Veronica Roth's Blog, page 2

When Divergent first came out back in 2011, my publisher sent me on a tour with four other authors who were also publishing YA science fiction and fantasy, and it was great. Not only did I get to spend some time with my (brand new!) peers, but the events were so much fun— they introduced a few books at once to curious readers, and generated interesting discussions about writing and genre and craft that were distinct in each city we visited. 

So trust me when I say I’m pretty damn thrilled to be touring with other authors again— this time three fantastic (see what I did there) fantasy authors: Andrea Hairston, Rebecca Thorne, and Nghi Vo, for the VOYAGE INTO GENRE LIVE TOUR! And we’re joined by some pretty spectacular moderators, too.

THE STOPS

✨ May 13 - SEATTLE, WA - 7:00 PM • RSVP Here

Third Place Books @ Lake Forest Park location
Moderated by TJ Klune (Somewhere Beyond the Sea)

✨ May 14 - GRAND RAPIDS, MI - 6:30 PM • RSVP Here

Schuler Books
Moderated by Jacqueline Carey (Cassiel’s Servant)

✨ May 15 - CINCINNATI, OH - 7:00 PM • RSVP Here

Joseph-Beth Booksellers
Moderated by Christopher Buehlman (The Daughters’ War)

✨ May 16 - RALEIGH, NC - 7:00 PM • RSVP Here

Quail Ridge Books
Moderated by T. Kingfisher (A Sorceress Comes to Call)

✨ May 17 - NEW YORK, NY - 7:30 PM • RSVP Here

Greenlight Books @ St. Joseph’s College
Moderator: P. Djèlí Clark (The Dead Cat Tail Assassins)

Presented by Tor Publishing Group and Literary Hub.

THE BOOKS

Andrea Hairston’s ARCHANGELS OF FUNK,

Nghi Vo’s THE BRIDES OF HIGH HILL,

Rebecca Thorne’s CAN’T SPELL TREASON WITHOUT TEA,

And from yours truly, WHEN AMONG CROWS.

The beauty of it all is that I don’t know what we’re going to talk about just yet– you’ll have to come and see! (And I believe at least one event will be recorded, so if you don’t live anywhere near these stops, you may still get to eavesdrop on one– more on that later.) But I do know that for my part, I will likely be talking about the following:

Swords!

Polish folklore and the Baba Jaga of it all

The allure of contemporary fantasy

Chicago vibes, again, but this time with magic

The saddest man in the world AKA Dymitr, the main character of When Among Crows

If you can’t make it to any of the events, you can still pre-order WHEN AMONG CROWS at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, or Amazon.

Hope to see you in May!

-V

I read some books this year. Here are some of my favorites.

*Where marked, what I actually read this year was the sequel or even the entire series, but I’m just recommending the first book because I’m assuming you’re not gonna start in the middle.

Just Tell Me What’s Good for Me

Don’t ask questions, just read these and thank me later.

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

The king’s scholar, the magus, believes he knows the site of an ancient treasure. To attain it for his king, he needs a skillful thief, and he selects Gen from the king’s prison. The magus is interested only in the thief’s abilities. What Gen is interested in is anyone’s guess. Their journey toward the treasure is both dangerous and difficult, lightened only imperceptibly by the tales they tell of the old gods and goddesses.

If you’ve been paying attention to social media you know these books made me lose my shit. This year for Christmas I’m giving them to a fourteen-year-old girl and a woman in her thirties and I feel sure they will both love them.

*The Murderbot Diaries (series of novellas) by Martha Wells

In a corporate-dominated space-faring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. For their own safety, exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.

On a distant planet, a team of scientists is conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid--a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, Murderbot wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is, but when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and Murderbot to get to the truth.

Recommending these books is like recommending ice cream; I almost don’t feel like I need to do it because duh, who doesn’t like ice cream? (I know, I know, some people don’t. But we do not speak of them here.) Anyway they’re excellent, funny, sometimes heart-breaking (poor Murderbot!) and the audiobooks are particularly good.

I Just Really Want to Spend Time There

Not sure how a book can feel cozy when people are getting murdered or there are literal monsters afoot, but these do.

*The Luminaries by Susan Dennard

Hemlock Falls isn't like other towns. You won't find it on a map, your phone won't work here, and the forest outside town might just kill you.

Winnie Wednesday wants nothing more than to join the Luminaries, the ancient order that protects Winnie's town—and the rest of humanity—from the monsters and nightmares that rise in the forest of Hemlock Falls every night.

Ever since her father was exposed as a witch and a traitor, Winnie and her family have been shunned. But on her sixteenth birthday, she can take the deadly Luminary hunter trials and prove herself true and loyal—and restore her family's good name. Or die trying.

But in order to survive, Winnie enlists the help of the one person who can help her train: Jay Friday, resident bad boy and Winnie’s ex-best friend. While Jay might be the most promising new hunter in Hemlock Falls, he also seems to know more about the nightmares of the forest than he should. Together, he and Winnie will discover a danger lurking in the forest no one in Hemlock Falls is prepared for.

These books are set in a fictional town that’s very insular, so there’s a kind of warm, lived-in feeling to them despite the constant creep of danger. Also the “a long time ago, we used to be friends” vibe of Winnie and her ex-friends contributes to that feeling of history. Kudos to Susan Dennard, because building that kind of feeling— that a place has existed long before the first page of the story— is not easy.

Sword Catcher by Cassandra Clare

Kel is an orphan, stolen from the life he knew to become the Sword Catcher—the body double of a royal heir, Prince Conor Aurelian. He has been raised alongside the prince, trained in every aspect of combat and statecraft. He and Conor are as close as brothers, but Kel knows that his destiny is to die for Conor. No other future is possible.

Lin Caster is one of the Ashkar, a small community whose members still possess magical abilities. By law, they must live behind walls within the city, but Lin, a physician, ventures out to tend to the sick and dying of Castellane. Despite her skills, she cannot heal her best friend without access to forbidden knowledge.

After a failed assassination attempt brings Lin and Kel together, they are drawn into the web of the mysterious Ragpicker King, the criminal ruler of Castellane’s underworld. He offers them each what they want most; but as they descend into his world of intrigue and shadow, they discover a conspiracy of corruption that reaches from the darkest gutters of Castellane to the highest tower of its palaces.

One of the nice things about an author transitioning from YA works to adult is that they tend to give themselves permission to settle into a world a lot more; this one is lush and I really enjoyed being there. It was like that whole section of the Witcher 3 where you first get to Novigrad, aka my favorite section.

The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

Tesla Crane, a brilliant inventor and an heiress, is on her honeymoon on an interplanetary space liner, cruising between the Moon and Mars. She’s traveling incognito and is reveling in her anonymity. Then someone is murdered and the festering chowderheads who run security have the audacity to arrest her spouse. Armed with banter, martinis and her small service dog, Tesla is determined to solve the crime so that the newlyweds can get back to canoodling—and keep the real killer from striking again.

CAN WE PLEASE GET A CRUISE THROUGH SPACE IN MY LIFETIME. I will see you all at the pool. But I guess in the meantime, this book will let me go there in my mind. It’s a murder mystery, it’s in space, there are cocktail recipes scattered throughout— this book is a puzzle set in a place you’ll wish existed.

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Earth Is Trash, Space Sounds Nice

Do I really need to explain this sentiment?

The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei

They left Earth to save humanity. They’ll have to save themselves first.

It is the eve of Earth’s environmental collapse. A single ship carries humanity’s last hope: eighty elite graduates of a competitive program, who will give birth to a generation of children in deep space. But halfway to a distant but livable planet, a lethal bomb kills three of the crew and knocks The Phoenix off course. Asuka, the only surviving witness, is an immediate suspect.

Asuka already felt like an impostor before the explosion. She was the last picked for the mission, she struggled during training back on Earth, and she was chosen to represent Japan, a country she only partly knows as a half-Japanese girl raised in America. But estranged from her mother back home, The Phoenix is all she has left.

With the crew turning on each other, Asuka is determined to find the culprit before they all lose faith in the mission—or worse, the bomber strikes again.

The best kind of locked-room mystery is the one where, outside of said “locked room,” you will lit’rally die in the vacuum of space. I actually had to stop listening to this on audiobook and rustle up an old ARC because the audio just was not fast enough.

The Last Watch by J.S. Dewes

The Divide.

It’s the edge of the universe.

Now it’s collapsing—and taking everyone and everything with it.

The only ones who can stop it are the Sentinels—the recruits, exiles, and court-martialed dregs of the military.

At the Divide, Adequin Rake commands the Argus. She has no resources, no comms—nothing, except for the soldiers that no one wanted. Her ace in the hole could be Cavalon Mercer--genius, asshole, and exiled prince who nuked his grandfather's genetic facility for “reasons.”

She knows they’re humanity's last chance.

I’m sure J.S. Dewes is tired of this comparison, but if you ever played Mass Effect and loved it and wished you could just kind of live in that story forever, these books will scratch that itch without being too similar. It was action-packed with lovable characters and I pretty much immediately read the second one after the first was done, which is rare for me.

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she readies herself to face the Wisdom, the all-powerful, reality-shaping weapon that gave the Majoda their victory over humanity.

They are what’s left. They are what must survive. Kyr is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet. But when Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons until she dies trying, she knows she must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands.

Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, she escapes from everything she’s ever known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could have imagined.

This book is about someone getting out of a cult, basically, only the cult is in space and is wrapped around the worship of Earth. Kyr’s POV is claustrophobic in the best way, and I enjoyed watching her see through the haze in her mind more and more as the story progressed.

I Just Want to Watch A Good Person Do Well

And if a part of you is like “goblins, though?” just tell that part to stfu.

Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

The youngest, half-goblin son of the Emperor has lived his entire life in exile, distant from the Imperial Court and the deadly intrigue that suffuses it. But when his father and three sons in line for the throne are killed in an "accident," he has no choice but to take his place as the only surviving rightful heir.

Entirely unschooled in the art of court politics, he has no friends, no advisors, and the sure knowledge that whoever assassinated his father and brothers could make an attempt on his life at any moment.

Surrounded by sycophants eager to curry favor with the naïve new emperor, and overwhelmed by the burdens of his new life, he can trust nobody. Amid the swirl of plots to depose him, offers of arranged marriages, and the specter of the unknown conspirators who lurk in the shadows, he must quickly adjust to life as the Goblin Emperor. All the while, he is alone, and trying to find even a single friend... and hoping for the possibility of romance, yet also vigilant against the unseen enemies that threaten him, lest he lose his throne – or his life.

I confess that I didn’t really understand the appeal of “cozy fantasy” until I read this book. (No shade, this is just how I’m wired.) It helps that this story isn’t nonstop good vibes— my mind does not trust nonstop good vibes— but it’s about a good person navigating a complicated political situation and ultimately succeeding through his innate goodness, and I really could have just kept reading it forever.

Me & A Friend Wanna Screech At Each Other in the Text Chain

HAVE YOU GOTTEN TO THE PART WHERE—

*The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

The Alexandrian Society, caretakers of lost knowledge from the greatest civilizations of antiquity, are the foremost secret society of magical academicians in the world. Those who earn a place among the Alexandrians will secure a life of wealth, power, and prestige beyond their wildest dreams, and each decade, only the six most uniquely talented magicians are selected to be considered for initiation.

Enter the latest round of six: Libby Rhodes and Nico de Varona, unwilling halves of an unfathomable whole, who exert uncanny control over every element of physicality. Reina Mori, a naturalist, who can intuit the language of life itself. Parisa Kamali, a telepath who can traverse the depths of the subconscious, navigating worlds inside the human mind. Callum Nova, an empath easily mistaken for a manipulative illusionist, who can influence the intimate workings of a person’s inner self. Finally, there is Tristan Caine, who can see through illusions to a new structure of reality—an ability so rare that neither he nor his peers can fully grasp its implications.

When the candidates are recruited by the mysterious Atlas Blakely, they are told they will have one year to qualify for initiation, during which time they will be permitted preliminary access to the Society’s archives and judged based on their contributions to various subjects of impossibility: time and space, luck and thought, life and death. Five, they are told, will be initiated. One will be eliminated. The six potential initiates will fight to survive the next year of their lives, and if they can prove themselves to be the best among their rivals, most of them will.

It was the sequel that I read this year, but like, have you read the Atlas Six yet? It’s basically CHOOSE YOUR FIGHTER: intense annoying girl that you either knew or were yourself in college, or possible-sociopath-with-a-conscience, or irritable plant lady who just wants to be left alone (Reina, are you me?). And it’s also WHO’S GONNA MAKE OUT WITH WHO, in the best way, and the answers will surprise you. Seriously, read this with a friend; I screamed at my friend Laurie when I read this and it really enhanced the experience.

Oh, I Know This One… Wait. No I Don’t.

Your classic “orphan plucked from obscurity by a wealthy benefactor attends a fancy school” story, except then SHIT. GETS. WILD.

The Will of the Many by James Islington

The Catenan Republic—the Hierarchy—may rule the world now, but they do not know everything.

I tell them my name is Vis Telimus. I tell them I was orphaned after a tragic accident three years ago, and that good fortune alone has led to my acceptance into their most prestigious school. I tell them that once I graduate, I will gladly join the rest of civilised society in allowing my strength, my drive and my focus—what they call Will—to be leeched away and added to the power of those above me, as millions already do. As all must eventually do.

I tell them that I belong, and they believe me.

But the truth is that I have been sent to the Academy to find answers. To solve a murder. To search for an ancient weapon. To uncover secrets that may tear the Republic apart.

And that I will never, ever cede my Will to the empire that executed my family.

To survive, though, I will still have to rise through the Academy’s ranks. I will have to smile, and make friends, and pretend to be one of them and win. Because if I cannot, then those who want to control me, who know my real name, will no longer have any use for me.

And if the Hierarchy finds out who I truly am, they will kill me.

There are a lot of familiar beats here— that’s not a criticism, because it can be a real pleasure to know where you’re going in a book and then to put yourself in the hands of a capable author to go there— but what it’s building toward, world-building wise, and how…is a real joy. I am so, so interested in where the sequel will go.

I Need to Have Something In Common with My Dad

Listen: it was published in 1989 and you gotta be ready for some old school sci fi vibes, but it blew my mind a little. I probably just made a science fiction enthusiast shudder with horror at that description.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope—and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.

I wouldn’t recommend this to just anyone— you have to be someone who is so enamored of science fiction and fantasy world-building that you’re willing to just surrender to an entire book’s worth of it. But this book is brilliant (coldest take ever; its brilliance is well known). It’s structured like the Canterbury Tales in that it’s a group of people on a journey, each of whom tells a story, and the way their stories build on each other, fleshing out other parts of the world but also piecing together a mystery, is really interesting and satisfying.

What to Add To Your TBR

I mean, it’s my newsletter. May 14th, people!

When Among Crows by Veronica Roth

Step into a city where monsters feast on human emotions, knights split their souls to make their weapons, and witches always take more than they give.

Pain is Dymitr’s calling. To slay the monsters he’s been raised to kill, he had to split his soul in half to make a sword from his own spine. Every time he draws it, he gets blood on his hands.

Pain is Ala’s inheritance. When her mother died, a family curse to witness horrors committed by the Holy Order was passed onto her. The curse will claim her life, as it did her mother’s, unless she can find a cure.

One fateful night in Chicago, Dymitr comes to Ala with a bargain: her help in finding the legendary witch Baba Jaga in exchange for an enchanted flower that just might cure her. Desperate, and unaware of what Dymitr really is, Ala agrees.

But they only have one day before the flower dies . . . and Ala's hopes of breaking the curse along with it.

Trust me. You’ll love it.

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Note: I’m about to talk a lot about spiders and other insects. There are no pictures. Cover image is by Hunter Desmarais, courtesy of Unsplash.

When I remember my dreams, they’re always about bugs.

Specifically, they’re about infestations of bugs, or swarms of bugs. Usually it goes a little something like this: I’m sitting on the sofa, doing something mundane, and I pick up a pillow. Clinging to its underside are hundreds of insects. I am then obligated to rid my house of the infestation, but I’m unable to contend with the sheer number of them. I wake up somewhere in the middle of a frantic struggle against this repulsive and irrepressible force.

I’m never frightened in the dream, not the way I’d be if I were being chased by an axe murderer. I’m just overwhelmed and horrified. That’s how I know this recurring dream— which I’ve dealt with for most of my adolescent and adult life— is a stress dream. There is no situation more stressful to me than this: unseen and ill-intentioned creatures filling all the empty cracks of my life, to be discovered at random.

The origin of this is easy enough to pinpoint in my childhood: when I was a kid, we had an infestation of millipedes in our house. The pest control guy my mother hired told her there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot we could do about it: millipedes sometimes move in big swarms, and if your house happens to be in their path, the most you can do is caulk the living crap out of your exterior to force them to move around you instead of through you, and wait for them to pass.

Still, I avoided our basement for about a year. If I did go down there, there were always curled-up millipede corpses scattered along all the walls and in the corners. We kept the vacuum down there to suck them up as soon as we found them, but even my mother— my intensely neat, organized mother who has never met a label maker she doesn’t love or a tub she couldn’t find a use for— couldn’t stay on top of the sheer number of them. One morning, after caulking the living crap out of the exterior basement door, she woke up to discover a welcome-mat sized sea of them fighting to get into our house.

For the record, I still don’t like basements.

Despite the fact that spiders, specifically, were never a huge problem for us (or any other bug other than that one absurd infestation), spiders feature regularly in my dreams. It’s because of how they move. Precise and many-legged, they appear to wiggle, but they’re faster than that word implies. There are few things as sudden as a spider.

I’m not usually a dramatic person. I’m comfortable with public speaking, when I get hurt I’m pretty quiet about it, and on one notable occasion in my adolescence, I rolled my mother’s Chevy Blazer on a patch of black ice and called her while upside down in the driver’s seat, only to inform her, levelly, that I was upside down on a nearby road and would need her to come pick me up.

But at the sight of a spider, I used to shriek, and shudder, and scream for my husband to kill it. None of this was melodrama— I was actually too afraid to do it myself.

In the summer of 2020, after we’d been locked down for months in fear of a virus we didn’t understand, as my wounded feelings about a book release thwarted by said lockdowns were starting to fade, I noticed a huge spider web stretched between one of our big planters and the arbor vitae tree next to it. It was wheel-shaped, with perfect unbroken lines of silk. Perched in the middle of it was a reddish brown spider the size of a black bean. It looked, I thought, almost like a crab.

(from 2020)

Seeing it, I remembered with shame the last time I encountered this type of spider, in a similar web, between two trees that I regularly had to pass by on my way to the back door of our house. I was so unsettled by it at that time that one day I went outside with a bottle of bleach spray to kill it, thinking the bleach would offer it a swift death. That’s not what happened.

When I sprayed it, that spider writhed in apparent agony, and I, horrified, knocked it to the ground to kill it properly.

I later looked it up to find out what type of spider it was, and found out that it was a harmless Orb Weaver. Gentle. “Only bites if provoked,” Google said. I almost cried. I was okay with killing spiders, but I never want to torment an innocent creature, even if they do haunt my dreams.

This one next to my front door was the same, and I had learned my lesson: I wasn’t going to kill this Orb Weaver.

Instead, I checked on it every morning when I let the dog out, watching it grow from bean-sized to nickel-sized to quarter-sized, so I could see the markings on its back. I looked it up and learned that it remade its beautiful web every single day, so each day it would be a slightly different shape and configuration. It became part of my routine: let dog out, check on spider, let dog in, make morning tea, eat breakfast.

I later learned that spiders are surprisingly clever, especially considering their pinhole-sized brains. Though we know they factor in a wide range of variables in building their webs— temperature, humidity, wind, silk supply— and make adjustments accordingly, we don’t know exactly how they make these evaluations. A spider can also navigate a maze.

They also use hydraulics to move. Their bodies are full of a blood-like substance called “hemolymph,” the varying pressure of which extends their legs or, receding, lets their legs naturally contract. This pressure is regulated by the cephalothorax (the “head” of the spider). The creepy wiggling that made my skin crawl was actually a marvel, the cephalothorax acting as a bellows to push fluid, lightning-quick, to the places where its pressure was most required.

Later that summer, I noticed another orb weaver on our back porch, right over our door. Instead of killing it, I trapped it in a glass and carried it to the arbor vitae. I was trembling the whole time.

I’ve seen a few different kinds of spiders around our house. There’s a zebra spider that lives near our kitchen sink, no larger than a grain of rice. I ushered a yellow sac spider away from our toilet the other day. Last week I watched a delicate cellar spider cross my path in our basement while doing a dead lift.

When I see them, I usually talk to them. “Well, that’s not a great place for you to be, is it?” or “Come on, let’s get you somewhere out of the way.” I catch them in glasses or try to get them to crawl on an old magazine so I can put them outside— or I just eyeball the one that lives in the corner of my shower, hoping it’ll stay where it is, because at no time is a spider more intimidating than when you’re naked.

It’s been years since I’ve knowingly killed a spider. I used to make fun of people like me, who escorted arachnids outside instead of just stomping on them. “This is my zone,” I used to say. “I’m fine with them if they stay in their zone, but the second they come into mine, it’s fair game to kill them.” I sneered at our neighbors when they said they got rid of the spiders behind their house by spraying soapy water.

So after a lifetime of “bug dreams,” as I call them, the only way I can explain this change of heart is with curiosity.

That pivotal spider summer, 2020, was a hard time. Weeks of watching the Covid death tolls climb and wiping down my mail with antibacterial wipes turned into a restless summer of protests and, for me, a heightened awareness of injustice in our society and my place in it. I’d spent months living my entire life on a computer, doing regular Zoom calls with my aging parents, visiting a friend’s island on Animal Crossing, and trying my best to promote a book on social media that no one could actually go into a store and buy. I was an exposed nerve, too aware of myself and the darkness of the world around me, and too uncertain about the future to feel anything but dread.

So when I saw that Orb Weaver next to my door, I think I just couldn’t bear to be harsh toward it. Instead, I decided to be interested in it. Curiosity yielded to wonder, as I marveled at these small, smart creatures that populated my yard and the century-old house that I live in. And wonder turned to a warm fondness. I can’t get rid of the primal instinct I have to recoil from them, which I think is probably a survival skill buried deep in my animal hindbrain. I’m not out there catching them in my hands like they’re fireflies— for one thing, that would scare the shit out of them; for another thing, it would scare the shit out of me.

But curiosity makes you gentler. And as I grow older, I think more about how easy it is to let your heart harden into a diamond, unchangeable and unassailable. It’s a protective instinct, like my fear of spiders— it helps you to survive the harshness of the world around you. But while it may serve you some of the time, it will also keep you from growing, from marveling, and from falling in love with something new. And that cost, in my opinion, is far too high.

So it feels like a small miracle, to soften toward something, to open myself up to it, and to let myself change.

A few weeks ago, when it was still warm, I noticed a spider web above our back door. “A spider friend,” I said to my husband, which is what I call them now. When we walked inside, he flipped on the porch light. “To help attract bugs for him,” he said.

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(That amazing art from the ten year anniversary editions of the Divergent series is by Victo Ngai.)

As I’ve said before, I’m not someone who has a lot of deleted scenes lying around. First of all, when the Divergent series was coming out, the way to please accounts (“accounts” in this context means major book retailers) was to offer each of them exclusive content, so whatever deleted material I had was distributed among them. Though you can find it all together now in the ten year anniversary editions of Divergent, thankfully.

Second of all, I usually write “short” instead of long, meaning I add scenes as I revise instead of cutting them. So.

But I did reread the Divergent books recently, and it reminded me of a few bits and pieces I haven’t showed anyone before. (As far as I can recall, anyway.) They’re not long, but I do hope you enjoy them.

Before I start, though, I want to make sure you know I’m officially in my troll era.

veronicaroth A post shared by @veronicaroth

Sorry!

…Or am I?

Okay, now on to the main event. This first scene was a potential moment from Divergent. Before I decided on “Capture the Flag” as a Dauntless bonding activity, I played with the idea of a high-risk game of hide-and-seek. Ultimately I decided against it because while it presented some ~sultry possibilities (as you’ll see below), it didn’t have the team-building effect I was going for.

I walk carefully forward, pressing with the ball of my foot on the floor. I was on concrete a moment before, but now I am on something softer. Carpet. I stretch a hand to my left, and feel glass. A window, or a wall—either way, it can be my guide as I walk through this room.

            My fingertips slide across the glass as I walk. Four wouldn’t hide along a wall. He wouldn’t make it that easy. I pull away from the wall and step forward, my hands outstretched. I know I must look stupid. If he’s in the room, he’s probably laughing at me. I stop, and let my hands fall. Do I hear suppressed laughter? Shaking shoulders, bursts of air, do I hear them?

            I hear something. It has a rhythm like a heartbeat. Or like breaths—inhaling and exhaling. I move slowly toward it, angling my head toward the sound like that will make it easier to hear, only it doesn’t. My foot touches something hard. When I reach out to feel what it is, I realize it’s a piece of furniture, probably a desk, since we’re in what was an office building.

            Inhale, exhale. I hope those aren’t my own breaths I’m hearing. I stop breathing for a few seconds to make sure, but the air in, air out sound is still there. Louder. I move faster toward it, eager to see if I’m right, and if I’ve won.

            My face hits it first, and then my chest. It’s hard, but not as hard as a wall. I don’t move back, but my hands press to it, and find a contour, find cotton and beneath it, a muscle. Above it, a bone. A collarbone. A person.

            Gasping, I step back, and immediately heat rushes into my cheeks.

            “Guess you found me,” he says, and his voice is distinct— low and clear— so I know who he is. My face is so hot I press my palms to my cheeks to cool them. Four. Of course it’s Four.

            “Why didn’t you say anything?” I demand.

            His fingertips touch my cheekbones and slide up, under the blindfold, to lift it away from my eyes.

            “Because that wouldn’t be in the spirit of the game,” he replies.

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This next one is truly tiny: just two paragraphs from the start of Insurgent, when I thought I might tell the story partly in Caleb’s POV. This idea didn’t get very far, but I do like this glimpse of Caleb’s voice:

I pinpoint the star that shows us north: Polaris. Since the train traveled directly west of the city, we will have to walk north and east to reach the Amity compound. According to Polaris, we are. Whoever Tobias Eaton is, aside from someone who necks with my sister right in front of me, he is a skilled navigator, at least.

            My knees ache, probably from the ten foot leap from train to rooftop outside the Dauntless compound, but there is no use complaining when two of our party have bullet wounds. I feel the ghost of my spectacles on my nose, though I abandoned them on the train. I was only Erudite for a few weeks, but they were formative weeks.

Finally, an alternate beginning to Insurgent where I tried out Tobias’s voice. (Can you tell I was having trouble figuring out how to write Insurgent?) If this scene has appeared somewhere else before, I’m sorry— it’s been awhile and I have trouble keeping track of what’s been released and what hasn’t.

I really enjoy this particular kind of moment: wherein a child gets the chance to show their parent that they’ve changed or grown. Here it’s a bit complicated, though, because…Marcus sucks.

Ultimately I decided not to include any other POVs in Insurgent, but I do like Tobias’s voice. The difference between him and Tris is admittedly more subtle than I was going for, but he indulges in poetic descriptions more often, and it’s nice.

I search the horizon line for pinpricks of light, but so far there are none, and we walk only by moonlight.

            “Are you sure you know where we’re going?” Peter sounds sluggish, like he is talking around a particularly thick tongue. I grit my teeth and suppress the urge to grab him by the throat, like he did to her just weeks ago.

            “Yes,” I say.

            “I assume you’ve wandered to Amity headquarters in the dead of night before,” he says. “Because how else could you possibly know the way for sure?”

            I stop walking. “Would you like to take the lead, initiate?” My voice falls easily into the cadences of an instructor, though I am not his instructor anymore. Still, it is a more comfortable identity for me than Leader of a Pack of Survivors. I gesture toward the horizon. “Feel free.”

            Peter’s pale face looks to me like a dimmer moon in a darker sky. His eyes flick from me to the horizon to Tris to his arm, and he shakes his head.

            “I thought so.”

            My father’s voice slices the air in half, slices me in half. “We’re all tired,” he says. “There’s no reason to be hostile.”

            Hastily I try to mend myself. If anyone else had done the scolding, I would have told them off, but it was him, and his chastisements press down on me like weights, making me silent. They always have. I close my eyes and start to walk again.

            She slides her hand around mine. Though she is small and so are her fingers, she feels strong to me, like her bones are steel and her muscles are wire. When she touches me, she presses that strength into me. I have felt it since she first touched me.

            I open my eyes and stare at the horizon, where there are tiny circles of light.

            “There it is,” she says, leaning into my side.

            I nod. “I hope they let us come in.”

            “If they don’t,” she says, “we’ll make them.”

            I smile a little. “Of course we will.”

Have a good week!

-V

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HELLO, I am thrilled to share an (early!) cover reveal for When Among Crows, my next book*! Out on May 14th, 2024!

*Actually, it’s a novella, but it’s also 40,000 words, so it’s got some heft.

Spoiler Alert: I am…obsessed with this cover.

!!!!

This art is by Eleonor Piteira, who is…amazing, and perfectly captured the feeling of this story (and Dymitr!). And big thanks to Katie Jane Klim at Tor for getting us here, too.

This isn’t an official summary, or anything, but let me tell you what it’s about. When Among Crows is about a knight on a holy mission to kill monsters, a mission he’s so committed to that he split his soul in half to do it. For ~mysterious reasons, he travels from the old country to Chicago in pursuit of Baba Jaga, a legendary (and dangerous) witch who always takes more than she gives. But he needs help to find her. Enter Ala, a zmora who feeds on fear and the carrier of a deadly curse.

Without telling Ala what he really is, Dymitr offers her a bargain: if she helps him find Baba Jaga, he’ll help her break her curse. Desperate, she agrees, and over the course of one day, the two of them risk life and limb in Chicago’s monstrous underworld… but Dymitr’s motives— and his secrets— may pose the greatest danger of all.

A few things about this book:

The title comes from a (probably infrequently used) Polish saying: “Kiedy wejdziesz między wrony musisz krakać tak jak one,” or “when among crows, you must caw as they do.” (The equivalent is “when in Rome, do as the Romans do.”) The story is primarily about creatures from Polish folklore— though I of course took quite a few liberties— and as I am a first generation American who never learned the language, my uncle was kind enough to check my Polish to the best of his ability. Dziękuję, Uncle Stan.

Last summer I proposed a summary for a completely different novella to my editor, she was on board, I tried to write it, and then… I ended up writing this instead— almost in a fever dream, unsure of why it was suddenly the only thing I could work on and whether anyone would ever want to publish it. Big thanks to my editor, Lindsey Hall, for receiving “oops, I wrote this contemporary fantasy with strzygi and banshees and wraiths instead!” with enthusiasm. Though I’ve written things with fantastical elements before, this is the first purely fantasy work I’ve ever tackled, and I absolutely loved the challenge of it.

It has a playlist:

And a Pinterest board:

There’s a lot to love about the cover, but let me show you one of my favorite little bits:

It comes out May 14th, and I can’t wait!

<3,

V

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It’s been a couple weeks now since the second session of Choose Your Own World, my pair of worldbuilding seminars. Thank you so much to those who attended, you made the whole thing a joy! If you missed them and want to tune in, they’re now up on Twitch here.

If you just want to know what I talked about, though, you’re in the right place.

SYSTEMS

My quotable quote was: “a system is a description of who holds power and how they hold it.” Systems are governments, religions, companies, schools, criminal organizations, book clubs, unions, you name it. Wherever people organize, there’s a system in place. And fictional worlds are a series of systems, even when those systems are weak or ineffectual. (In which case you have to ask yourself: what made them that way? Will the plot have to center in some part around rebuilding or strengthening them?) Once you build one system, you can start extrapolating from there. In the world we were building (revenge story set in dystopian society controlled by genetically enhanced people), we had a strong government system implied in the premise. In building out this world, my tasks will be: to determine what laws, if any, there are against the pursuit of individual vengeance; to decide what kind of genetic enhancements we’re talking about; to figure out what kind of government this is (dictatorship? monarchy? oligarchy? republic? pure democracy? etc.). Those decisions will affect character— their social status, their capacity to rise, their freedom to move through the world, their involvement with any ~shady characters, their trust in the system (or lack thereof)— and they’ll affect plot (to what extent will the system intrude on the plot and make things difficult for the character?).

System decisions also ripple outward to affect the rest of the world-building. A government, for example, impacts…laws. Buildings. Names of places, of people. News. Holidays. Education (itself another system). Religion (same). The interplay of government against the other potential power centers is also something to consider— does the government permit autonomy in schools, or do they oversee them? Do they work in concert with religious figures— or do they restrict them? Now you’ve gotten the snowball rolling downhill. Just keep following it to the bottom.

BUT HOW DO I CHOOSE?

If the idea of making any of those decisions is intimidating to you, you can fall back on this simple series of questions: what do I have? What do I like?

What do I have? means taking a look at what’s already out there. If you want to write a revenge story, look up revenge stories. If you want to write a high fantasy involving elves, look up high fantasy involving elves. Read widely. Do research. It’s as if there’s already a conversation going on surrounding whatever type of work you’d like to contribute to culture— you want to know what’s already been said in that conversation. That doesn’t mean you have to come up with something completely new to contribute, it just means it’s good to be aware of what you’re repeating, if anything. And how. And how intentionally you go about it.

Seeing what other people have done with a particular thing can also introduce you to the challenges of it, the questions of it, in advance. Revenge stories, for example, carry their own questions— about violence, about grief, about justice, about whether you can really ever “get even,” about how far a character will go to try. If you aren’t interested in those questions, you probably shouldn’t write that kind of story. If you’re excited by them, that’s a good sign.

What do I like? is a bit of an obvious question, but this is more about confidence than anything. Just making a choice because you like it is a perfectly valid way to make worldbuilding decisions. I’m tired of writing about dictatorships so I want to tackle an oligarchy— great. I’m not interested in rewriting Allegiant, so I want our genetic enhancements to be weirder than that— also great. What you like is important, not just for your well being as you write a story, but because other people out there are like you, too. They like the things you like. You can trust yourself to steer your fictional world toward something interesting just by filling it with the things you want.

WHEN YOU’RE STUCK

Go back to these two little loops:

THE SOUP

Plot, character, and world— which one would I like to add to? How does that affect the other two?

HAVING/LIKING

What do I have? What do I like? (What’s already out there? What do I enjoy in stories?)

UPCOMING

My job, now, is to write a short story set in our world— a character on a government-sanctioned revenge quest in a world ruled by people genetically enhanced to resemble gods. Keep your eyes peeled— I’ve got some interesting ideas.

If you watched these seminars and enjoyed them and have ideas for the future, feel free to put them in the comments. I’m already considering a revision one— thoughts?

V

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Yesterday was the first session of Choose Your Own World, a pair of worldbuilding seminars where we build a world together via a series of polls (and then I write a story set in that world).

If you were able to come, thank you so much for being there! I know I went, uh, a half-hour longer than I said I would— I think I underestimated how long it was going to take me to make polls and also to decide what should be in those polls. I have some ideas for how to streamline it next time so it’s a more easily digestible length. That said, I had a really great time with all of you and almost didn’t want it to end.

I did section it off on my twitch page here, so if you want to just watch the “lesson” part of it, which is a little more meaty, that is only twenty minutes long. And I’ll put our ultimate world-building conclusions— which we’ll build off of next time!— at the end of this little summary.

Here are some highlights, if you want to know what went on but aren’t the video-watching kind—

WORLDBUILDING BEGINS WITH ONE DECISION

Worldbuilding can be intimidating! But it starts with one decision, and then another, and another, and another, until you have something you can work with. In this exercise, we chose a story “type” (loosely taken from Ronald B. Tobias’s 20 Master Plots) and our first decision was just about genre. Is this story going to be on future earth? In space? In a vampire coven? A school for magic? That choice, regardless of what it is, sparks questions about character and story, that then spark questions about world. That’s because…

IT’S ALL A BIG SOUP

People often ask me if I start with character or plot, which I’ve never known how to answer. Instead, I describe my world-building method as a “soup” of plot, character, and world. Why build a world this way, you ask? Because you want your story to lead your reader through the most interesting parts of your world. Extraneous lore can be very cool, but the best worlds are functional— you don’t want to weigh your story down too much with information that doesn’t impact either character or plot. So I use story and character to guide my worldbuilding, to keep things tighter, to make sure I’m making interesting choices for the story in front of me, and to build something that matters to the characters.

A CAVEAT ABOUT ORIGINALITY

Beginner writers— and experienced writers, let’s be real— worry a lot about originality. I don’t think they should. UNoriginality can be a useful tool. Think of your story like a backpack. It has a finite amount of space, and every single thing you put in it— every character, plot point, and world-building detail— takes up space in that backpack. If your goal is to focus on vivid, interesting characters, you can save space in your backpack by using a tried-and-true structure for your plot. If your goal is to develop a really fascinating plot, you can save space in your backpack by letting your world be a little familiar. Most of my favorite stories are actually simple— Children of Men (the movie, anyway) is just a pursuit plot at its core; John Wick is standard revenge fare. It’s their execution— characters, certain world-building choices, style— that makes them work, that makes them resonate.

SELECTION OF DETAIL

I didn’t call this idea by this name during the seminar, but “selection of detail” is something I always used to focus on in literary analysis (when I was writing papers in college, I mean)— it’s basically a term that describes which details the author chose to include in their work. Selection of detail affects the reading experience by communicating what’s important to the reader. The more time you, the writer, spend on a particular thing, the more important it’s going to appear to the reader. So spend your time on what’s important and interesting and exciting to you. And try to spend less time on the things that you are not excited by.

the outcome!

When offered a choice of “pursuit” plot, “revenge” plot, or “assassination” plot, seminar attendees chose “revenge”! They also chose…

a futuristic earth with a terrible government (aka dystopia)

which we combined with the other top choice: a creature overworld, aka a world in which creatures were in charge instead of living in secret.

and we decided that “creature” in this world meant genetically modified human beings.

One attendee noted that we had worked our way right back to Divergent. To which I say: lol, in a sense yes, but we’re definitely going to build something different from Divergent. In the next session, we’ll work on our “systems”. A “system” in this context is just a description of who holds power and how they hold it— a government, a religion, a school, a company, those are all systems, and worlds are made up of systems. We definitely have a government to build, but there are plenty of other systems to consider— so join me on July 11th at 7PM central time if you want to learn about how to construct them and help me with all those decisions!

<3,

V

You may have already seen this, but I’m doing something fun this Thursday and I’d love it if you could join me—

If you are…

A. A writer who wants to learn more about how to make worlds

B. A reader who’s curious about how authors do this whole “make a fictional world up from scratch” thing

C. Both of the above

…then this is for you: Choose Your Own World, a pair of interactive world-building seminars with me, for free, on Twitch, that will culminate in me writing a short story set in the world you help me build.

After brainstorming with other writers for quite a few years now, I’ve realized that nothing gives you a sense of how a writer’s mind works quite like being present while they’re brainstorming. So my goal here was to find a way for you to be present while I do some brainstorming— and not just present, but participating, via a series of Choose Your Own Adventure-style polls. And that way I can take you through my thought process, and share some of what I’ve learned after writing seven (published) novels.

The point is to 1. have a great time, 2. use a case study to give a lesson in world-building that may help you in your approach to your own, and 3. give you something new to read within the next six months, via this newsletter. So if you want to read the short story that will come at the end of this, subscribe to this substack, if you haven’t already!

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A FEW QUESTIONS ANSWERED:

What if I can’t make it to the live sessions?

I’ll leave them up on Twitch afterward so you can tune in whenever! But you won’t be able to participate in the fun and games if you aren’t there, alas.

Can I come to one session without coming to the other?

Yes! Though if you can only come to the second, you should probably watch the first one before attending so you know what we’re talking about.

How much will this cost?

It will cost you zero dollars and zero cents! It’s free, baby!

What is this Twitch you speak of?

I’m not going to attempt to explain all of Twitch to you, but Twitch is kind of the perfect platform for this: you can watch for free at twitch.tv/vrothbooks without creating an account, or create a free account to participate in the chat. And Twitch will host the streams for later viewing. They also allow polls! Yay.

Will you help me with my story idea/manuscript/etc.?

No— I’m happy to talk about more general writing questions in the Q&A following the session, but for various reasons (some of them legal), I can’t get specific to your work or read it or anything.

Will you answer my Divergent questions?

No, that’s not the focus here, so I will ignore you if you ask Divergent questions (unless they’re very pertinent to the world-building/craft discussion). Go to my instagram (instagram.com/veronicaroth) to watch the many, many questions I have already answered there and saved to my highlights.

If you have other questions, feel free to ask in the comments! Otherwise, I hope to see you on Thursday. :)

V

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I write short, so I don’t usually have a lot of deleted scenes to offer. The ones I do have usually contain so many different character names, place names, drastically re-ordered events, etc., that it’s difficult to share them without overburdening you with explanations. But when I thought about what deleted scenes I might share from Carve the Mark— which, unlike all my other books, actually has a lot of deleted material— this scene was the first one to come to mind.

It’s a bit of an odd one. For a scene that’s supposed to depict the start of Cyra and Akos’s slow burn (slow thaw?) romance, it includes something kinda un-sexy: a girl getting her period.

I don’t know how it is for other people, but for me, periods have always been an intense monthly intrusion, both absurdly painful and unpredictable. It’s strange to me to think that such a huge part of my experience of having a body is so private, both because of my natural inclinations toward privacy and because the world makes people feel gross and even alien for having periods. So when I thought about Cyra’s pain, and when I thought about the complicated relationship she has with her body because of it, and the occasions on which she most felt the loss of the only kind person she’d ever had in her life— her mother— this moment seemed like the obvious choice.

And as for the romantic opportunities it offered, well. I know it’s not going to make it into many romcom scripts or anything, but I find this scene to be pretty sweet. Cyra isn’t someone for whom vulnerability comes naturally, but her body betrays her in this moment, and she braces herself for Akos’s scorn, or perhaps for him to treat her as alien and strange…and he doesn’t. He has every reason to be unkind to her at this stage, but he treats her like a person, instead. Which is revolutionary for Cyra, since she’s only ever been treated like a monster.

So why did I cut it? Well, I think it was partly for pacing— I needed to speed things along at this point in the book— and partly because I needed to be deliberate about how Cyra was unlearning all her father and brother’s brainwashing, and and how her understanding of Akos was shifting over time— so this scene just hit the wrong note at the wrong time.

(art by Mindy Lee)

Two days before I turned sixteen, and four days before we were supposed to board the sojourn ship for Akos’s first sojourn, I woke to blood spotting the sheets beneath me. My mother had told me about this day, a long time ago, before I was old enough to understand what she meant by any of it. Something about ebbs and flows and a message relayed from organ to organ. But all I could think of were the days when I still wet the bed. That my body could do something that I wasn’t aware of while I was sleeping, and that I would have to clean up after myself like I was still a child, was somehow humiliating.

And my mother was supposed to be here to help me. To tell me again about the power of this step forward through life. But she was dead.

Akos walked in when I was still standing at the edge of my bed, staring at the red spot like it was my mother’s own blood, the sign of her murder. My face heated up, and I blinked away tears.

I covered my face. “Get out.”

“Should I get someone?” he said, quietly.

“Who?” I demanded. “My brother? Vas? You think they would be helpful?”

Then I sat on the edge of the bed and cried. I hadn’t cried in a long time, not really. Just the kind of tears that appeared in your eyes when you were in pain. But suddenly I didn’t care if Akos saw me this way, I didn’t care if it made me look weak. I didn’t care about anything.

I felt his hands on my shoulders, and I meant to shove him away, but I was frozen.

“Come on,” he said. He took my arm, at first, holding me by the armor I wore strapped to my arm even in my sleep. Then his hand slipped down to mine, stalling my gift, and he pulled me toward the panel in the wall that led to the servants’ passage. He slid it open, and ducked inside.

In the dark, I wasn’t as worried about the ache in my abdomen and the sheets I had left behind. We descended a staircase, took a few turns, and reached an open wall panel in the kitchen.

“Stay here, I’ll get someone,” he said.

“Otega,” I said. “Ask for Otega.”

I stayed back, in the shadows, while he disappeared into the bustle of the kitchen staff. I could still see them from this angle, chopping ingredients for breakfast and lunch, arguing about whose turn it was to carry the tray to Ryzek’s room. I heard them refer to me, too: “Miss Noavek probably needs her kitchen restocked.” “Is it just me, or is she eating twice as much these days?” “It’s not for her, it’s for Kereseth.” “Ooh, Kereseth. What wouldn’t I give to know what that’s about.”

I blushed again.

“What did you say about me?” Akos’s voice sounded, deep and steadier than it had been when I first met him.

“Nothing, kezagyang,” one of the voices replied. The word was harsh slang for one of the Reclaimed, co-opted from the Pithar words for “paper” and “skin.” Some of our language, like much of our technology, was scavenged.

“You use my name in conversation, you’d better be sure it’s not for ‘nothing’,” Akos retorted.

I raised my eyebrows.

Silence fell over the kitchen, and Akos ducked into the passage again. Following him was Otega—older now than when she had braided my hair, but still sturdy as she had been when I was young, and stern as the Shotet came. She nodded to me as Akos took my hand again, snuffing out the currentshadows that had gone into a frenzy at the sight of her.

“Well,” Otega said, from behind us. “That confirms that rumor, at least.”

“Rumor?” I said.

“That he can touch you without wanting to die,” Otega said.

A brutal way of putting it. “What other rumors are there?”

“Better that you don’t trouble yourself with them,” Otega said. “There’s nothing you can do to stop them anyway. Shotet mouths are busier than most, especially when it comes to favored lines and Reclaimed survivors.”

“Reclaimed,” Akos said, harshly, from the front of our little line. “I hate that word.”

“Which one do you prefer?” Otega said. “I’ll use that instead.”

“How about ‘Victim of Kidnapping’,” Akos said. “Or ‘Speaker of the Accursed Tongue’.”

“Accursed Tongue.” Otega snorted. “You spontaneously speak a language without having to learn it, and you call it a curse? That curse is your birthright, boy.”

We reached the open panel, and Otega marched into the room and ripped the sheets off the bed in one swift motion. I turned to Akos, dried tears making my cheeks tight.

“Thank you,” I said. “I should have been able to deal with this myself.”

Akos just shrugged. “When my sister turned thirteen, my dad had a long talk with all of us. There were diagrams involved.” He tilted his head a little. “It’s hard to go through things a parent is supposed to help with when you don’t have a parent. It’s like the universe is twisting the knife.”

I let that statement— the truth of it— hang between us for a few seconds. I was looking at him, and he was looking at me, and it wasn’t strange.

“What’s your sister’s name?” I said.

“Cisi,” he replied. “Cisi.”

Her name came from a tight throat, spoken with such longing I felt it in my own chest.

“Cisi,” I repeated, with a sharp nod, trying to match his accent. “I’ll remember.”

“All right,” Otega said, as she charged back into the room, dusting off her hands. “You and I need to have a talk, Miss Noavek. Kereseth, out.”

Akos’s hand lifted, hesitant, to rest just above my elbow. My pain disintegrated at his touch. His fingers were warm, and gentle, and then gone.

He walked into the next room. Before he closed the door between us, we exchanged a smile. Small. Tentative.

That was a little short, so how about a bonus scene? If you voted for the “shorter, softer” option on Instagram, the following scene will probably scratch that itch a little better. :)

In this little piece of a draft, I had Akos and Cyra find out that their mothers switched them at birth in the first book, right before they confront Ryzek in the arena. But I realized I was trying to cram too much into the first installment, so I delayed that revelation to the second book in the series, The Fates Divide, to give it more room to breathe.

(Also, in earlier drafts, Cyra’s currentgift got worse around Akos because she was attracted to him. Hot? No? Lol.)

But here it is!

(art by Gabriel Picolo)

I crossed the room, and opened the door next to the bed. Akos had unlocked it when we came in, so he could get into his room. I didn’t knock. I liked catching him off-guard—it always showed me more than I got to see otherwise. Showed me what he was like when there were no eyes on him, when nothing was expected of him at all.

He stood at the dresser, tugging the armor over his head. His windows were open, letting in the cool air and the sound of shouting and music from the street below. His room was more sparse than mine, long and narrow, with a slim bed between the windows. Along the far wall, was a metal countertop with burners at the far end and shelves suspended above it. Jars of hushflower in all its forms stood on the shelves, marked with Akos’s Thuvhesit scrawl. Dangling from the ceiling were pots, pans, knives, and vials, glowing with fenzu light from the little lamps that hung every few feet.

“You okay?” I said.

He didn’t look back. “Not really.”

“I say, fuck them,” I said. “Our parents are liars. Fuck them.”

He pulled his shirt over his head, and I stepped back, pushing the door closed behind me. He turned at the sound. I felt the shadows burning across my throat like a blush as I looked over his narrow waist. The bruises that had stained his skin the last time I saw him, cowering on the floor in the basement, were faded now, light brown and green. He wore new scars on his left arm and a new weight on his shoulders.

I pressed my hands to my cheeks, briefly, willing myself to calm down. “Dammit,” I said.

But he was moving toward me—cautiously, at first, one step at a time. Frowning, a crease between his eyebrows. The closer he came, the darker and more frantic the shadows became, until I had to bite my tongue so I wouldn’t cry out at the pain.

I flinched, and at the first outward sign of my pain, he pressed a hand to my cheek, extinguishing the currentshadows so all I had left was the pulse in my face and my hands and the deep ache in my stomach, the ache that was just for him.

“No,” I said, sharply, slapping his hand away. “You can’t do things like that to me. Not when there’s no hope of anything behind them.”

“Well,” he said, “what if there was hope?”

My hands went flat and limp against the door. He took his hand away from my cheek, and the shadows were just a dull stain on my arms.

“What?” I finally said.

He reached for me, to quiet the currentgift, and I snapped, “Leave it.”

“I can’t talk to you when you’re in pain—”

“Yes you can, just tell me what you meant!”

“I meant exactly what I said!” He threw up his hands in frustration. “I meant that you were a Noavek, and loving you meant betraying my country, but now…you’re a Kereseth and you’re sending me home even when it causes you agony, and when they told you your own mother sent you to live with Lazmet Noavek as an infant your first instinct was to comfort me!” He stared at me, incredulous, eyes wide. “I told you that everything had changed, Cyra. I meant it.”

A strange ferocity came into his eyes, and he pressed closer to the door, framing my face with his forearms. Only a sliver of space separated us. He was so close I could feel his warmth. He was so close I could taste his breaths.

He dropped his hand to my waist, to the strip of skin just beneath the hem of my shirt. Then he bent his head and kissed me.

I had intended the first time I kissed him to be the last. He could never love me, I thought, not while I was still a Noavek, with Ryzek’s blood in my veins. It would feel like a betrayal, to him. I understood that, and I had resolved never to let it happen again.

But I was not a Noavek. Ryzek’s blood was not in my veins.

I stayed still, at first. Getting used to him, unyielding mouth and heavy-pressed palm and heat.

Then I put my hands on him. I had thought about touching him hundreds of times, and now it was happening—now I knew how strong his arms were, how his ribs were still right at the surface of his skin. He pulled me closer, his arm wrapping around my back, his hand covering my side, beneath my shirt. Everything was warm and close and muddled for a moment, and then he pressed me against the door again, hard, his teeth closing over my lip. He kissed my throat, hungry and searching.

Someone knocked on the door, right behind my head. I swallowed a curse. He pulled away just far enough to call out, “What is it?”

“How’s the poison coming?” Teka said. “You said it takes a few hours to brew.”

Akos gave me an exasperated look, and I laughed.

We pulled away from the door to open it, and I went to the counter to start chopping the jealousy petals for the poison.

(art by Morgana Wallace)

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Whew, guys, it’s been a weird couple of months.

The Arch-Conspirator tour was really excellent— thank you to everyone who came to the events or preordered a copy or otherwise supported AC! I so appreciate it and I had such a great time with you all. (Also, because I feel like people don’t actually know this: one of the best ways to support authors is to leave reviews, even if they’re not raves! Wherever you bought the book from is a good place to start, or on Goodreads, but really, wherever.)

Then I got Covid and found myself inexplicably binge-watching The Closer and playing Two Dots on my phone for five days.

While all that has been going on, I’ve been finishing up two projects. One is a short story that will come out this year, and it’s very fun; I hope to share more about it soon. The other is my next novella, which comes out next year…but I’m going to tell you a little more about it anyway.

For context, in the period of time I like to refer to as Mid-Divergent, I had to stop talking about my works in progress at all because…they were Insurgent or Allegiant and THE EYES OF THE WORLD WERE UPON THEM, and people would read entirely too much into a stray remark about a bad writing day, or the songs on my playlist, and they would bombard me with panicked messages online. So I trained myself to keep everything locked down, all the time. Of course, now that I am no longer in the middle of a series being adapted into movies, there’s no need for that level of intensity. But sometimes when you’ve kept your hand in a fist for that long, you don’t know how to unclench it; it’s like hey, I just have a fist instead of a hand now, that’s normal, right?

This is all to say, I’m going to start relaxing that hand and share more about what I’m working on. Especially here.

A few things about my next novella:

It’s long. We’re talking…the upward limit of what technically still counts as a novella. (40,000 words, for those keeping track.) So if you read Arch-Conspirator (~23,000 words) and enjoyed the novella format but wished there was a little more meat on its bones, this should be good news!

It’s fantasy. Some of my other work (Carve the Mark, Chosen Ones) has had fantasy leanings, but always with the incorporation of some obvious sci-fi element, such as superpowers, spaceships, portals, alternate dimensions, and so on. This one is Fantasy, capital F, though set in the real world.

It’s set in Chicago. There is an actual reason for this beyond my enduring love of Chicago—

It incorporates Polish folklore, and Chicago has one of the largest Polish communities in the world outside of Poland itself. This was really meaningful for me, because as a first generation American, I’m a little detached from this aspect of my identity, and writing this novella helped me to engage with it more. I did a lot of research on the history of Polish immigration to Chicago, as well as into the folklore itself, and my uncle proofread the Polish in the story itself, which was both nerve-wracking and touching. Dziękuję @ him.

The title is based on a Polish idiomatic expression that may or may not be used by actual Polish people, I’m sure they’ll let me know— but I came across it and loved it and it was just right for the story.

And lastly it has a playlist which I have made public on Spotify…

If it’s been awhile since you listened to Flagpole Sitta or any kind of System of a Down: you’re welcome. I listened to them while writing fight scenes.

Also…a Pinterest board.

That’s all I have for now, but let me know in the comments if you have any requests for ~behind the scenes things!

And as usual, give me your book recs. :)

V

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