time in my life. We always think about the things you were obsessed with when you were like 12, 13 years old; they cement in you in some way. And Pirates of the Caribbean was so one of those things. Not just because of, like, “Oh, pirates, what a fun theme.” We all have this sort of romanticized notion, the mythology of piracy. But the actual adventure, the characters, the feeling of being swept away on this journey and this adventure, I'd always been kind of trying to scratch that itch in other stories and looking for something to give me that same feeling. It's always been in the back of my mind, so the pirates were always kind of there.
But then when it came time to write my adult debut, I was working on something entirely different after I had finished Realm Breaker, and it had a pirate subplot in it. I was struggling with so much else of the story as I was outlining. But the pirate subplot was so strong and so clear to me that I thought, "This is actually its own thing. I'm going to take it out. I'm going to put it on the burner. This is a story for a later date. This is something else." But that story kept tapping me on the shoulder. And even though I was trying to outline this other thing that I'd already run by my agent, had spent some months on, I couldn't get the pirate idea out of my head.
"All of these things just unfolded in my head in a way that I've not really experienced with another book before. It was almost like I was succumbing to this thing and letting it take over me."
I was like, "Shit, I need to go for a walk." And this is what I do. I go for a walk with some music in my head and I ideate. I'm like, "I'm going to give myself an hour to go for a walk and see if there's actually something here that needs to be addressed right now that is stronger than what I'm currently working on." I went for a walk with my Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack. I wonder if someone in my neighborhood saw me like angrily power walking. But I remember the entire story—like, act one, act two, act three, this character, this character, this character, this plot twist—all of these things just unfolded in my head in a way that I've not really experienced with another book before. It was almost like I was succumbing to this thing and letting it take over me.
I remember I walked back to my house after an hour, went in, sat down at my desk, and I wrote up a one-page sort of almost query letter for my agent. I did a one-page for the project I was working on at the same time. I sent them both to her and I was like, "Hey, I know that you have already signed off on the thing I'm already working on, but this other idea won't leave me alone and I need a gut check. I need you to give me your feedback of which direction I should take." I think I was also looking for just a little bit of validation. She emailed me back very, very quickly, her and her assistant, and they both love pirates: "You have to do the pirates." I was like, "Okay. My hands are tied."
You said it.
They said that I have to do the pirates. That's what we all need is we all need someone to give us the excuse. So, that's how Tempest really came together. It was very quickly "I am this thing. I am about this character. I am this kind of world with this kind of layer to it." I knew very, very quickly Cat, her story, who she was as a person, and how I was going to let that unfold for a reader.
The chapters in Tempest alternate from the before and after. In the after, our heroine, as you mentioned, Cat Rose, is a widow on the run, having betrayed both the Meridian Empire in her support of pirates and the pirates themselves, most notably her former lover, Valerian Kane. In the before, Cat is a naive 19-year-old, miserable in her married life to the point that she's ultimately happy when she is held captive by Valerian and his crew. Did you write the narrative linearly or did you write the before and after in separate chunks?
So, it would've been smarter on my part if I had written it linearly, but I have to write a book the way the reader experiences it. That works best for me. And while it was probably more difficult in the long run, I would hope it is better for the story itself and for the experience of the audience. I went back and forth in the chapters, and I had to make sure that they sort of echoed each other. Something that was mentioned here would be mentioned here, or wasn't mentioned until this point, so I couldn't say it here.
It was a lot of going back and forth, a lot of rereading, but I got to have those moments. And this was sort of something I was always thinking about when I, from the very beginning, knew this is how I was going to unfold the story. I wanted to have a couple of moments where it's like 10 years ago, they're in this room, in this place, having this conversation. We flip a page, we're 10 years later. They're still in that room. Someone's stepping through a door and 10 years goes by. I love those little moments.
So, I'm always thinking of that and seeing that in my mind and trying to communicate that as best I can so that someone else sees it in their mind, too. People ask, “When did you think about telling the story in this kind of structure?” I almost couldn't remember because it was so early on in the process. When the story unfolded in my head, I kind of saw it that way to begin with. I almost can't even pinpoint. It was what it was. I always said, “This is how you're going to tell the story.” Of course, forever, I will think, was that the right choice? And I will never really know.
I will say as a listener, it was very satisfying having those moments echoed. It felt very intentional.
I'm sure some readers won't like it. Some readers love it. That's just the nature of art. It's going to be subjective, and I just hope that I did right by the people who this book is really for.
Did you have a preference writing a younger Cat versus a more world-weary Cat?
It's a little bit of both, because world-weary Cat as a character, she has less of a filter. And, of course, she's smarter and more sharp. Writing that kind of character, for me, always feels delicious. You're feeding your id a little bit, like, "This is what I want to be. I wish I was in this sort of mindset and could be this person." But you're balancing against the Cat who's still learning who she is, which is also super interesting. She's on the before timeline—because it's inherently catching up to the after timeline, that timeline moves a lot faster, just going through more events. So, it's a little bit of both. The character on this side I really love, and then the events on this side I really love.
Fair enough. Fair enough.
The diplomatic answer.
You're like, "I love all of my children equally." You are pretty famous for research trips. I would love to hear about any adventures you went on in support of this book, and then maybe any more academic-style research you might have done.
Sure. I kind of feel like, you know how Adam Sandler makes movies in places where he wants to go on vacation? I didn't write a pirate book so I could go on vacation in the Caribbean. However, it was super helpful to go on a research trip to the Bahamas. I think we literally went on submission with the proposal while I was in the Bahamas. So that felt very on the nose a little bit.
"You're finding ways to honor expectations and honor the myth but also bring in what you hope is a little bit more realism, while not being shackled by that, either."
There are plenty of forts that are still there. There are some museums. Obviously, that was really, really helpful to go through Fort Charlotte in Nassau and have a guide take us through, feel like what it feels like to go from the gun battery in the blazing heat and humidity and bright sunlight, and take a step and go down a flight of stairs and suddenly you're in this cold, damp, dark room to see what the cells look like. I remember I had a moment where we were walking through and they showed us the cells of the fort and I was like, "Oh, I gotta rewrite what the cells look like in chapter 2, because this is not what I pictured in my head."
So, that was super helpful, especially with something like pirates, where we, as an audience and as just people, have all of these connotations, these myths, these legends, and then real history that we're all sort of balancing in our heads. You are, as a writer, trying to balance that, too, and sort of looking at the expectations of what people want from something that's pirates and the history of piracy and what that really looked like. Because it's like, the ships were smaller. They actually didn't have buried treasure. There was no one with a parrot on their shoulder. They didn't walk the plank. Those sort of things.
So, you're finding ways to honor expectations and honor the myth but also bring in what you hope is a little bit more realism, while not being shackled by that, either. I hope I hit the mark, but there were some cool things where you're like, "Oh, they don't walk the plank. What do they do instead to execute people? I actually like that better.” So, I got to do that in the second book.
I look forward to that.
I mean, it was fun.
I think that you hit that mark in a lot of the costuming, too. I loved the details of the, was it a green velvet coat on our original pirate captain?
Yes, on Moravan. There were pirates who were very flamboyant in how they dressed, and that is kind of in our social awareness of piracy. So that's always fun to find those moments where the two do intersect and you get to really have that.
Yeah, you've created a very richly realized world in Tempest, and I think particularly in the islands of the Lyrian Sea. As you're world-building, how are you keeping yourself honest?
I had the benefit of leaning very, very heavily on true events in the Caribbean, in the Bahamas, specifically in the year 1718. That was my hinge point for inspiration, because 1718 is sort of when the Pirate Republic met its fate essentially, when the British Empire was like, "We're done with this. We're sending a guy in. We're sending the might of the Navy. We're not going to deal with this anymore, and we're going to eradicate you guys." It was sort of the beginning of the downfall of piracy, so I looked at that and mirrored a couple of characters off historical figures, specifically on the more imperial side.
At the same time, I was also trying to extrapolate from the real history of the Caribbean and sort of think, “What would this place have looked like if we still had some of the Indigenous population existing in real numbers?” Because obviously when we look at Columbian contact, when we look at the genocides that happened in the Caribbean, you lost so many people, so many tribes who were essentially erased without a trace. Very, very few remained. I was trying to sort of imagine, “Okay, some people did survive. What would that look like? What would those islands look like? What would that belief system look like? What would those people be doing to continue surviving in this world where, no pun intended, the tide is rising?” So, you're trying to honor and invent and balance all at the same time without letting that overwhelm you.
Sometimes you have to be overwhelmed, and you have to hope you did the best you could. It's not going to land for some people, and that's okay. Hopefully it lands for as many readers as possible. But it did give the world much more heart and make it feel like it was breathing and real. I go back to just being able to physically stand on a beach in the Caribbean and feel what the air felt like and smell what the sea smells like and what the sounds were. To stand on a gun battery and look in every direction and think, “This is what they saw. And what would they have done if they saw a ship on the horizon?” That kind of thing. I found that very, very helpful in grounding myself in the world I was trying to create and put the reader into.
I'm actually going to segue to a narration question just because of something that you just said, but Fiona Hardingham, she does a beautiful job with the performance. I'm curious if you've gotten to listen yet. But then also, did you give any direction on the dialect of the different kingdoms that were still in existence?
Yes. So, again, because I had this sort of scaffolding—very, very clear inspiration of British colonialism—I got to very clearly communicate, okay, Cat is upper class. Valerian is lower class. Jasper is middle class. And we can kind of jump off from there. We have this person who doesn't have a very educated background in sort of the British sense, this person who does, this person who will have been taught elocution and how to speak because that's sort of what society demands of women. It was really, really easy to lean on those inspirations. And then of course we did the pronunciations of some of the more invented words or the names or the ships and stuff like that. This was new for me, it was the first time I've done this. Usually, we write it out phonetically, or that's been my experience. This was the first time where it's like, “Oh, no, we have software now and you are just going to record yourself saying these words.”
Oh, that's so cool.
You're again trying to balance: This word was influenced by the Arawak language or the Taino language. How is that pronounced there? But what would the pronunciation be in my world? You're trying to balance all of these things, and then also not jar an audience. That's another thing with fantasy is, you're always trying to balance their suspension of disbelief, and you never want to bump someone out of the story. It can be anything from spelling to, in an audiobook, pronunciation that can make someone go, "Wait, what?" And you don't ever want them to have the “wait, what?” moment.
And I think it's so specific to fantasy. I was actually having this conversation with somebody else in the industry around fantasy, specifically, that sometimes I am a person, in just the way that my brain works, that I need to read it alongside listening to it.
So, this is something I had never heard of before until the Tempest ALC went out and I saw people were saying, "This is a great immersion read." I'd never heard that term before. I was like, "What is immersion reading?" And it was you're listening and reading at the same time. It must be such a cool experience. I'm a total Luddite when it comes to audiobooks.
Well, welcome. We're here to educate you. But I think it really helps when there is that language nuance or specific terminology around kingdoms or even magic systems and whatnot. I find it very helpful.
Fingers crossed we get a graphic audio or like an immersive audio because that, ooh, hearing the waves crash in the background, that might be really nice.
Some of those battle scenes, too. That would be really, really cool. So, this is your adult debut. I'm just curious if your process differed at all writing for an older audience.
It wasn't so much the process. I am someone who has to, because it is my full-time job and I'm very lucky in that, I really have to treat this like my full-time job or else your brain slows down a little bit and then the, "Wait a second, are you telling me that I get to write books for a living? This is my job. Are you kidding me?" And then the wave kind of crashes over you. I have to move fast enough so the wave never catches me, because I don't want to get into that like, "Oh, my God, what do you mean?" So, for me, it's like Monday to Friday, 10 to four or five o'clock with like a lunch break. That's my ideal. I have to treat it like a job, move forward linearly, hit my marks. I find that that helps balance living the dream, essentially. I have to find the realities of the dream. So, that approach was fine.
"The big difference for me was always just remembering these are characters who know who they are. In YA, you have characters who are discovering who they are."
The world-building, the map, I love a map. That is one thing that I'm like, "Ooh, I'm very happy that there's a map in these books,” because getting to create the world, the visual element of the world for me is just delicious. I started with the map once I kind of knew the boundaries of the story, the characters, the world that I was in, so that I had something physical to work off of while I was writing and sort of ideating. They're traveling through lots of different islands in this collective place. And then I have my research files. I love to write in Scrivener because I find it keeps it all in one place. It's so useful for fantasy writers, especially, or if you're working between different perspectives or different timelines. That was really helpful. The big difference for me was always just remembering these are characters who know who they are. In YA, you have characters who are discovering who they are.
So, with Cat, I got a little bit of the discovery when she's younger, but getting to see the other side of it, it's not something I've really been able to explore in my work before with my young adult characters. Realm Breaker was a little in the middle because I had some adult POVs, but Tempest, these people know who they are, have made choices, and are surviving with those choices. And as I'm 36 years old now, it felt really, really, I don't want to say healing, but it felt like a really good exercise for me to write an adult woman who is making her own way, no matter the cost.
Yeah, that's interesting. There's so much, I think, in this book that kind of debates selfishness versus survival.
Right. I've had female characters in the past, and I feel like this is just in general—I'm not saying anything new; many, many female writers talk about this: female characters are judged more harshly than their male counterparts.
Oh, yes.
I almost wonder if subconsciously I was like, "Oh, you think my characters are unlikable? I'm going to show you unlikable. And I'm going to make you like her." And that's something, again, that I'm seeing where I'm really, really delighted by people who are saying, "I don't agree with her, I don't like what she's doing, but I understand it and I'm rooting for her." And I'm like, "Yes," because I feel like that character study is so cool—
You do want to see Cat Rose survive.
Yeah, you do. Because you empathize with her. And to be fair, we haven't seen how deep things are going to get. And that's what we're going to see in the second book. But I feel like we're in the place where I've got you on her side. And I want to see how long you're going to stay on her side.
Ooh! You originally wrote Tempest as one 300,000-word novel, but now it's been split into a duology. Did you struggle to figure out where to split the story? Or was it natural for you to find that split?
I did split it. We went back and forth on which chapter exactly, but I always knew spiritually it was going to be the midpoint. There was a specific, very specific, midpoint hinge point in the draft that is the end of this book. And it's specifically a moment in Cat's before timeline where she makes a very, very big choice that changes her path. The battle of splitting the book in half isn't just figuring out where, it's making that first book feel like it has a completed arc. Even though you know it's part of a bigger arc, you still want any book in a series to feel like it has closure of some piece of the journey. And I feel like that was very, very strong closure. And then once we had that, we kind of shifted back and forth. Do we add this piece? Do we add that piece? What feels like it echoes that ending a little bit, but also has a pull into the next book? Because of course we want you to read the next book, so we want to end on a little bit of a cliffhanger, and I think we did.
You do. Don't worry. There's reason to continue. Although, I will say that piece that you are hat-tipping to, as a listener, was deeply satisfying.
It was. And it was also, in the grand scheme of the world, and the grand scheme of where the story goes and how high the stakes get and how big the action becomes, it's small, but it means so much to her. So, I had to make sure it was going to mean so much to the reader when that moment finally happens. Because you know it's coming.
Right. From the beginning.
Yeah. You know this is going to happen, but we have to balance that anticipation and that want for it to happen with earning the moment and making her earn it, but then also making the reader earn it. I love how many people are like, "I hated this person in this moment." And I was like, "Yes, finally." Because I could have easily had it much earlier, but I really wanted to draw it out. And something I have learned about myself while writing these books is that I love writing weasel men. I have a weird talent for it.
I'm thinking back to the OG weasel in Red Queen.
Oh, yeah, the OG weasel. So, in the second book, obviously we've lost weasel number one. Who's going to be weasel number two? I'm really excited, and I hope I've created another awful man who's awful in a different way.
What do you think is the most valuable currency on the Lyrian Sea?
Ooh. Well, Cat says this a couple of times. It's literally currency. And I think there was something there subconsciously for me because I think we also, whether we like it or not, live in a world where currency is king. Money is king, money is wealth, money is power, money is protection. And we're seeing that every single day in our lives, is you can at least cushion yourself. And for her, she's learned that lesson in a very hard way, of knowing, “I'm a woman. I don't have the same rights. I don't have the same abilities. The only thing I have is money, and money is going to be the thing that is going to protect me. How do I keep it? How do I get more of it?” That felt very therapeutic to work through with her and have her have those realizations and have to also kind of shake other people who maybe are a little more noble but maybe a little bit more naïve, when she's like, "What do you think I was going to do? What choices do I have?”
You took your social media fans through the entire process of this novel.
Yeah, that was fun.
Yeah, I enjoyed it. But I mean, from ideation, to first draft, to working with your agent, through selling it to a publisher and the edits, et cetera. What made you want to pull back the curtain in that way?
I'm naturally very nosy. I wish I got to watch other authors do this. I'm always like, "Oh, I want to know what's on their desk. I want to know what their day-to-day looks like." I think if I'm interested in it from someone else, I'm sure other people are interested in it from me or whoever. I also, as someone who was a debut author, who didn't know very much, who was taken under the wing of some really incredible authors who are now friends, who helped me, who guided me, who were wonderful sounding boards, who are still sounding boards for me, I really, really advocate for authors, especially young authors, to find each other and to use each other to commiserate. Because what we do is very, very isolating and very, very strange. And you're not going to find a lot of people in the world who are experiencing what we have gone through, both with the work of the actual writing and then the launch, the marketing, the publicity side, the social media side. It's a very solitary process. It's very isolating. It can be really scary.
"I really, really advocate for authors, especially young authors, to find each other and to use each other to commiserate. Because what we do is very, very isolating and very, very strange."
I remember how many bullets I kind of dodged, maybe by accident, but also because I just had people who I didn't realize were passing on this idea of looking out for each other. I think with the pandemic, too, that kind of pumped the brakes a little bit on authors' ability to meet each other in person and to form these bonds. It used to be we'd be sent out all on the same sort of festival circuit, event circuit. We would meet each other at cons, we would meet each other at book events, and you would create these bonds with people who you'd see maybe once or twice a year, but you would talk every day or talk every week. Or if you had a question, you knew who you could ask. So, I'm always encouraging young authors, when you go to a festival, when you go to a con, I totally understand being wiped. I totally understand we're all introverts and all you want to do is run back to your hotel room. Don't do that. Go to the cocktail party, go to the bar, ask, "Let's get dinner after," because we are each other's best resource, and we also are each other's best defense in this very, very weird industry.
So, coming back to social media and talking about the industry, I know it's so murky, I know it's so strange, and I know that there's no sort of set path. And anything I'm talking about obviously is going to be unique to me, but I feel like it's still hopefully revealing and validating to other people who may be going through it or just curious about the process, because it's a very weird process and it's different for everybody.
Yeah, it's very true. I'm sure it has been helpful to people who are starting out and don't necessarily have a grasp on how it all works. So, we have an epilogue from Valerian's point of view, performed by Shane East. Can we expect to hear more from them in book 2?
Well, I'm not sure if they're going to tell me no, I can't say these things because it's a spoiler, but whatever. Yeah, we're definitely going to hear more (laughs).
Phew!
So, that was not in the first manuscript, that big draft. Valerian was a late add to the first draft of Tempest.
Sorry. Valerian, period?
Well, Valerian in his POV.
I was like, "Hold on a second."
Valerian's POV epilogue to Tempest was a late add. That came late in the process. We were well into editorial when I was like, "Wait a second. This might be interesting." And then I did it and both my editors were like, "Oh, yeah, girl." And then I'm working on Tyrant. We're running into, “Okay, this works, this works, this works, but these pieces we still need more of, or this wasn't explained well, or we feel like we're missing this thing here.” And I realized I have the answer. Adding Valerian's POV fixes all of these things. I didn't really realize this from doing the epilogue, this is kind of creating a promise of you're going to see more of his thoughts and his interior life. I find that's worked out very well. So, any one of my friends or earlier readers are like, "Oh, I know you have draft two of Tyrant. Can I have it?" I'm like, "You don't want this one. You want the next one."
You want the next one. That's great.
Because this is, I think, going to work really, really well. I'm in the process of doing that right now. And it's interesting because I'm now balancing having known Cat so well with Valerian, who I know not as well, obviously, but has a lot of different viewpoints and a lot of different touchstones. And also, for Cat, it's survival. For him, it's survival in a different way. You always find what's the core of who they are? And his is a little bit different.
Speaking of points of view, I just want to make a quick plea for an Anna-centric novella.
Oh, I know. I really, really love her. And to have this sort of foil to Cat and a female character who is demonstrating like, you do not have to be what they say you have to be, but then have her be, in one timeline: friend, in one timeline: foe, how did they get to these places? It's, again, we're tracking female friendships, which I think are inherently more complex than male and female friendships.
I mean, I even would want more from Jasper. Are there secondary characters that have been jockeying for more of your attention or for more of a voice?
From the get, I knew who [Jasper] was in the story. I knew what role he played. I knew how he and Cat would dovetail, and I knew how he and Cat would kind of echo each other and have overlaps in their character and their personalities. But as soon as I started writing his lines, it was like, "Oh, this guy is snappy and sassy." I'm like, "We gotta dial back the banter a little bit. This scene is going too long because the banter is just going back and forth and it's not serving any purpose."
My education is in screenwriting, and in screenwriting you're taught if the scene is longer than three pages on a script, something's wrong. Or you really have to make that scene worth more than three pages.So, my brain is always like, “Move, move, move, move, move. Let's keep going, let's keep going. We're lingering here too long.”
Feel free to linger (laughs).
But that's the other thing, is then you get the questions about extra content and, "Oh, do you have any deleted scenes?” And I'm like, "No. If I deleted it, it’s not supposed to be there." So, that's always interesting for me. I'm also very lazy, so I'm not writing anything that's not going in the book.
You're like, "I already did 300,000 words. You guys are good. You're good. You got it.” What is next for you?
Tyrant, the sequel to Tempest, the quote "other half" of the megabook. On the one hand, it's very, very daunting, of course. But on the other, I can now see, having fully edited Tempest, and now it's completely out of my hands, I can see how much better that draft is than the first half of the megadraft. And I can see how much farther we got it through the editorial process. It was the most difficult editorial I've ever had of any of my books by far.
Oh, wow.
But I think it was worth it. My editors pushed me harder than I've ever been pushed, and I hope, I think, it was worth it. So, now I have to do it all over again with Tyrant. We're hoping that it'll come out, like, exactly a year later. You would think it would be like, "Oh, it's done. It's out." No, no, no. The editorial was a lot longer on these books, but that's the nature of adult. I think getting an adult fantasy out one year exactly after the other still feels pretty fast, especially coming from the YA world, where I was on a book-a-year schedule for quite a long time. And then after Tyrant, I know what I want to write. I have to get the proposal together. I just came back from my research trip for that book, but I was in Scotland on some quite remote islands.
Dot, dot, dot.
Yeah, looking at a lot of seabird colonies and thinking, "What if these were dragons?"
Oh, I love it.
Yeah, I love it. It was great.
Sign us up. Well, Victoria, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
And listeners, you can get Tempest by Victoria Aveyard right now on Audible.
