Sariah Wilson Delves Into Romantasy with 'A Tribute of Fire'

USA Today bestselling author, Sariah Wilson, visits Writer’s Voices to discuss her debut romantasy, A Tribute of Fire. The first in The Eye of the Goddess trilogy, A Tribute of Fire follows Lia, the princess of Locris, who lives in a nation cursed by an earth goddess. Because of the curse, Locris is required to sacrifice two maidens each year to Ilion, its rival nation, as tributes to compete in a death-defying race to reach the goddess’ temple. This year, Lia is one of the tributes and her sister is the other. For Wilson, the origin for this story came unexpectedly as she was working on a different novel. She said, “…I wanted to use a line about Cassandra from Greek mythology, and she was the prophetess who would see the future, but she was never believed and she was alive during the Trojan War and she warned them… they get invaded… she fled and she went into Athena’s temple, and there was a man named Ajax the Lesser who chased her down and violated her in the temple… knocked the statue of Athena over from doing this and Athena was livid, and she shows up to the Greeks and she’s like, ‘I want him punished…’ because of that, she was so mad that she destroyed half the fleet and the rest of them, she blew off course… but because of his actions, two maidens had to be sent from his nation of Locris to the temple to serve in place of the priestess that he had taken, and there was a line and it said, ‘but only if they made it there alive,’ and it just leapt out at me… So, I started looking… and it was the Locrian maidens… this actually happened… and these two women were sent, but the men in this city that they were going to were authorized by the goddess to hunt these girls down, so I read that and I’m like, ‘oh gosh, this is a story…'”

Regarding her writing process, Wilson prefers to let her stories develop as she’s writing rather than planning everything out beforehand. “I am constantly surprised. I am very much a pantser. I am not a plotter… I can’t do it. I tried. It doesn’t work for me, and I also write chronological. I just write the book in order… I know what that chapter’s going to be, but I don’t really know what’s coming after that, so hopefully by the end of this chapter I will have figured that out, and I usually do. I’ve only been stuck maybe a couple of times, but… it just comes to me in these little bits and pieces… it’s a fun way to write… I get surprised a lot. I think it’s good because I think that it translates to the readers, too, and they get surprised too.”