It is nighttime on Caveat, and it is very dark.
These are the opening lines of a sprawling 600-page novel known only as the Pirate Story that I completed at 15 years old—an outpouring of pure teenage passion mingled with hope that one day I’d see my name emblazoned on the shiny spines lining bookstore shelves alongside those of my heroes. Almost 20 years later, those are still the opening lines of that story’s current form: Scarlet Morning, my prose debut, but not my first foray into the world of publishing, because the 20 years in between ended up being an adventure of the most unexpected kind.
I never related much to the swampy summers and endless church services of my childhood. I was the middle child of five (all of us homeschooled to protect us from the evils of the world), gap-toothed and redheaded in my grandmother’s castoff clothes, a constant dreamer by the light of day and a sleepwalker at night. There was no privacy in a family like mine, not even inside my own head. Quickly, though, I learned that storytelling could be a kind of social currency, especially among other homeschoolers without much access to the shows and video games of our secular peers. If I painted a picture vivid enough, my friends and siblings would follow me into the worlds I imagined, turning those worlds real in the process. Beige megachurch hallways became enemy headquarters that we crept through as secret agents, smuggling encoded messages; broken toys were given burials fit for a pharaoh in shoeboxes scribbled with hieroglyphs; and the neighborhood playground, strewn with wood chips that were murder on our bare feet, was obviously a pirate ship, adrift on a prickly poison sea that could kill with a single touch.
From this came the spark that would grow into the Pirate Story.
I wrote feverishly in those days, emailing the chapters to my friends as I completed them. Never again have the words flowed so easily as they did on that old hand-me-down computer, a gorgeous clunker rendered in the iconic bubbled curves of the early oughts. I would write until my eyes burned from the screen’s grainy glow, rattling out the epic saga of two orphans stranded on the most boring island in the world, waiting for someone to come and rescue them…a wish dubiously granted by the dangerous, enigmatic Captain Cadence Chase and her ragtag pirate crew. The magical world of Dickerson’s Sea was always there as an escape from my loneliness, a balm for my first heartbreaks, a hopeful dream of a brighter and more interesting world that would one day be mine. This book, I was certain, was my ticket out of there.
But when we grow up, it’s hard to bring stories of pirates with us, as I would soon find.
It took two semesters of art school to kill my love of writing. The fancies of my youth did not translate well to noisy dorms and judgmental professors waxing poetic about the elusive Great American Novel. The message was clear: If I was going to write, it should be about something important, something soul-blisteringly raw, an unflinching account of an extraordinary life not yet lived. I tried, but what words I managed to squeeze out onto the page were lifeless and leaden, and I was immediately ashamed of them. I’d done it; I’d escaped the home that had never felt like home, and yet here I was, lonelier than ever, and I couldn’t think of a single thing I wanted to say.
I dropped my creative writing minor.
After that I shifted my focus to illustration, and the Pirate Story ended up shunted to a zip file in the obscure depths of my hard drive. What had been my constant companion was abandoned as I consigned myself to leaving childish things behind…among them, the dream of being a published author.
Then something very strange happened: I became a published author anyway, almost by accident.
In hindsight, it isn’t strange at all. Storytelling can take any form, and if ever the idea of writing or being a writer or especially writing the next Great American Novel brings more dread than inspiration, it’s best to let those ideas go and find something buoyant instead. For me, that buoyancy came in the form of comics, and, because technically comics were drawing instead of writing, for a moment I could cut loose the heaviness and artifice that words had accrued for me. My first webcomic, Nimona, would go on to be published as a graphic novel by HarperCollins, and my dream of seeing my name on the bookstore shelves became a reality. It would become only the second graphic novel ever shortlisted for the National Book Awards; it would eventually be adapted as an Oscar-nominated animated movie. I couldn’t believe it then, and I still can’t believe it now.
But all through that adventure of a lifetime, I never forgot the story that had been my first love.
Years later, in the long, dark months of early 2020, it would all slam to a sudden halt. Stuck inside and grieving a world I suspected was never coming back—one to which I hadn’t even thought to say goodbye—I decided that it was finally time to open that long-neglected file, terrified and bracing myself for what I might find. But in a moment, it all came pouring back: shy Viola and gawky Wilmur, bickering exes Jacoby and Fives, scowling Herman and prim Jacquelin, the ill-fated Queen Hail Meridian and the ever-mysterious Captain Cadence Chase. Outside, the red sun hung low in a sky choked by wildfires and the armchair on the corner where one neighborhood elder had always sat fell forever empty…but I found comfort again where once I’d sought it with that pack of lovable ne’er-do-wells in their bruised and broken world, a world that nevertheless still found a way to be beautiful.
And I knew that it wasn’t done with me yet.
Relearning how to write prose was nothing like riding a bike, but rather trying to dance again after never really having known how. The words came in fits and spurts, piling up in frustrating clumps. It was clear that the teenager who had penned that first draft was no more, and the adult who was going to finish it did not yet exist. And so I set out to become that adult.
I read books about the history of salt and female sailors and doomed arctic expeditions; I learned the ins and outs of thieves’ cant; I watched videos on how to clew and sheet and tack; I scoured old digitized books and hobbyist forums in search of rarer secrets; I took an inexplicable side quest into theoretical physics; I sketched disturbing sea creatures in black ink; I bought a typewriter, then somehow ended up with two more. Some days I had nothing on the page to show for it, and yet with each rabbit hole, the world of Dickerson’s Sea grew richer.
Open sea was reimagined as a desert of hungry salt, white as an icy tundra and haunted by the forgotten ghosts of everything it had consumed. Viola and Wilmur became reflections of my childhood self and my companions, but they spoke with the voices of a younger generation, mourning a past that they would never know and an uncertain future ahead. And Captain Cadence Chase, avatar of everything I’d once found unknowable and alluring about adults, took on more human depths once I realized that I was now closer in age to her than I was to the child protagonists.
Four years and four drafts later, the Pirate Story has been reborn as Scarlet Morning, refitted piece by piece with more seaworthy parts (like Theseus’ famous ship), but at its center the teenage heart that started this journey is still beating, a north star for guileless love and joyful passion in a time before I’d learned to fear. I’m too often hampered by fear these days, but it soothes my soul to know that somewhere out there, frozen forever in the tangled sprawl of space and time, some version of us is still there, playing pirates on that playground ship atop its prickly wood chip sea.
Check out ND Stevenson’s Scarlet Morning here:
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