Carissa Broadbent on Crowns of Nyaxia novella Six Scorched Roses

We are big fans of Carissa Broadbent, as you can see from our coverage. Anyway, we understand that sometimes it is daunting to jump into a growing series, so perhaps this new novella, Six Scorched Roses, is the perfect place to start.

Six Scorched Roses was originally written for an anthology. When did you realise you could fit it into the Crowns of Nyaxia universe?

The story was originally written for an anthology, but I knew from the beginning that it would take place in the Crowns of Nyaxia world – as a way of expanding the universe overall while also giving new readers another introduction into the world. Selfishly, I also had a lot of fun with it, because it allowed me to push the boundaries of the universe in new and exciting directions!

The novella is short and feels very different from the rest of the books in the series in that there’s more romance and less fantasy here. Did you consider making it into a full-length novel when you decided to publish this story by itself?

I did very briefly consider the idea, but dismissed it pretty quickly. There were some logistical reasons for that, such as avoiding reader confusion and managing my time with other deadlines, but ultimately, the clinching reason for keeping it as-is was that I simply liked how it worked as a novella! I thought the story was served well by the length and format of the book, which really grew on me.

We are glad you didn’t because it felt very refreshing and we are hoping there would be more of these novellas for side characters in the future…?!

Six Scorched Roses is the only true, complete novella I’ve ever written and I was so surprised by how much I loved writing it! I would really love to write more of them, and there is one story in particular I would absolutely love to tell – but I already have so many more books to write in the Nyaxia world, so I’m unfortunately not sure if I’ll ever get the chance to get to it.

And in fact, was there less pressure to write Six Scorched Roses because you don’t need to worry about the world building, or did the pressure simply shift to the fact that the romance has to be particularly strong to make the story shine?

Six Scorched Roses was an extremely low pressure writing experience for me. I felt very sure that it would not be a popular story because it was so different than The Serpent and the Wings of Night, and against all expectations, that turned out to be quite freeing! (It was truly surprising to me too at the time!) I really felt like I could write the story for myself, (mostly) devoid of all my typical angst. I ended up with a book that was very much of my heart for that reason.

Let’s chat about the story. The six scorched roses are so romantic. Was it easy to pick these roses as the object of exchange? What was the inspiration behind it?

Roses are a no-brainer when it comes to the gothic romance stories, right? It just felt like the right vibe! I have kind of a convoluted backstory here that I won’t get too far into, but some of these ideas actually had been batting around in my head for a while, originally for other parts of the series that ended up taking a different direction. So Six Scorched Roses was a fun opportunity to take some of those ideas that I was most excited about and run with them!

Love that the months were indicated by the number of roses. What would be Carissa Broadbent’s equivalent? 

This is about to make me sound so boring… but lately, I really measure my life around deadlines. They aren’t quite monthly, but I often feel like my life is divided up into “parts” based on whatever deadline is looming over me at that time! My much-less-glamorous “Eras,” haha.

Finally, we love Lilith and Vale a lot more after reading this novella. The important question: would we see more of them in future Crowns of Nyaxia books?

They definitely turn up again in other future books! That’s honestly all I can say about that…