Hello and welcome to this Track of Words author interview, where today I’m delighted to be chatting to the brilliant Jude Reid about her debut novel for Black Library – Creed: Ashes of Cadia. With the paperback edition recently landing, now is a great time to take a look at this excellent addition to Black Library’s ever-growing range of Imperial Guard novels, which introduces the character of Ursula Creed and returns the action to the surface of Cadia itself! Read on to find out more about this great book and its characters, Jude’s writing process, and loads more.
Track of Words: First of all, congratulations on your debut novel! To start us off, could you tell us a bit about Creed: Ashes of Cadia and what readers can expect from it?
Jude Reid: Thank you! Well, for anyone who hasn’t come across it already, Ashes is a Warhammer 40k novel, set in the grim darkness of the 41st millennium – and as you’d expect it’s a war story, about soldiers going into the devastated remains of their own shattered homeworld, looking for the rumoured secret weapon that their former commander never had the chance to use. You can expect lots of fighting, horrible monsters, politics, drama and grisly description. There are even a few Space Marines in it, but it is very definitely not a book where they play a major part in the fighting.
ToW: For anyone who isn’t familiar, who is Ursula Creed and why has she got her own novel?
JR: She’s the Lord Castellan of Cadia – and as it happens the daughter of the legendary Lord Castellan Ursarkar E. Creed who was the military genius who almost successfully saved Cadia during the 13th Black Crusade, and who was lost in one of the final battles before the planet was destroyed. Ursula has done pretty much everything she can to distance herself from her father’s reputation – when we first meet her she’s using a different name and has made a big deal of coming up through the ranks without his patronage, but that sort of legacy isn’t something that is going to leave her alone forever, particularly now that Roboute Guilliman has started looking at how to turn the remains of Cadia to his advantage…
ToW: Without spoiling anything, can you tell us a bit about some of the other characters in the book and what we need to know about them?
JR: The story mostly revolves around a core group of Cadians – but of course many years have passed since the end of the 13th Black Crusade and the number of people actually born on Cadia is getting slowly whittled down by a process of attrition. One of the themes of the book is exploring what it actually means to be Cadian by this point in time – so amongst the main characters there are native-born Cadians who remember the fall, Cadians who were off-world when it happened, the children of survivors who’ve never even seen Cadia but have been handed this bewildering generational burden, and people transplanted in from other regiments who are desperately trying to integrate into a culture that’s millennia old and whose people don’t want them there. Oh, and there are some penal legionaries as well, including a Cadian medicae who has found himself very much in the wrong place at pretty much the worst possible time…
And an Ogryn called Clavie, who is pretty much my favourite character in the whole thing.
ToW: Again without spoilers, what can you say about the sort of state Cadia is in when Ursula returns there? What sort of setting can we expect?
JR: I don’t want to give anything away, so all I’ll say is that Cadia has been utterly devastated by what’s happened to it – it’s not even really a planet any more, just a big fragment of rock full of unspeakable horrors – but the real horror is in the parts that are still recognisable…
ToW: How does this fit into the chronology of the broader range of Cadian novels?
JR: It’s set a good few decades after the fall – long enough for the Cadians to have begun the work of rebuilding their identity without their world, but not long enough for them to have come to terms with it in any way – I feel like it’s quite possible they never will…
ToW: You’ve had a range of BL short stories released already, but how does it feel to now see your debut novel on the shelves?
JR: Absolutely wonderful and completely terrifying all at the same time. There’s something deeply personal about writing a book, and it takes so long to craft it that I tend to forget that the purpose is for people to read it! In an anthology there’s always a sense of safety that your work is only part of a greater whole, whereas a novel comes with a much greater feeling of exposure I think.
ToW: Could you give us an overview of your general writing process, and whether that changed at all over the course of writing this novel?
JR: Chris Baty, the founder of Nanowrimo (National Writing Novel Month) once wrote that the single most important thing you need to write a novel is a deadline, and he’s not wrong. I find I write best when I’m busy – when I’ve got whole days with nothing to do but write I procrastinate, overthink and don’t get much done – but when I’ve got one golden hour first thing in the morning to write before the day’s work gets started then the words fly out of my fingers. When I’m working on a draft I get up at about 5.30am to get some peace – Ashes was started as spring was turning to summer, and the early morning light made getting up at that time considerably more bearable than it would have been in winter. I slept in a few times and missed my morning slot, which always made catching up during the day a bit harder – there’s something about breaking the ice on the day’s writing before you’re fully awake that makes the words flow much better – but I didn’t miss a single day in terms of putting words down on paper. Writing that first draft is quite a solitary pursuit, and I think if you slow down at any point you can start second guessing both the story and your own ability to write it – Stephen King says that a first draft should take no more than three months to write, and I’m inclined to agree – longer than that and I think I’d lose all sense of where the story is going.
I usually draft on a Freewrite Traveller, which is a very neat little word processor with very limited functionality. All you can do is type – there’s a backspace key, but no way of copying or pasting, and there are no internet or apps beyond what’s needed to upload your document to whatever cloud-based storage you use. It’s absolutely useless when it comes to editing, but for the first draft it’s perfect – and it’s also very portable, only about the size of a standard computer keyboard.
ToW: You mentioned in your WarCom interview that Ashes of Cadia ended up longer than you expected. What can you tell us about the evolution of the novel, from your original idea to the finished version, and how/why things developed the way they did?
JR: Oh it just grew in the telling! I remember shyly telling my editor that it was “getting quite long” and that at the halfway point it was almost the full length we had originally expected the novel to be. Very kindly she let me run with it, and the book came out a very healthy size, and the hardcover particularly will be useful for beating off heretics or propping heavy doors open. Honestly I think I underestimated the amount of words it would take to tell a story this epic.
ToW: How do you find writing action-packed 40k stories like this compares to writing the sort of horror fiction that you work on outside of BL? Presumably they each come with their own challenges, but I assume there’s also plenty of crossover too?
JR: I think about this a lot – I probably read more horror than any other genre and what I love most about it is the way that generally it puts ordinary people into the most appalling situations that strip away all the things that don’t matter in life, and all you’re left with is characters in extremis and the things they’ll do to survive. 40K stories are primarily about war – but for me there’s so much horror inherent in the universe that a lot of the elements are the same – these aren’t generally war stories where soldiers are facing people just like them who happen to be born in another country – the enemy are aliens intent on the destruction of humanity, or servants of literal daemons who’ve done terrible things, or fallen demigods maddened by years of corruption. Even if the enemy thinks they’re doing the right thing there’s generally some awful secret behind it, and if there isn’t you can pretty much guarantee that the protagonists are unwittingly working for something terrible themselves. There’s horror everywhere, and it’s an absolute joy to turn over these seemingly innocuous stones and go looking for the rot underneath.
And then there’s the Imperium itself – from the sprawling bureaucracies of a galaxy-spanning empire than means that entire planets get forgotten and starve to death to the factoria where people labour their lives making a single mechanical component without ever seeing the sun and count themselves lucky for the privilege – it’s an infinite source of delicious horror, and I’ve really enjoyed reading and writing for the Warhammer Crime and Warhammer Horror imprints, where the characters (mostly) have a lot less agency than the heroes of the Imperium, meaning that all the horror and suffering is a lot closer and more personal…
There’s no doubt though that the pace of 40k stories is a lot faster and more action-packed than most horror novels – and it’s definitely had an influence on the other things I write, particularly the importance of having “reaction” scenes as well as “action” ones – scenes where the character can react and come to terms with whatever event has just happened. It’s made me a lot more comfortable with writing about violence, too (possibly too comfortable?) – one of my other projects at the moment is a standalone childrens’ book, and when I was writing the first draft this spring I found myself continually worrying that what I was writing was too dark and violent for the 9-12 year old market – but then I went back to the books I was enjoying at that age and a lot of the middle-grade fiction I’ve read since then, and there’s a lot of pretty heavy stuff in those.
ToW: From a writing craft perspective, is there anything in particular that you learned during the process of working on this novel?
JR: One of the massive privileges of writing for BL is working with the editorial team, and having a fresh pair of eyes to look at the hundred thousand words you’ve just extracted from your head is exactly what every first draft needs. After three months or so of staring at a single document I find I just can’t be objective about anything in it any more, and having that space to step back and get a second opinion on everything is so, so useful. Before this book I really struggled with making major structural changes to first drafts – but of course you have to, otherwise the book never gets any better! It can be psychologically pretty daunting, but is absolutely vital to getting a decent outcome. I now think about my first drafts like a sculptor chipping out the rough outline of a statue in marble – it’s just about getting the basic events in place, and all the finesse like characterisation and theme is going to come later. I don’t think I’ll ever write a perfect first draft no matter how many books I write – there’s something delightfully freeing about knowing that nothing much of it needs to survive intact, and it’s led to a few unexpected gems that I wouldn’t have thought of if I was too worried about getting it right first time.
ToW: To finish off, if you were to join the Cadian 8th would you want to put your medical skills to good use, or is there a different role you would choose to take?
JR: Oh man. I think the trick to surviving in 40k might be to a) be a long way from the fighting and b) be sufficiently useful that people want to keep you alive, but not so useful that you’ll end up being fought over (and probably torn apart in the process). So yes, I could totally see myself as a medicae, hopefully the sort that treats senior officers for gout and administers juvenat rather than cobbling people back together under heavy fire – but I think my ideal job would be as a propagandist, crafting inspiring narratives to keep the troops fighting while remaining a safe distance away…
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Jude lives in Glasgow with her husband, two daughters, dog, cats and rabbits, and writes dark stories in the gaps between work as a surgeon and wrangling her menagerie.
Her short fiction has been published in numerous anthologies including Haunted Voices: An Anthology of Scottish Gothic Storytelling, Places We Fear To Tread (Cemetery Gates Media) and The Corona Book of Ghost Stories. She is the author of Creed: Ashes of Cadia for Black Library, and is currently working on her fifth novel. She drinks her coffee with oat milk.
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Thanks so much to Jude for chatting to me for this interview, and for this excellent book! If you haven’t yet picked up Ashes of Cadia, I definitely recommend it – you can read about what I thought in my review.
Creed: Ashes of Cadia is out now from Black Library – check out the links below to order* your copy:
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To be surgeon and still find time to write a book, blows me away. Though saying that, the amount of study to become a consultant surgeon, does require a singular will.
So congrats.