I got to sit down with Valerie Valdes, the author behind the Lost Caverns of Ixalan storyline. We talked about the process of writing for Magic, the themes of the LCI storyline, some of your favorite LCI characters, and of course, the hottest couple in Ixalan.
Speaking with Valerie was such a pleasure–I learned a lot, and I think you will too!
A quick note: you’ll see that Valerie and I both use the term Latine, which is a recently-coined term intended as a gender-neutral alternative to Latino (similar to Latinx). There’s an ongoing discussion in Latine/Latino/Latinx community about these terms, and I’m a strong believer that queer people like myself who aren’t part of that community should sit back and listen while it’s happening. Latine is the term Valerie uses, so I followed suit, as one should!
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What was your history with Magic, prior to writing this set?
I started playing magic when I was very young. My first set was Revised. My parents were divorced; I used to go visit my dad in the summer. I had no school–what I would do is I would go work in his office, and he would pay me to file papers, and then I would take that money, and I would spend it on chili dogs from 7-Eleven, comic books, the arcade cabinet in the corner store, which had Samurai Shodown, and Magic cards. I initially was just buying booster packs, or I remember the store sold sets of four of specific cards. So like, I got four Healing Salves. Just random stuff that I ended up with.
And over time I started, you know, collecting more and more cards. I’ve got Fourth Edition. I’ve got Ice Age. I think the last set that I really was kind of into getting stuff for was actually Visions, which is a long time ago. I do have some Weatherlight cards.
But I grew up playing Magic. I played it against people at school. We played it at lunch. We played it after school at McDonald’s.
How did you end up working with Wizards to write the story for Caverns of Ixalan??
I heard through the grapevine that they were looking for specifically someone with a Latine background to write a new story, and I had at that point no idea what that might entail. But it was basically like, “Hey, can you, you know, submit a writing sample?” And if they like your work they might reach out to you and see how it goes.
And sure enough, that’s what happened. I submitted a short story that later, I submitted to Uncanny Magazine, and it did get published. But at the time it was just a fantasy story that I had written that was sitting in my drawers, my digital drawers, and so I sent that in. And they did like it. And I went through some interviews, and they brought me on board, and I was really hyped to do the thing.
What was the process like? How did you work with the story team?
So caveat, of course, that I have no idea how this works for anyone else, and whether my experience was unique or routine. But what they did for me was, they sent me the story guide–so you know, 300 some-odd pages of art and history and character descriptions and all sorts of stuff. An interesting thing about it is that even with what I was sent, all of the story stuff is still a work in progress. So even after it was done, for example, character names may have changed, or location names may have been tweaked, or descriptions of particular things may have been altered. For me as a writer it works that way, too. When I’m world-building for a novel, for example, a lot of times I’ll have ideas, I’ll put those ideas down, have them in my notes. And then, as I’m writing, I’ll be like, actually, I wanna tweak this because I think it will work better this way. Magic works that way to an extent as well.
So I was given the story guide, and I was also given an outline, a fairly robust outline of what they wanted to happen in the story, and I turned that into an episode outline. We went back and forth with that until we were happy with the episode outline. Initially, when I was brought in, it was only supposed to be 5 episodes, which,with the amount of story that I was given to put together, I was like, I think maybe this should be a little longer, actually.
By the time that I had written to the end it was over word count from what they wanted, because there was just a lot to cover. It was tough, but we made it work.
What happens when you wind up over word count? Does it just get edited down?
I did a lot of work to try to edit it down to word count, yeah. You don’t want to do that [go over word count], as a rule, you want it to be the word count that it is. But there really was just so much to do, so much to cover. I wanted to make sure that each POV character got their time, their space, the opportunity to shine, and to have their stories told and resolved over the course of the series.
Did you determine who the POV characters were? Did you have to figure out that structure as you went, or was it implied in the outline?
It was both. There were implications in the outline that suggested these specific characters should be POV characters. And then it was up to me to decide who was the POV character for each section. And again, when I returned the outline, we went back and forth. I think actually Bartolomé (Bartolomé del Presidio) was not a POV character in my initial construction of things, because I felt like that would be too many POV characters. But it was suggested that no, actually, we do need his POV at least once, if not more than once, and I went with it. Because, yeah, I mean, it works.
We don’t have any merfolk POV in this. I wish I could have snuck that in somewhere. But there really were just so many things going on independently that it felt, again, like it would be too much.
Interesting–I’d always thought of the story as a three-way race, but of course it’s actually a four-way race, if you include the merfolk.
That’s part of why I felt like it was okay to not have them as a POV group, because they had already won the race. They were there, basically, already at the finish line. Could I have told the story of them getting there? I guess. But in the outline that I was given, the stuff that I was given initially, they were basically already there. And then it was just a question of everybody else stumbling through to get there as well. And then the fighting.
Speaking of the story team and their overall plan, I wanted to ask about two characters who it seems like we’ll see more of in future sets. First, Kellan, who we met in the story for Wilds of Eldraine, and who Wizards has been hinting will be a continuing presence. What was the ask from Wizards about Kellan’s involvement here? How do you see his role in the story?
I did not have a ton of details, because they are very immensely secretive about this stuff. So I basically knew almost nothing about the wilds of Eldraine when I was writing this, which was definitely a challenge. But they gave me a description of Kellan. It was like, Okay, here’s this guy. He’s a good guy. He’s just–he’s doing his best. This is kind of what his voice sounds like, and they meet him in this area, go with it. And so I knew that having him get encountered by the vampires, it was a lot because he is this kind of, we’ll say noble? Is noble a good word for him? He’s just a good guy, right? And so to land in the lap of a group of heretics–who, are they heretics, when their God is calling for them, and he is the bad guy? It’s a very “Are we the bad guys” moment that happens in this and a couple of places. But there’s a clear schism that’s occurring in the Legion of Dusk at this point. So Kellan gets dropped into the midst of this vampire contingent, where pretty much everyone but Amalia and Bartolomé is there to do bad things. I knew that that would mean that he would have to be latched onto by the resident cinnamon roll, because otherwise he was just–he was not gonna survive this! And he had to, he’s got protagonist immunity. So it was just a question of, how would that play out? How would they kind of get together–not necessarily together-together, of course, because that is up in the air, I have no control over that–but how would they team up? How would they become a pair working together to do the things that need to be done. And so that was part of the challenge of getting this written, pulling him into this zone where he is extremely out of his element, everything is a hot mess, and seeing how he could come out on top, so to speak.
Since you brought it up, would you like for Amalia and Kellan to get together?
I think it would be adorable. I recognize that Kellan has pre-existing relationships, and that they may be more preferable to some people. And so I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum, or, you know, try to crush anyone’s dreams.
Kellan’s real young, and that is something that is also not necessarily set in stone when it’s given to us writers. I was told Kellan was between 17 and 19. That’s a broad range, and to me there are a lot of differences in writing a character who is 17 versus 19 in terms of yuck factor, I guess I’ll call it. You don’t necessarily just want to go around shipping 17-year-olds. I feel like it’s also extremely reasonable for him not to be getting into any romantic relationships as a 17-year-old. Let him grow, let him mature, let him see the planes. Let him explore. Let him find his dad, and you know, see where things go. And it’s okay, also, if he gets into relationships, because teenagers do, and then gets out of them because teenagers do. That is a normal part of growing up and I fully support him experiencing that part of growing up, to whatever extent they feel like doing it in the story going forward, and whether that means he and Amalia have a thing, whether that means they do not have a thing, if they separate in the next plane. Who knows what’s gonna happen to them, right? It’ll be interesting to see where that goes.
Maybe he’s gonna collect a harem. I don’t know. It turns into a harem anime.
That’ll be the only pull quote that Youtube hears from this interview. “It turns into a harem anime.”
We’ve been hearing for a while that Kellan was going to be a throughline for the current story arc, and now it appears that Amalia will be as well. What was it like introducing a character who’s going to have an ongoing role in the larger narrative?
In terms of Amalia as a character? So, it was never in the outline that she was going to leave the plane, just to put that out there. The relationship between her and Kellan, such as it is, developed in the writing of it. I would turn in an episode, it would come back to me with comments. I would use those comments to tweak whatever I needed to tweak for future episodes. We redo the outline as needed, that kind of thing. They had just such good–I’m gonna use the word chemistry, but again, it doesn’t have to be sexual chemistry. It’s just they had good relationship chemistry when they came in together.
And Amalia as a character–I originally wanted her to be a cinnamon roll kind of character, but for me she was representative of part of the sort of white vampire faction that is very dedicated to the ideals of vampirism as laid out by the Church. And so I leaned into that sort of sheltered religious upbringing. Because I wanted to show the transition from sheltered religious upbringing to oh, no, this is not good actually. I think that is something that a lot of people experience in terms of their relationship to religion. And it is something that I wanted to model in the fiction because of the very heavy religious overtones with the vampire faction.
And so for her as a character, she did start very optimistic, very positive, thinking that what she was doing was important. She just left home for the first time to go on this holy quest, and then it’s oops all horrors just all the way down.
I think that because of the way that I initially constructed her as a character who is just so optimistic, looking on the bright side, trying to do the good and the right thing, it made her a good counterpart for Kellan, because he is in a lot of ways fundamentally the same. They were propping each other up in this situation, in emotional ways, in physical ways.
Because of that, her journey then became one of distancing herself from the clearly toxic and hostile aspects of her upbringing and her religion, and attempting to then move into a wider world, a wider multiverse, to find herself, which is a very “coming of age” kind of story. And again, I feel like modeling stuff like that in fiction is important. Getting away from what you discover is a bad group, whether it’s a toxic family, whether it’s a religion, whether it’s cultural things that are hostile and toxic. Being able to see them for what they are, and move away from them and try to do better, I think, is something that we can all aspire to, to a certain extent.
When was it decided she would leave Ixalan? Did that come from Wizards?
Yes, it came from above. It came from the story lead because it seemed like they were gelling really well together. And there are sort of two approaches, I think, when you have a character who is part of the exploration and explication of a rift, like the schism that’s occurring within the church there right now. The character either tries to go back and fix things, or the character leaves, and I think those are kind of the only two routes for Amalia at the end based on her own character arc. And ultimately it was decided that her leaving was the better way to go.
The discussion of Amalia’s culture is maybe a good transition to talking about real-world culture. There’s clearly been a lot of effort to include Latine voices throughout Lost Caverns of Ixalan. How is this a Latine story, and what did you personally bring to it because of your own background?
First I will say that obviously there’s been a lot of world building work that has been done to really deepen the roots of this in certain Mesoamerican cultures–South and Central American, I should say, and Mexican, which is part of North America. But because of the pirates, there’s a Caribbean element that’s brought in as well. And so it does cover kind of a broad swath of that entire experience. And then you’ve got the Spanish influence of our Dusk Legion.
It’s been…How do I put this? I was trying to make sure that a lot of cultural stuff from not just my own culture, but other cultures, was getting its time to shine. I think a lot of times we see adventure stories just in general as a thing where you have to justify the culture of non-white characters, if that makes sense. You’re not just allowed to be Latine and go on adventures, and I think it’s important to have stories where, even though the world-building and the characters are very deeply and definitely from those kinds of cultural touchstones, it’s okay for people to just go on adventures! I don’t know if that makes sense.
Once upon a time little Valerie wrote a story that had a Cuban-American character as the main character, and just had references to my culture in it. And someone critiqued the story and said, “Why is this character Cuban-American, though, the story doesn’t really justify it.” And I’m like it doesn’t have to justify it. She just is. Why does it have to be justified?
That’s part of the reason why I wanted to interview you, as an LGBTQ+ writer with an LGBTQ+ column, besides just Huatli and Saheeli. That’s a point where I think solidarity is really important, because obviously we get the same message about queerness in fiction.
I literally saw somebody be like, Why is this character gay? And I was like, because people are gay!
One of my biggest oopsies in Chilling Effect was that I did not make it clear enough that one of the characters was trans. I still wish I could go back and hit myself. I just talked about her like, taking her hormones. I was like, I’m trying to just be cool about this.
[Going back to the question about Latine culture,] there is a lot of interest in exploration and interest in delving into history. One of the legacies of colonialism is that a lot of history is lost and erased, and I think that in particular is something that is worth examining in a story like this. Delving into the past, digging into the literal core of this world to find what they lost, to find what they became disconnected from. In some ways, I think that it’s not just a Latine story, but it’s also a diaspora story.
When I was growing up, I was raised by my mom and my abuelos in Miami, and my connection to my culture was very much through them. I’m second generation. In some ways Miami is a bubble. It is full of a mix of cultures from Mexico and Central and South America and the Caribbean. Being constantly surrounded by that meant that I grew up feeling it was very normal and very reasonable, and yet it still is a diaspora city–it still is people who are immigrants coming from other places to build a new life in this place. Instead of an immigrant experience in the story, it’s all of the people trying to go back to where they came from, and find those connections that they’ve lost, learn more about their own history, and their own people while still reveling in and acknowledging who they are now. Because you don’t have to lose who you are to find out who your ancestors were. It’s all sort of part of the same thing.
One way you treat the theme of history is through Quintorius. He’s an archaeologist and an outsider, very Indiana Jones-esque in a way, and it feels like you use his presence to address the way that academics and scholars from colonizing powers haven’t always handled colonized cultures well. Why is that something you wanted to include, and how did you address it through Quintorius?
I read back through the Strixhaven stuff to be able to adequately represent him, and he already in his “Mentor” story was very aware of the need to carefully and properly acknowledge the past, and try to bring it to life in a way that is in keeping with where it came from.
One of the things that is different in real archaeology versus Lorehold archeology is that in real archaeology there’s just so much speculation, you gather as much information as you can. And, to be clear, I’m not an archeologist. I am related to archaeologists, but that is my only claim to archaeological anything.
A real life archaeologist is assembling as much information as they can, as much data as they can, as much physical evidence as they can, and then trying to create a story from it, trying to explain it, trying to locate it in whatever historical knowledge we already possess. However, there are gaps. There are just vast unknowns that exist in our study of history. There are places where we only have a few sources for stuff, and imagine if, you know, a thousand years from now, someone is trying to reconstruct, I don’t know, the Nineties based on Stephen King novels – like, it would be a hot mess! Or maybe they have, like a couple of fragments of the National Enquirer. In some instances, we can’t know how something was received in its time. Basically we are doing our best to try to figure this stuff out. Whereas in Magic they have literal spells, so they can bring people back and talk to them. That ability to literally reach into the past and use magic to see things, talk to people, interact with them, get their stories is wildly different from what we can accomplish in our own reality.
I think that is one of the interesting aspects of the attempt to do justice to the history of Ixalan, and the Core, and all of the stuff that Quint is experiencing and exploring, is that as an outsider, he doesn’t necessarily have the context to understand all of this stuff, even with the magical ability to converse with people. It still is to a certain extent him on the outside looking in, and he has had that experience himself, with being a character who is an outsider to a lot of the other people at Strixhaven and having his own cultural and historical background that is not necessarily overlapping with theirs, and then finding a place of great importance to the history of his own people.
Part of what I included in this story was something that absolutely has happened in archaeology, where you will have certain groups who are like, “Oh, well, if you try to get natives to tell the story of the place that they’re from, you know, researching it, yada yada, then they are not going to be objective.” I cannot say how large a contingent that is, but that is something that is real, unfortunately.
Thankfully, I think that modern archaeology has developed in a lot of ways an ethos of care and respect that I wanted to bring to the story as well, even as I alluded to ways in which that care and respect sometimes gets set aside, because certainly in our history, in the real world, absolutely, it has been set aside in the past, unfortunately. And that has meant that stuff has been lost, stuff has been misunderstood. Even now people are working real hard to correct past…I don’t know if mistakes is the right word. Misinterpretations, misunderstandings, to be generous.
I like the way that you address these questions as a conversation between Quint and Wayta, as a topic that’s raised and thought about but not solved in a straightforward way.
Yeah, I’m not here to preach to people. Honestly, I’m here to raise ideas and questions and create that kind of space for dialogue, I think, because it is stuff that’s worth talking about, and especially in the context of a plane where there have been – are we gonna call them colonizer wars? Certainly there have been wars back and forth, and I also am hesitant to draw a one-to-one correlation with all things Hispanic and Latine in terms of real-life experiences, because I think that that’s a dangerous thing to do. I think that the influences are there, and a lot of the correlations are there, but this is still its own thing, and so it plays out how it plays out according to the internal lore, and is meant to be internally consistent in that way, even as the story people and I are drawing parallels with real life stuff that has happened.
Writers are drawing from their own experiences in a lot of ways, not just thematically, not just in the sort of small details that we bring to things. But there is a kind of emotional verisimilitude that occurs when you’re writing where you are bringing things from yourself and your experience and your history and your knowledge and your culture. You’re putting all of this into this giant mélange, this big pot, from which you’re creating a paella of story. I think it is really interesting to examine the ways that that can play out, even if we acknowledge that this is again not necessarily intended to be an allegory. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of things that feel like things that have happened in real life. Because I think that journey, even if it’s just emotional, even if it’s just thematic, it can be very cathartic for a lot of us who have that sort of inherited trauma, or just cultural experience that we want to bring to the page in interesting ways.
This conversation brings up two interesting characters, Wayta, and then also Abuelo, the Echo who Quintorius wakes up. Let’s start with Abuelo. What’s his role here?
My abuelo has also been dead for a very long time. As I was writing about this character, I was processing my own feelings about that, my own kind of grief at not being able to talk to him anymore. I thought it was really important to have a character who can be a sort of elder figure who has this knowledge and experience, and is a bridge to the past in ways that other people aren’t necessarily. In some ways, my abuelo was my bridge to Cuba, because I was born in the United States, and my mom wasn’t, and my abuelos weren’t. They were my link to that place in that past that I could not experience, and that I didn’t grow up in. And I think that is an experience of a lot of diaspora writers, that their abuelos are the ones–I say abuelos, but of course, depending on which diaspora you’re from, it’s going to be a different term–they are that bridge. They are that link. They are the ghosts of your culture, and you do what you can to remember them and honor them.
And it still is hard. It’s still difficult to keep in touch with that and keep those memories alive as those generations die and fade. And I think that one of the beautiful things about this particular set is, much like with Strixhaven in Lorehold specifically, it has a way to literally bring these kinds of past characters to life, and have a much more direct connection with history and culture, and the people who have gone before us. And I think that’s really beautiful.
What about Wayta? She’s one of my favorite characters, and I think an interesting dramatic pair with Abuelo, the old man and the young woman. How did you approach writing her?
I really wanted to portray the experience of someone who came of age during a war and fought for her life, literally, and watched her friends, her allies, just dying in droves around her, and how that would affect someone growing up and having to process the emotions of that. It’s really hard to come back from, I think. We would like to hope that in a fictional setting people get better mental health counseling and support than in real life. But that isn’t necessarily the case. And regardless, I just wanted her to have that kind of experience, to be the voice of that, to be the war poet. Even though we have Huatli, who is clearly also the war poet. But she is a commander, right? She is in charge. But Wayta is in the trenches. Wayta is the one who is the cannon fodder.
There was a term from wars past, called the Forlorn Hope. And so it would be like the people that you throw at the wall after you break a siege. I feel like that’s the kind of group that she would have been part of. Just, you know that you’re gonna die, but you’re doing it, anyway. And she did survive, and then she has to kind of deal with all of that cumulative survivor’s guilt, and at the same time, the sense that well, the war is over. Now what do I do? Where do I go? Who am I? What can I become?
I really loved Wayta’s connection with Huatli, the fact that they have completely different perspectives in some ways, but there’s still solidarity and respect between them.
Yeah, and this is an experience if you dig into war poetry, which is a very, very robust genre. You will find not just people writing war poetry from a distance, people who were not participating in the wars writing these very positive war poems that are meant to inspire patriotism, and a desire for young men to enlist and go throw themselves at bullets. But also you have a lot of war poets who are in the trenches, and who are experiencing the most ugly parts of war and chronicling them as accurately as they can. I wanted to show that dichotomy. I read a lot of war poetry, and I delved into that in an attempt to again just see the two sides of it. Not that Huatli is trying to put a happy shine on everything, but in some ways as THE Warrior-Poet, as the mouthpiece of her empire, it is her job to make it seem cool. You know, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. It’s her job to make everyone want to throw themselves on each other’s swords.
Whereas Wayta is already down at the bottom, and she’s just writing that experience, the Miguel Hernández experience. Different people had wildly different experiences during wars, and poets don’t have to be academics, you know. Poets don’t have to be telling things from one specific experience. Wayta was introduced in the original Ixalan story as just somebody who’s like, “Oh, the Warrior-Poet! I am a fan, and I want to grow up to be just like you!” And then to show her grow up to not be just like you, but to have found her own way into the poetry of that experience.
And finally I have brought us to Huatli and Saheeli. We don’t get too much of them together, of course, because this is really Huatli’s story, but I thought you did a lot with a little. Basically, they just really feel like they’re very much in love. How do you go about writing romance?
Oh, so it’s interesting, because when I first wrote it, I was trying to cut down on word count, right? And so I actually didn’t do it as much justice as it has in the final version. Definitely, the story lead was like, “Valerie, enhance, enhance!” I was like, okay, more, we got it! I’m happy to do it. It was a genuine delight!
I’ve read a lot of category romance books, you know, Romance-with-a-capital-R, and I think that one of the things that happens in a lot of romance novels is the new relationship energy kind of romance. These are people who are falling in love. But you also have stuff like second chance romance–there’s a lot of variation that you can have in romance novels.
I think, one of the best things that romance novels can do…A lot of them are a series in which separate couples get their own stories from one book to the next, but they’re still in a chronology such that you get to see couples from previous books, having these moments of tenderness, these moments of affection, these moments of being together and living together, and having the continuation of their relationship instead of just the new relationship energy portion of it, the ‘getting to know each other’ portion. It’s the ‘they do know each other’ portion, and even if they still are discovering new things about each other, because that’s life, and people change and grow and stuff, it’s really great to be able to represent a couple that has been a couple, and that can be comfortable together, but still have that spark between them. It’s something that I love about series romance where you get to see that. Where you have the couple getting together in the first book, and then, even though they’re now secondary characters in future books, you still see them, and you see them being happy together.
Was there anything special that you think about in writing a queer romance, rather than a straight romance?
So, as a cis-het writer, I have to come to it sort of from what I know. But this is not the kind of romance that we see in a lot of queer romance novels that take place in our world, where there is, you know, homophobia and -isms that people have to deal with. I am a very big fan of queernorm. So if I’m writing a queer couple, I’m going to write them basically the way I would write other couples, unless I’m writing them in a real word story, where it makes sense for them to have some sort of alternate dynamic that comes from the world around them being crap.
But otherwise, they’re two people in love, and I’m gonna write them as two people in love. I’m not writing anything explicit, so I don’t need to get into any specific details like that. So it becomes just, who are these people, and how are they gonna be intimate with each other? How are they gonna be affectionate with each other? How are they gonna show that affection? You know, everyone has their own ‘love language’? I don’t actually believe in that. But I believe in manifesting that kind of thing in fiction, if it makes sense. Who is the one who’s gonna give hugs? Who is the one who’s gonna receive hugs? Who is the one who is more stoic? Who is the one who’s less stoic? Are they both stoic?
Huatli is definitely the poet of the two of them. For one [of them], it’s like, “I’m gonna make you a dinosaur robot to show my love.” And for the other, it’s, “I’m gonna write you a poem to show my love.” Just the ways that different characters are able to express those feelings to each other, I think, gets to be very individualized when you take it into a queernorm space, where you don’t have to worry about all of the crap that our world has that makes things potentially ugly and complicated.
Well, thank you. Thank you so much. I want to close by just sort of asking about what else you have going on like, where else can people find your work? What do you have in the works now?
So I am working on potential sequels to my latest novel, which is a space fantasy called Where Peace Is Lost. If you like The Mandalorian, and Voltron: Legendary Defender, then it’s potentially the kind of book that you will enjoy. And I also have my Chilling Effect trilogy, which is space opera, and stars a Cuban-American-descended spaceship captain whose sister is kidnapped by space Mafia, basically, And then she has to perform a series of increasingly terrible tasks in order to rescue her sister. That one is very pop culture–lots of easter egg jokes about video games and things like that. So that one’s more funny, more actiony, more wild. Where Peace Is Lost is a little more serious, a little more like Voltron or The Mandalorian, thinking about war and the aftermath of war and refugees. It’s closer to the Ixalan story in that sense!
Thank you so much to Valerie! Check out her work at her website.
Dora Rogers (she/her) is a writer, game designer, and heart-eyes lesbo from Montreal. She is one half of Gal Pal Games, and you can find her solo TTRPG and interactive fiction projects on itch.io. Follow her in all the places, or catch her on Arena playing questionable Vorthos decks in Standard.