Authors Amanda Foody and C.L. Herman have crafted a new fantasy world following their breakout YA duology collaboration All of Us Villains. In A Fate So Cold, two teen magicians, Dom and Ellery find themselves rising to power when Dom bonds with a power wand and Ellery taps into an ancient magic, making them the Chosen Ones, responsible for saving their world from a deadly forthcoming Winter. And despite growing closer, the pair discover that the Chosen One prophecy spells disaster for their budding relationship. Here the authors discuss how they play with the Chosen One trope, and what they’ve learned on their collaboration journey.
Amanda Foody: What’s delightful about having this conversation is that we get to talk formally about the same topics we spend all day blabbering about informally. Namely, co-authoring books about super ground-breaking, esoteric tropes, like death tournaments and chosen ones.
C.L. Herman: Talks like this one are how our co-writing began. All of Us Villains came from a conversation about story concepts we weren’t quite brave enough to tackle alone. Like you mentioned, we went for death tournaments first—then we went to chosen ones. Why do you think we were so set on exploring this particular topic in A Fate So Cold?
Foody: It fit precisely into that same category: a trope once so popular that it’s fallen a bit out of vogue, that comes with built-in audience expectations. Some expectations, we could subvert; others, we could lean into and celebrate. Basically, chosen ones was big enough to give us room for drama and camp.
Herman: We loved homing in on the specifics of the trope that really spoke to us. Chosen One—it’s such a lonely position to hold. So much power, so many expectations. Save the world. Put everyone else’s fate before your own, always. We were excited to write characters burdened with such a tremendous duty. And we also knew early on that we wanted to do a particular spin on the trope: instead of a Chosen One, A Fate So Cold features a Chosen Two. What would it mean if there was only one other person in the world who understood you, if you knew you didn’t have to fulfill your daunting destiny alone? Those kinds of questions are at the heart of our book.
Foody: I guess you could say A Fate So Cold is also about a very epic collaboration.
Herman: Oh, yes. Saving the world as the ultimate group project. What else do you think makes our specific Chosen One story something only we could have written?
Foody: How hard we go on character, for sure. In the story, each of the Chosen Two have a different relationship with their destinies. Though both Ellery and Domenic are talented, Ellery suspected her entire life that she was special. She’s already been cast as a hero—as a child, she saved her hometown from a disaster that made national news. And those who care most about Ellery have always treated her as someone special, someone removed from the rest of them.
Herman: Meanwhile we’ve got Domenic, who’s been written off by pretty much everybody at his fancy magical academy as a slacker who’s just scraping by. He’s got tons of potential, but he’s still recovering from a tragedy in his past. And everyone who cares about him assumes he is too human to truly take on the task of saving the country, even after he’s revealed as a Chosen One. Domenic and Ellery are the only ones who can see each other for who they actually are, both the power they possess and the person behind it. So, obviously, they fall in love. And it ends…
Foody: It ends terribly. But that was also part of what made writing their romance so interesting. It isn’t until near the end of their story that Domenic and Ellery realize that the only way to fulfill their destinies and to save their homeland is for one of them to slay the other. But the reader knows this from page one. The reader witnesses all of the classic beats of their romance—their meet-cute, their developing crush, their first kiss—and knows through all of it that these characters aren’t getting a happily ever after. It’s the ultimate dramatic irony, and we interacted with it in our writing constantly.
Herman: After writing All of Us Villains, where all our main characters are in a death tournament together, we really did sit down and ask ourselves: What if we made it even worse?
Foody: The real villains have always been us! And we’ve now been terrorizing characters together for… eight years now? Do you feel our process has changed much since the beginning?
Herman: Yes and no. It’s evolved over time, but it was extremely hands-on from the start. People like to ask us who wrote what, but I’ve always felt like that is missing the point a little. We both write everything.
What would you say are some of the most rewarding things about working together? And yes, I do accept flattery.
Foody: Professionally, publishing is no quest for the faint of heart—I’m forever grateful to have a built-in buddy. Creatively, it’s watching our projects develop into such rich, layered stories. We always invest the whole of ourselves into our solo work, and so together, I genuinely think you can feel the double effect of both of us bringing in our individual quirks, our fascinations, our styles.
Herman: Yeah, and the validation is nice, too. It’s fun having someone to immediately show a cool line to or run a joke by. And when we’re brainstorming, we solve problems and generate new ideas much more quickly than we do alone.
Foody: Honestly, I’m really proud of this book. I think we took everything we learned from All of Us Villains and cranked it up a dozen notches. And now we’re very excited for it to break readers’ hearts.
Herman: Don’t say we didn’t warn you!
A Fate So Cold by Amanda Foody and C.L. Herman. Tor, $22.99; ISBN 978-1-25087-315-6.
