S. R. Severn (she/her) is a British author who writes dark fantasy romance and loves devising different ways she can make her characters suffer, both in and out of love. The vital ingredients found in her books are steampunk, mythology, and morally grey characters with happily-ever-
afters.
Her love for romance novels was first discovered at the age of eleven after picking up a Mills & Boon book. She grew up with a fascination for the supernatural/paranormal, Greek mythology, steampunk and developed an unhealthy obsession for fantasy. Since then, she’s collected enough books to build a spacious book fort.
The inspiration to become an author came during her years studying Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich in London. After being unsuccessful in finding a book combining all the things she loved, she decided to create it herself.
She currently lives in London surrounded by her hoard of steampunk and pirate trinkets. When not writing, she can be found gaming, reading under cosy lighting or cocooned in a comfort blanket watching movies.
Author Links:
Instagram: @s.r.severn_author
Website: srsevern.com
GoodReads: goodreads.com/srsevern
Amazon Author Page: amazon.co.uk/dp/B00IK8EJ8I
Interview Transcript: Introduction
CMR: Hello, and welcome back to Eldritch Girl. And today we have S.R. Severn with us, which is really cool and exciting. Can you introduce yourself for us, please?
SRS: Hello! Hi! Thank you so much for having me. I’m Sab. I am a British fantasy romance. Indie, author. I first self published in 2014 with my debut novel called Origin, but since then I did a huge rewrite of that publication, and I republished in 2024. So it’s been 10 years worth of rewrites and reworking, and now it’s under a new title called Pirate’s Vow, which is what we will be talking about today.
CMR: Really exciting. I’ve already had Sab as an author interview for the Author Spotlight Series as well. So you can see a very short version of her interview, which is just a text interview on my website. So yeah, Sab, would you like to introduce the extract that you’re going to read for us, and then you can crack on with that.
SRS: Thank you. Yeah. So I will be reading the blurb first, just so listeners can get the feel for the book, and then afterwards I will read an extract featuring two of the characters and their first initial arrival in the city. So this is blurb.
Introduction to Pirate’s Vow
BLURB:
Pirates seek freedom. Highborns crave power. The gods demand worship. The Sacred desire peace. How could there possibly be room for love in a world full of peril, definite adventure, mythic creatures, annoying deities, unbreakable prophecies & twisted curses?
Once upon a time, Kennedy Jekyll and Viera Goslink were slaves, dreaming of freedom and a future together. But the fates would tear their paths apart until that once clear dream is fogged with time, becoming a bitter memory.
Ten years have passed. Viera lives as a Highborn, dedicated to keeping Belle Vue city and its residents safe as a Badge.
Kennedy thrives as a pirate, duty bound to seek vengeance for his fallen comrades who met an untimely demise at the hands of the city Viera protects.
When Ken is arrested and imprisoned, she must battle the darkness inside his heart to save him. Time may have hardened him, yet the chemistry between them is still as intense as the day they met, reawakening a passion they thought had died long ago.
Reality is harsh and the gods are cruel. Their paths may have merged once again, but it’s paved with injustice and pain. Kennedy sees the cruelties of the world, Viera is blind to it. Desperate to open her eyes, Ken will stop at nothing to expose the truth, even if it costs him his life…and his heart.
Extract from Pirate’s Vow
SRS: Right, and this extract is from Chapter one, and for context it is when Kennedy and his brother first arrive in the city 10 years prior.
Despite the bulk of the machinery, exosuits were agile and gave the navigator enhanced speed and strength. There were so many different types; ones for diving, walking through fire, construction, battle. Too many to count, and many Ken probably had never, ever seen before.
Gus nodded, even as they were escorted away from the queue, and into a well built stone building with more people than seats. People held in quarantine stood or sat on one side, whilst the other side, beyond a glass wall had desks where Badges made telephone calls on ivory rotary phones and typed smoothly on shiny typewriters.
Ken stood against the wall with his brother away from the crowd of settlers who had just arrived off the boat. Many of them eyed one another with suspicion and dislike, before looking away he averted his gaze completely, instead focusing on the Badges beyond the glass.
Badges were officers of the law, and often distinguished from highborns by the imperial uniform of a long coat fashioned with more buttons and buckles than Ken thought necessary, black knee-high boots, leather armour, chest plates, and firearms strapped across their torso. Failing that, there was the golden cuff on their wrist, always on display during working hours. Embossed on the carat’s surface were Justice Scales, the symbol of the Olympian goddess of Justice, Themis.
Ken watched as their belongings and passes were handed from one Badge to another, until someone made the call to the Jekylls. He caught his brother’s eye. Gus gave him a nod of reassurance. It was always the same procedure. Lord Jekyll was called by the Badges. Questions were asked, then they were released from quarantine to carry out their job until their maximum stay period expired – which was another thing. Even though they had been granted permission to travel, they hadn’t been given the power to choose where they had to make earnings. On their papers, the maximum stay in Bellevue was two weeks, the shortest stay so far in the two years they’d spent moving from one place to another.
It baffled him as to why this non-airship town was even on the list. Every city capital they’d stayed in had been different. No, scratch that – every city capital they’d been in had been better. The airships were an integral part of trade and business, a reliable, fast, efficient form of transportation, and normally owned by highborns, the constabulary, or traders.
He didn’t want to judge a city by its appearance, but he scoffed. There wasn’t much else he could do.
One of the Badges picked up a small device and held it to their mouth. Seconds later, their names blared out off a rustic megaphone on the ceiling.
“August and Kennedy Jekyll!”
Grateful for the rapid response, they both kicked off the wall and sifted through crowds of other members of the public. Once they reached the glass wall, a young Badge with brown eyes, dark hair, and fair complexion, approached. One look at Gus and Ken, and suddenly he stood taller, though Ken couldn’t understand why. Neither he nor Gus were threatening in any way, aside from maybe their tall, broad frames, physiques earned from hard daily labour.
They both shared similar features, aside from Gus’s shoulder length hair, which was neat, whereas Ken’s messy mass underneath his own tricorn hat stopped at his ears and was a permanent case of bed hair.
“Lord Abraham Jekyll confirmed all your details. You’re free to enter.”
“No, really?” Ken received a hard elbow in the ribs for that.
Gus glared at him before smiling apologetically at the Badge. “Thank you, officer. Our belongings…?”
“…Will be taken out to you in due course. Once they’ve been stamped,” the Badge answered with a sniff. “Before you get comfortable. It is protocol. We give you firm awareness of how our city works. You’re both slaves, and as you don’t belong to any of our highborns, you’ll both stay in General Gateway. Secondly–“
“I’m sorry, General Gateway, where exactly is that?” Gus interrupted.
The Badge sighed and pointed a gloved finger out the window. From their view Ken could see the faraway burning lights of buildings in the distance. As his eyes followed the warm lights on higher hilly grounds, he noticed the lights became scarcer until there was nothing but the twinkling stars of the night.
“You see the lights below the cliff? Those are the homes of the lower classes. That’s General Gateway, and where you’ll be both residing for the next two weeks. If you go uphill, you’ll you’ll find golden bricks underneath your boots. That’s Grandeur Gateway, home to the Highborns, and you’ll need to turn back immediately.” He pinned both of them with grave glares. “It’s a serious offence for outsiders to be caught around the area, and I’ll impart this to you both. I don’t think even your master can save you if a Bellevue Highborn sees fit to have you arrested for trespassing.”
“No worries. We won’t be going anywhere near there,” Gus assured, as Ken stiffened.
The Highborns separated themselves to that extent? How in Zeus’s name were they meant to make their sales without the Highborns? His gaze returned to the window, where he could now make out a dim but existent glow of light at the top of the cliff.
The more he learnt of Bellevue, the more it irked him. How typical of a city to have the Highborns placed above the lower classes, and even more annoyingly, have the ground they walked on paved with gold, whilst the lowborns, hard-working, wage-earning citizens, got bricks of bronze and silver.
What bothered him more was the echo in history of the gods who lived on high Olympus, a glorious mountain, so tall and vast the top was hidden from the eyes of mortals. Highborns were not gods, they were mortals, they bled. And if it were up to him, he’d prove it.
Interview Transcript: Discussion
CMR: I really like the gaslamp fantasy mixed with Greek mythology mixed with alternative universe stuff. It’s really fun. So we’re going to have a little chat about that. And first of all, I’d like to ask you about your genre. So how long have you been writing romance? And I know you also really like dark romance. So not just cosy romantasy, but more specifically the darker themes in that. So what led you to that? And have you always written in that genre? What’s your relationship with it?
SRS: Okay! So I think I first delved into romance during university, and I think that decision stemmed from the fact that I was studying creative writing, which is an amazing subject. I adored it. And I really learned about different writing platforms. Different modes of writing, and I remember creating some stories of things that I really enjoyed. However, it wasn’t necessarily what was best at the time during my my studies. So I kind of felt quite restricted in what I was writing. So I remember around the time that I was studying, I decided, let me just try writing my own thing, my own romance.
I hadn’t initially started massive plotting. It was more like an experiment, more like fancy kind of thing that I wanted to do. Aside from my work, and I had always grown up reading romance, I think, from the age of 11. I picked up a Mills & Boon book, and yes, 11 is probably a very young age to pick up a Mills & Boon book, but it was my mother’s, and she had taken it from the library, and I found it, and I’ve always loved reading. I’m an avid reader. So I started reading Mills & Boon romance from the tender age of 11, and I fell in love with… just romance. Just love, just two people trying to overcome their their struggles, their conflicts, coming together in the end, and having that happily ever after. So it was very, very, very lovely and whimsical and fluffy and I’ve always loved romance.
When I got older I had this huge fascination with Greek mythology, and I studied that in school.
And I suppose when I reached that point where I felt comfortable enough to start my own story, I wanted it to definitely be a romance. I just wrote these two characters who we know in Pirate’s Vow as Ken and Viera, and there was no real muscle to them. They were just there as existing characters in my brain, and I just had them come together, and gradually I thought I could actually build on this. I can build around them as a personality, and create a world around them.
And the dark romance of it all came a lot after university where I had read fantasy novels and I reached a point where as I started reading other kinds of romance stories, I wanted to try something new, read something new. And I found myself down the rabbit hole of dark romance. It was a huge shock factor to me, because it was definitely different from the conventional romance that I’ve been reading before, where it was very sweet. I wish I could go back and experience it all because I it changed my life. It honestly did, and I found myself addicted to dark romance.
At the time I started going into dark romance, I never felt that I was brave enough to even write dark romance. But I just knew that romance was my thing. It was within me. Because I love it. So Origin came about with Kennedy and Viera, and them to just being, two young teenagers who had met one summer, fallen in love, and then were separated for 10 years, and then eventually come back to each other, and that was it. There was no world building around it. There was no status, there was no real struggle with them, too, that came a lot after.
And the reason why there’s this huge story of me publishing in 2014 and republishing in 2024, is because I self published without any help, I self published without an editor to help me work on that that story, and it was a mess. I will admit that it was very messy. I had all the elements of everything that I loved in that, but absolutely no direction, no structure. So just imagine. Imagine, like, 6 things you absolutely love more than anything, and you just throw it in a story. So yeah, it took me a long time, and an editor’s help to get it to where it is now.
I hope that answers your question.
CMR: That’s perfect. Yeah, that’s great! So, okay, so let’s dig into the world building of it, because we’ve touched on that in your answer, like how you develop that a little bit more. So what was your starting point for the kind of like the gaslamp fantasy kind of world. And how did you? What was the process like of building it for you?
SRS: Okay. I love steampunk. That has a huge impact on the the world. I can’t even remember when I first fell in love with Steampunk. I don’t know where that came from, I think it I think I must have seen it in movies. I also have a huge love for Victorian London and that time period, and I suppose I had never read a book where it had that steampunk element, or it had a hybrid of futuristic elements that I like, or Greek mythology. And like. I said to you I adored Greek mythology. I still do. And I love romance. But I’d never come across a story that had that combination of all the things that I really really wanted to write. So I just thought to myself, well, if I can’t find a novel that has all these things, what if I just create it myself.
So I in my book, I don’t have a time period stated. It’s all down to the reader’s interpretation of what I’ve put on paper. So when you immediately go into the story, there are snippets of extracts from people in the past who talk about the different reigning periods of the gods. So you you go off that. And you learn about. Okay. So this is when the world was ruled by these gods, and then these gods, and then these gods. And this is where we’re currently at. And this is who rules the world and who the the society worships.
I remember definitely wanting the world to be a hybrid of Victorian London but still keeping the world that we know. So there are countries that we know of. But it’s kind of like a parallel world. So, the world isn’t called Earth. The world is called Spironus, and the countries have Spiro in front of it. So Spiro-England. So in a way, readers can somewhat have an idea of what each of these countries have or what they’re like. But it’s not actually a huge reflection on what we know in reality.
And I chose fantasy because I love being in control of what I write, and I have tried writing in other genres, like subgenres of romance before, but there’s always rules to it. And whereas fantasy for me, I make up my own world, my own rules around that. And I have that freedom. So yes, if you can imagine in your brain, and this is what I’ve wanted readers to imagine when they read. The first book is to envision Victorian London with steam powered machinery, but also there’s their own source of power that they use. So it’s almost futuristic in some aspects. But old, there are horse drawn carriages, but then there are also vehicles. There you’ll find, like cobblestone paves and old Victorian buildings, yet you’ll find mansions that are made of marble and pristine gold, and and then you have the temples from Olympus and Greek mythology to worship all the gods. So it is a hybrid world. It’s a vast world, where, in a way, you never really know what to expect, and the struggle of writing something like that… It is easy for me to get carried away. But it is something that again I feel so in control of. I love it, and it makes me feel happy. I feel like I’m escaping from the real world.
There’s so much to the world building, too, because, as you probably got from the extract, there are statuses. So the world is divided. There’s a huge hierarchy. The gods are considered the highest power, and below the gods you have the highborns, and those are people who have societal power and privilege. Then you have the lowborns who are wage-earning citizens, who don’t have the privileges that the highborns have, then you have the slaves who are the lowest on the hierarchy, who are owned by highborns, and even the slaves have their own statuses. And again, it’s quite similar in in the city where the statuses are ranked by bronze, silver, and gold.
And I again, I can’t actually say where the desire came from to create this hierarchy. But I can say that I think I can understand why I wrote this to be a dark world. And I think it’s because at the time during my life I was going through difficulties. And I, I found myself, after reading dark romance, specifically seeing the struggles of 2 people and their trauma, helped me understand, in a way, what I was going through, and that it was a coping mechanism for me to create something like that.
And it’s why I take pride now in writing characters who have trauma, or I take pride in breaking them a little bit, and then – not fixing them, because I don’t believe in fixing characters. I just believe in them healing together.
But yeah, that’s it basically in a nutshell where all the world building comes from and everything comes along with it.
CMR: That’s so cool. I read quite a bit of fantasy and stuff where you’ve got the hierarchies and the class, and I think, like there are a lot of writers who do it really well, but I think there’s something quite nuanced about a British author writing about Victorian… especially because you’re you’re from London, right? So like, yeah, you’re writing about a city that you know really well, and the history of the city you know really well. But also it’s that entrenched cultural class that we have here that I think a lot of people don’t get unless you have been here or you’ve lived here, you have experienced what the class system is like here, or you’ve studied it a lot. Do you know what I mean?
SRS: Yeah.
CMR: And I really like the nuances of that, and like how that can come out in the writing, and how that bleeds through.
SRS: Honestly, it it does, and it’s it’s why I also feel like I – my novel does have a content warning and trigger warnings because it does get quite… It can be a shock, I suppose, if you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, because I don’t tend to hold back with presenting things as they are on the page.
I try and be as careful as I can, but ultimately I’ve labeled this as a dark fantasy romance, because the elements are dark and raw and real. So you will see a highborn treat a slave in an abusive manner. And it will dredge up some painful emotions or emotions of anger or injustice. But I enjoy writing that, because I feel like it helps readers understand a bit more about these struggles in the world. And to me it’s just real, it is real, and it’s not fair.
And I always like my characters to ultimately have their justice in one way or another, so it’s not always… It may seem painful at the time for a short period as you’re reading. But just know that because I am a romance writer, there will be that satisfactory ending. And yeah.
I strongly believe in happily ever afters, or happily, for now. I don’t feel like it’s a romance without it. I feel like that’s a huge thing, that’s what ties the bow at the end of a romance story.
CMR: Yeah, for sure. I think like, otherwise it’s just not a romance, is it? It’s a tragedy, or it’s…
SRS: Yeah.
CMR: If they die at the end. That’s Romeo and Juliet, and Romeo and Juliet is not a romance.
SRS: Exactly, exactly.
CMR: And I think people appreciate that as well. Because if you’ve gone through a lot of trauma with characters, you really want to know that they’re going to be okay. And that’s like part of the reason people love romance and the formula they can trust to get them to that point at the end. So you know that it works out, which I think can be very cathartic as well.
SRS: It is, yeah.
CMR: And people definitely … like characters definitely deserve their happy ending if they’ve been through such a lot of stuff, and I wish I could. I wish I could write that!
[laughter]
SRS: Oh gosh!
CMR: But yeah, and that’s the thing, isn’t it? I think, like it’s it is important to make things real and to make, if that’s what you’re going for, like that dark side of life. But also like, and that, I guess, plays into the idea that how Britain pretends a lot of the time in the way that we write history, that we didn’t do anything bad, and that we were fine, and the Empire was great, and we don’t have any racism or systemic racism anymore.
SRS: Yeah.
CMR: And it’s like, it’s such bollocks.
SRS: Yeah.
CMR: And it’s just good to have some books – not not all books, but like to have some books, at least, that look at the dark side of stuff and then go. This is shit.
[laughter & agreement]
SRS: Yeah!
CMR: Yeah. And I think some people, you know, like some people really need that, as like, you know, this is shit. But we’re gonna have a happy ending here.
SRS: Yeah.
CMR: They get what they deserve to have, and they’re gonna get their vengeance. And they’re gonna get their justice or something from somewhere.
SRS: Exactly.
CMR: And like, yeah, I really appreciate books like that as well. And I know people also want like the very wholesome, very cosy, very… you know, kind of accepting and fluffy kind of stuff, and people really need that as well. And I think it’s important to have both.
SRS: Yeah.
And there should be room for both kinds of stories, because people need different things at different points of their lives. I think.
SRS: One hundred per cent.
CMR: Yeah, so going back to the world building and stuff, not sure which way round ask it. So I’m going to ask it both ways and see. So how did either the plot and the characters inform the way that you built the world, or the other way around, so did the world building inform … Did you get the world first, and that kind of helped you to shape the plot and the character arcs? Or was it more like you had the plot and the characters? And you were like, Okay, what kind of world do I need to build that would facilitate this?
SRS: I know the answer, which is great. [laughs]The characters came first. Kennedy and Viera came first, and I didn’t know what struggles to put them through.
I should also say that I love trials and tribulations. I love seeing people go through a journey where they’re really struggling with themselves, their beliefs, their feelings, their outlook with the world. So, whether they are the embodiment of anger and injustice, or whether they are so open to everything that happens, and accepting of everything that happens, I somehow want to put them through their struggles and then have them find one another and help each other heal and recover from all of everything that they’ve gone through, and ultimately learn more about themselves. So with Kennedy and Viera at the time they didn’t have any things. They just found each other. And they found love. And I was like, Well, this is boring!
This is, this isn’t enough for me. Yeah, I love writing romance, and I have 2 people who who love each other. But how am I going to have them struggle? What will their struggle be? And how can I put them through the wringer and eventually have them come back together? So definitely, I worked around them. I thought, okay, well. I need to put them in a world that’s unfair. I need to put them in a world that’s quite dark and twisted, and there are outside elements preventing them from being together.
And then I came up with the hierarchy. Then I came up with the fact that they themselves were in a position of status that doesn’t allow them freedom to be in love or find love, or just have a family of their own, because they’re owned by other people. Everything that happens I built afterwards, which was a huge struggle, but I was quite satisfied with how it all panned out.
And I love anime. So I’ve grown up watching anime, and I’ve grown up falling in love with main characters who have such a strong bond, whether it’s a brotherly bond, a sisterly bond, or just like a clan bond. I feel like the power of friendship, which is something that’s thrown a lot in anime as a meme, triumphs over everything. So I felt like I needed to give my characters friends. I needed to give my characters bonds and not just have them on this journey on their own. So that’s exactly what I did.
So as Kennedy grows he becomes a pirate, and he has his crew, and that’s a huge amazing bond that they have – they’re family.
And then you have Viera, who is quite separated from everyone, but she does have – she does learn to have bonds with people that she meets, and characters that she has huge love for. But again, nothing is is simple in this world that I’ve created.
It seems like from Viera’s perspective, she’s always had to hide who she really is. And she’s had to hide behind a mask. For both of Kennedy and Viera, they started off as slaves in this world, and 10 years later they’re no longer slaves. She’s a highborn and he’s a pirate. He’s seemingly found freedom, or what he tells himself he has is freedom, and Viera has gone from one status to a completely different status, and she’s been trying to deal with that, but she feels that it’s not really her. So.
Both of these characters, in a way, have their own ideology of the lives that they live. And when they come back together, it’s not… They look at each other, and they think, Well. I don’t like the person that you are, or the decision that you’ve chosen to be. That’s their conflict, that’s their that’s their difficulty. Because they are on opposing sides. At this point, she’s justice, he’s freedom – or his idea of freedom – and they’re enemies.
So the tropes, I suppose, can be a little bit like here and there, but it would be friends become lovers, lovers become enemies, enemies become lovers. Second chance. There’s so many different romance tropes in this, and if there’s the whole forbidden aspect because they have to hide their emotions for one another behind their statuses.
And now that I think about it, I definitely gave them a lot of conflict and a lot to think about, and a lot to deal with. And that’s kind of where I am at this point, especially with the future books that I have planned. I’ve created this huge world where I have all of the external conflict there already. It’s how 2 people navigate around it to be together. So I hope that answers the question.
CMR: Yeah, it does 100%. But great, yeah, that’s really cool. So yeah, we kind of talked a lot about like the the themes of conflict, and I’m wondering about how Viera herself kind of goes from being a slave to being a highborn. I don’t know if that’s a spoiler. If you could say how that happens. But I imagine it’s kind of like either adoption or like, yeah, because I was like, Oh, Victorian London, I know that trope! where it’s like, oh, I found an urchin!
So I was thinking about like, I was imagining that kind of scenario. But also then, like the fact that she doesn’t see she’s now in this different situation and navigating that. But she doesn’t see the problems in the society that she’s in because she is now on, even though she was on the receiving end of the negative side of things. She’s now on the receiving end of the positive side of things and all the privilege that she now has, and so she thinks that’s good. and she doesn’t get that? There’s a bit of cognitive dissonance there, going on. And I thought that was really cool. You’ve got that the balance of that character who just doesn’t see the negative side of that privilege that she has, and the impact that has on other people, versus someone who is very much on the receiving end of all of that, and is like, what the hell are you doing? Why have you chosen this? And her journey towards a reinterpretation and a re-understanding of like, oh, actually, my world is shit!
SRS: Right. So it wouldn’t… It’s not necessarily a spoiler, because I actually have had readers who read the Blurb, and they’re like, how does one go from a slave to suddenly being in one of the higher classes? And it’s to do with her family. Half of her family are highborns, the other half are slaves. And she reaches a point in her life where the puppeteer at the head of her family is no longer there to pull the strings. Somebody else comes into power, and they give her that freedom and pull her back into where she technically should have belonged in the first place. But ultimately Viera was meant to be born a highborn. She was never meant to be born a slave. But readers understand how that happens. So it’s unfortunate that she has been raised on the shittiest side of society, and only learn about her relatives later on.
And they’re in this higher society, and it’s quite nice, because, as I said, this whole bond that I give my characters is that her cousin is in that higher society, and he treats her no differently. He becomes her best friend, her brother, her, her everything. And it’s through him that she’s able to get back into that highborn society, and what I like about her at that point where she is a highborn is, she isn’t necessarily… She’s not happy necessarily where she is. She doesn’t conform to highborn rules as such. She doesn’t have slaves of her own. She actually pays a lowborn to take care of her manor. So she’s she’s kind of like separated, and I think other highborns look at her, and they don’t fully accept her, because they’ve always seen her as she’s a slave, and now she’s a highborn. She doesn’t belong.
And she kind of separates herself from that, and doesn’t like. I said she doesn’t conform to their rules, but she’s kind of helpless because she’s in this status now, and she kind of had to accept things as they are. And she can’t fully be herself, and it takes for Kennedy coming back into her life for him to help her see, you’re not happy, and you’re not going to admit that you’re not happy. And what is it going to take for you to see that you’re not happy? And he’s kind of giving this foreshadowing? And he’s trying to warn her as much as he can, that the world that you’re living in is not as you see it.
The pride that she takes in being a Badge, because she’s also highborn, but she’s also a Badge, and that’s her pride and joy. She believes fully in justice and criminals getting what they deserve. And she’s blind to the corruption in the, in the police department, in the city, [and] to the corruptions of highborn. She’s completely blind to it.
She’s not been necessarily exposed to that, but it takes for a pirate to come along to help her see things, and unfortunately bad things happen, and it does take huge catalyst for her to be like – for all the blinders to come off, and for her to be like what the fuck is going on? Have I really just been here for all these years, not seeing what the fuck was going on, and unfortunately, you know she reaches that point where she has to make a choice.
But she has to go about it in a very diplomatic way. She can’t just be like Kennedy, who is a free spirit and does whatever the fuck he wants, because that’s Kennedy. Kennedy’s impulse, and he doesn’t give a fuck. He will do what he believes. Viera can’t. She’s very very restricted in that. So they are really opposites.
And yeah, so she has to. She has to really go through a huge, a huge turning point in her life to help her come to some realizations and hard truths.
CMR: I just, yeah, I just really love that. The kind of the nuances of the characters. And then, like the journeys that they go through, and the development and all of that. So yeah, really excited for the future of those. And I really like it when characters like wait what the fuck and kind of wake up to what’s been going on around them and like, have that kind of epiphany moment of like, oh, no.
SRS: I should probably add, because I’ve spoken a lot about Viera, and not necessarily a lot about Kennedy, but in that respect, to mirror what she goes through, Kennedy also has to go through his own realizations about highborns. He has his own hatred towards highborns. And bad things happen to him that solidify those beliefs that all highborns are awful human beings, and they basically don’t deserve to live, but because of his feelings towards Viera in the position that she is now in, he battles with that.
He battles with his emotions, and he feels anger towards his feelings towards her as a highborn. He he cares about her, but he’s like, but she’s chosen to be this, and I can’t accept that, and I’m struggling with that. And she tries to tell him, look, not all highborns are bad, but he’s just like well, I’m not going to believe what you’re telling me.
But again, similarly to him, he goes through his realizations, too, and he has to go through that whole rewiring of his mindset or his attitude towards that class of people. So they both go through trying to navigate through their prejudices, I suppose, against their classes. Yeah.
CMR: Yeah, I like, there’s a difference in there between thinking like, okay, the system is bad, and the system needs to be completely dismantled, versus every individual within this system is a bad person and needs to be put against a wall and shot. And they’re actually, if you’re in this class of people, you’re not a person anymore, and I don’t think of you as a person, and I’m taking away your personhood because I hate you.
SRS: Yeah, basically.
CMR: I think that’s a real life mindset that people do have to grapple with at some point. So, I think that’s an interesting – that kind of makes it more real and like more more impactful as a character arc. And like, yeah, I think that’s really interesting.
Yeah, cool. Thank you so much. Can you – before we go, can you tell us more about your future plans? Anything to look out for?
SRS: Yes. So the second book in the series releases on the 6th of December. And I do have 2 more books planned that will feature Kennedy and Viera again. And then I do know that book 5 will feature a new couple within the universe.
But yeah, I can’t say when those books will be out, but it is something that I am working towards, now that the second book is done. For any readers interested in reading Pirate’s Vow I do have to give a heads up that it does end on a cliffhanger. So, Pirate’s Vengeance, which is Book 2, takes place directly after the events of Book 1, and that doesn’t end on a cliffhanger. So you don’t need to worry about that one.
But yeah, so yeah, that’s basically what I have in the works. I suppose, for 2025 and 2026. So we’ll see how that goes.
CMR: Cool. Where can we find you about your social media? Newsletter, website?
SRS: I can be found on Instagram, and I have just recently started TikTok, so I can also be found on there. And then there’s my website that people can read my blog. And I post here and there updates on what I get up to.
CMR: I’m going to put all the links in the Transcript. I will put all the links in transcripts, so people can find you, and the transcript is going to be on cmrosens.com. So you can come over and find that whole [tran]script, and scroll to the end. You’ll find all of Sab’s links and links to the books and everything in there for you.
Thank you so much for coming on the show, that’s all we’ve got time for. So we’re going to wrap up now. But yeah, thank you so much for being here. That was really interesting.
SRS: Thank you for having me. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
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