We chat with author Adalyn Grace about The Wretched Divine, which is Grace’s heart-pounding adult debut about an ancient war between angels and demons, and the human knight determined to end it at any cost. Plus you can read an excerpt here too!
Hi, Adalyn! Welcome back! How have you been since we last spoke for the release of Foxglove in 2023?
Hello, and thank you for having me back! I have been excellent, but remarkably busy getting three more books out into the world since then. It’s been a wild ride, but a very exciting one!
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I was lucky enough to discover it from a very young age. While I always enjoyed books, I actually fell in love with the act of writing before I really fell in love with reading, thanks to the roleplaying boards on Neopets! I was around 10 years old, far too young to be talking to strangers online, but alas! I happened across all these people writing stories about wolves, gifted boarding schools, vampires… and decided I wanted to try it with them. I became immediately obsessed with the idea that I could create characters and worlds of my own, and I’ve never looked back.
Your latest novel, The Wretched Divine, is out September 22nd! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
An action-packed, romance-steeped, bursting-with-magic adventure!
Please forgive my blatant cheating.
What can readers expect?
Wretched is quite a different book for me! I think people who have read my previous work will still recognize the flavor of my writing, but the recipe for this book is entirely new. While the Belladonna series feels like cozying up on a couch with a warm cup of tea, Wretched is a slice through the throat.
It’s a fast-moving adventure with far more magic and a vastly larger world than anything I’ve written before. It’s also much more adult in terms of its themes and language, and while the story is thematically dark, I think readers are going to see a lot more of my humor in this one than they have in any of my previous books. I felt incredibly unconstrained while working on it. It’s bloody, action-packed, and readers have been telling me that this medieval adventure reads a bit like an anime, which is one of my favorite compliments. While the romance is a huge part of the story, this is definitely a plot-driven book with a massive world and a lot of lore that I’m not holding anyone’s hand through. There’s magic, demons, angels, knights, a multitude of fight scenes, various strange creatures, and plenty of morally questionable decisions.
It’s the biggest and most ambitious story I’ve written so far, and when it wasn’t trying to kill me, I had an absurd amount of fun with it.
Where did the inspiration for The Wretched Divine come from?
So many places! Truly, it’s hard to narrow them down. I drew a lot of inspiration from some of my favorite anime, including Attack on Titan, Fullmetal Alchemist, Demon Slayer, and Jujutsu Kaisen. A single scene from the musical Beetlejuice also inspired the bonding mechanic, while the angel and devil sitting on Kronk’s shoulders in The Emperor’s New Groove somehow inspired an entire race of creatures!
That’s generally how inspiration works for me. I find it everywhere, often in the smallest or strangest details. I’m always collecting little pieces of things that sparkle in my brain, then reshaping them into new ideas for my own stories so that they’re a melting pot of things I love.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I truly love all of them, though Severin’s ridiculous jokes and songs are certainly the most fun to write. He has a way of walking into a scene and immediately making it so much more entertaining.
For this book in particular though, I also really enjoyed getting to explore Yuriel, who we get to learn quite a lot about in this book. I loved getting to peel back his layers piece by piece, and walk readers through who he is as a character, and why he’s that way.
Can you share some insight into your planning and worldbuilding process?
I am a huge outliner. Before I start drafting, I usually want to know the major plot beats, character arcs, reveals, and where the story ultimately needs to land. That said, my outline is never sacred. Once I’m actually inside the book, the characters inevitably start showing me where I’ve misunderstood them and how they’d behave, and I’m very willing to tear things apart and rebuild if the story needs it. (Spoiler, this story needed that a lot.)
With worldbuilding, I tend to start with one idea that excites me and then keep asking questions until the world begins to expand around it. For The Wretched Divine, a lot of that started with the angel and demon bonds, and then grew into questions about how those bonds would affect religion, politics, warfare, magic… How would this influence their daily lives? Their jobs, what they eat and wear… etc etc etc. I usually always start with my world and the magic first, and my brain expands the story from there.
I also love lore and wanted the world to feel like it existed long before the reader arrived. To do that, there are things like history, beliefs, etc that may only ever appear briefly on the page. I don’t believe that everything needs to be explained immediately. I like trusting readers to pick things up as they go, and feel that it can often help the world feel larger and older.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
This was by far the most challenging book I’ve ever written. As I menetioned, I’m a huge outliner, but once I got into the drafting process, things just weren’t clicking. I rewrote the first 60,000-ish words at least six times before I finally understood the characters well enough to see what they actually needed from me.
There were so many moments where this book genuinely felt smarter than I was. Every time I thought I had figured it out, it seemed to uncover another problem that asked me to become a better writer in order to solve it. Eventually, I had to stop trying to force the book into the shape I had originally imagined for it and start listening to what was actually working on the page. That meant throwing away a tremendous amount of writing, changing relationships, restructuring plotlines, and accepting that some ideas I loved simply weren’t right for this story.
It was frustrating, of course, but the book is infinitely better for it. The Wretched Divine demanded more from me than anything I’d written before, and ultimately I’m very grateful that it did. I think it’s by far the best story I’ve written.
This is your adult debut! Did you make any changes to your processes?
I think the biggest change in my process has really just been learning how to tune out the other voices.
Edits are always helpful, and I deeply value having people I trust challenge the work, but publishing also comes with an endless well of opinions that can very easily steer a story down a different path than the one you actually want to take. Give a book to 100 people and you’ll have 100 different opinions. That’s just the way brains work.
When you’re debuting, I think there’s this feeling that you’re supposed to listen to everything you’re told because everyone else must know better than you do. Over time, I’ve learned that part of becoming a stronger author is knowing which notes will make the book more itself and which ones will pull it away from what you intended.
No book in this world will ever satisfy every single person who reads it, and trying to accomplish that is a very quick way to strip away everything interesting about it. So the biggest change in my process has been learning to filter through all that noise, take the notes that genuinely strengthen the story, and trust my gut on the rest.
Are there any other angel, demon, or knight books that you’d recommend?
Growing up, I was a huge fan of Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone. The Knight and the Moth is another widely loved fantasy that features knights, and is a great one to pick up if that particular part of The Wretched Divine appeals to you!
What’s next for you? Any teasers?
I’ll be deeply entrenched in the world of The Wretched Divine for a long while as I continue with the series! Beyond that, I have an additional project coming out next fall that I hope to be able to talk more about soon.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up? Any you’ve read so far this year that you’ve enjoyed?
I’m absolutely loving the Dungeon Crawler Carl series right now. If you’re not paying attention to it, you should be! The audiobooks are phenomenal, and as the series progresses, it has more heart than anything I’ve read in ages. I’m very much looking forward to book 9.
