No Pain, No Shame, No Fear of Death: ND Stevenson Discusses the Incalculably Fantastic Scarlet Morning

I’m going to make a confession to you. While it may appear that when I interview middle grade authors about their latest releases I’ve read their titles cover-to-cover, the sad and sorry fact is that some of the time I’m still halfway or three-quarters through their books by the time the interview runs. Oh, I fake it for my Q&As, but deep down I’m squirming with guilt. Now here’s the odd part: Today? I’m not squirming. I am, in fact, relieved. You see, if I HAD finished N.D. Stevenson’s debut middle grade in time for this talk (and I finished it about a week after I’d sent my questions) I would have been too intimidated to interact with him. You see…

I have discovered my favorite fantasy novel for kids of 2025.

And what’s most surprising? When you hear the origin story of how Scarlet Morning (out September 23rd) came to be, you might agree that this title Should. Not. Work. Why? Well, this glorious cartoon that Stevenson put on Substack kind of shows why. Essentially, this book is based off of something he wrote as a kid. Rewriting the stuff from your youth never works right?

So wrong.

Long story short, it does work. Brilliantly. I keep trying to describe it to people, but the best I can come up with is Pirates of the Caribbean meets Lemony Snicket meets Cthulhu. Which is accurate but not very enlightening. Here’s the description from the publisher instead:

Viola and Wilmur have been waiting for their parents for fifteen boring years in the colorless town of Caveat. Their lives are a drudge of salt, trash, pirate stories, and what-ifs . . . until one very stormy night, when Captain Cadence Chase breaks down their door. They cut a deal with the captain: Chase can take their most prized possession, a mysterious book, but only if she takes them, too. After all, if their parents aren’t coming, Viola and Wilmur might as well have a grand adventure to find them.

Setting sail into the treacherous and beautiful world beyond Caveat, the two inseparable friends must uncover the facts behind legend—and the key to saving all of Dickerson’s Sea from obliteration—before the truth tears them apart.

Wickedly funny, deeply emotional, and sharply incisive, Scarlet Morning is a tale of love, betrayal, and the extraordinary lengths we’d go to save a world broken beyond repair.

Better yet, here’s the book trailer:

So yeah. I’m kind of a fan.

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Betsy Bird: ND! Such a pleasure and an honor to get a chance to ask you some questions today. As origin stories of books go, yours takes the cake. Your intro says that you started this when you were twelve and finished it when you were fifteen as a 600-page double-sided tome. Remarkably it survived until you reread it. What did you see in this book of your youth that you knew you could work with in adulthood?

ND Stevenson: I don’t think I can fully emphasize just how much this story and these characters meant to me in my early teen years. It was a survival method, a way of retreating into my own head when I was overwhelmed or sad or scared, but it was also a form of social connection, because I could bring others with me to Dickerson’s Sea if I described it well enough. Then I very reluctantly grew up and lost touch with Scarlet Morning, and even when I started earning a living making books, it felt too big and too personal to revisit…until I found myself in the depths of catastrophic burnout in 2020, and I was completely detached from my creativity for the first time in my life. It can be so hard thinking of some next, new thing when you’re completely bled dry…but I could look back at something that used to mean so much to me and find this little protected spark of inspiration still burning there.

BB: Okay, so what elements of the original document are in the final product? How much did you have to change? And how much of the present day book looks like its source material?

ND: Almost none of the prose from the original teenage draft remains intact, but when it comes to the structure of the plot and especially the mystery, I actually found it very hard to change too much because everything was very interwoven. I’d pull out a peg and the whole thing would come crashing down. The challenge lay in both subverting and embracing whatever I was into as a fifteen-year-old (mostly Edgar Allan Poe and Sweeney Todd) while also trying to update it to my current tastes—basically, treating it as source material to be adapted, so I could be a little precious about it while also being very cold and calculating. There are all these little allusions and winks and inside jokes throughout it that no one will ever get but me and the few people who were there back in the day, but I can’t bring myself to take them out, because they feel so crucial to what this story is.

BB: You’re a graphic novelist by name and reputation. Was there ever a temptation to take this book and turn it into a comic instead?

ND: I actually tried! I wrote up a full comic pitch in 2015, but found that I could never quite crack it. The characters never felt like themselves, and the story was just too convoluted to compress down into a reasonable graphic novel length. Also, it would mean having to draw a LOT of ships, and ships are so hard to draw. Ultimately, I realized that this story had to stay as prose…and that meant having to relearn how to write prose, which was so hard in its own way.

BB: I sympathize with the ship thing. Couldn’t help but notice that you slip little allusions to other piratical fare into this book. For example, at one point Viola is told that Captain Chase’s name is possibly “Morgenstern” (a fact that will give many a Princess Bride fan a small thrill). What were your top pirate influences that played a part in the creation of SCARLET MORNING?

ND: I love pirates so much. I always have. It goes without saying that I had a huuuuuge Pirates of the Caribbean moment as a teen, but it all truly started at eight years old when I tried to play a Star Wars game on the library computer and, due to a glitch, it paired it with the soundtrack to a totally different game about pirates. One of the vocalists was a woman who sang about being the best pirate with the most treasure, and I couldn’t see any of the visuals, but I was so obsessed with her. Years later, I finally found that game and it turned out that all the characters were mice, but in my head they were really sexy pirates. Besides that, there’s Treasure Island (I used to claim to be descended from Robert Louis Stevenson, but of course that’s a complete lie), as well as its adaptions in Muppet Treasure Island and Treasure Planet; The Princess Bride, as you mentioned; Peter Pan (book Captain Hook is one of my all-time favorite characters); and I count Mad Max: Fury Road and True Grit as spiritual pirate movies, so you can see their influence in Scarlet Morning as well.

BB: Let’s talk a little bit about the illustrations you created for the book. Clearly the text came before the art, but did your original book also have accompanying illustrations? And when you made the art for this book, did you instinctively know where to put the pictures or did you work with an Art Director or Editor to make those choices?

ND: One upside of the comics process is that the visual aspect means you can find the characters much more quickly. Even a simple drawing of two characters standing side by side can show you immediately who they are. I felt really shaky with prose at the beginning, and so I leaned on my comics background to bring the characters to life, drawing inspiration from books like The Phantom Tollbooth and By the Great Horn Spoon! where the text and the illustrations are in conversation, much like comics. At the same time, illustrating a prose story is very different from drawing a comic. You have to be careful not to undermine whatever the reader is seeing in their mind, so I very intentionally omitted certain information—for example, you don’t see Chase’s face until a few chapters in, and other characters’ faces you never see at all. My team at HarperCollins were very generous in letting me be a part of the layout process so I could place everything just so, even though I’m sure it was a headache for everyone.

BB: Just had to ask. The name of the town where Viola and Wilmur live is “Caveat”. This may be the greatest name of a fictional town I’ve seen to date. Was that something you came up with long ago or a little more recently?

ND: Honestly, the original name of the island was so embarrassing that when my agent found out about the teenage draft and asked me to send it to him, I quickly did a find-and-replace to protect my honor, and ‘Caveat’ was the first thing to come to mind. Some things just fall into place like that.

BB: *successfully resists urge to know more about previous embarrassing island name*

Is SCARLET MORNING a standalone or might we see further adventures with these characters in the future?

ND: SCARLET MORNING is part one of two books—the second will be called EVENING GRAY, and it will be out when I finish it. Honestly, though, I’m not totally sure I’ll be done after that. I think I could keep writing about Dickerson’s Sea forever. So we’ll see, but I hope there’s a lot more to come.

BB: WOOT! Good answer. Finally, what else is going on in your life these days? What are you up to?

ND: I’ve been renovating our house and collecting typewriters and going to the mountains and finding any excuse to drive a boat. Focusing on books has allowed my to indulge my quieter, more introverted side; I think at some point I will feel the urge to return to making movies and TV, but at the moment, I’m enjoying just watching them.

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Boy, big time thanks to ND for talking to me today. Would you like to hear ND speak? With me? Well, if you’re in the Chicago area, on September 26th at 6:00 pm please come on down to the Downers Grove First United Methodist Church for a conversation and signing. But before you do, be sure to get your tickets here.

Special additional thanks to Audrey French and the team at TvS Media Group for helping to put this together. Scarlet Morning is, as mentioned before. out September 23rd. See? Soon you won’t have an excuse not to have read it!

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2025, Interviews