An Evening with Rebecca Yarros

Did you know it’s easier to get tickets to a Morgan Wallen concert at Neyland Stadium than it is to get a ticket to see Rebecca Yarros on her book tour? Securing Wallen tickets to his hometown show at the most magical place on earth involved a short, anxiety-inducing wait in the Ticketmaster queue while listening to “The Way I Talk” in the background (I do, in fact, get louder when I’m cheering on the Volunteers). Nabbing a ticket to see Rebecca Yarros in Philadelphia took many many minutes in a virtual line that kept refreshing and booting me to the back to start all over. Two hours later, I had a single golden ticket.

When Rebecca announced her Onyx Storm book tour, I immediately started plotting. She wasn’t coming to Knoxville or even Nashville, but she was stopping in cities where I had friends. I’d just gotten my Los Angeles fix while in town for my brother’s wedding so that was out. Raleigh was an option. I haven’t been back to North Carolina since moving from Chapel Hill to L.A. in 2021. The date didn’t work with my schedule, however.

The date that did work?

Philadelphia.

It just so happens that my very best friend, Hanna, lives an hour outside of Philly, and it takes very little to convince me to visit her. I confirmed she was open to a house guest and got busy buying tickets. I intended to buy two even though Hanna isn’t a fiction reader (she gives the best nonfiction recommendations!), but by the time I was able to purchase tickets after virtual line waiting and refreshing and waiting again, only singles were available. I snagged one knowing Hanna would be cool with me dipping out to spend a couple of hours with one of my role models. Definitely get yourself a friend that supports your wildest dreams.

Y’all, Rebecca Yarros is a DELIGHT.

She was joined by Xio Axelrod (also a delight – picked up a couple of her books to dive into soon!) in conversation on all things writing, life, and The Empyrean Series. She made us laugh, dropped a few F-Bombs, got real with us, and gave very little by way of spoilers. Here are the highlights (largely Onyx Storm spoiler-free).

Right off the top, she asked who had read Onyx Storm. She then asked who hadn’t read it yet. The audience was split about 50/50. I loved that she did this. It helped set expectations for what to expect from the talk regarding spoilers (she wasn’t giving them).
She emphasized that saying things like ‘bestselling author’ and ‘Amazon TV series’ doesn’t feel real to her. She saw Onyx Storm on a New York Times billboard two days earlier and said it was like watching it all happen from outside of her body.
The hype around all things Empyrean is a LOT for her to navigate. She has anxiety, and the rabid nature of the fandom can be overwhelming. She’s genuinely grateful and genuinely overwhelmed by it in equal parts.
Lori Hernandez gave her some of the best advice for dealing with the warring emotions: it’s okay for this to be everything she’s ever dreamed of and the worst thing that’s ever happened to her at the same time. Both things can be true. She laughed about getting such profound life advice from a twenty-year-old.
She celebrated Fourth Wing hitting the bestseller list by going to her son’s hockey game. Her husband asked if she wanted to go to dinner instead, but she wanted to be with her kids. Her son scored a goal that night and was awarded the game puck afterward. He gave it to her. She wrote the date on it and keeps it on a shelf in her office.
Her advice to aspiring writers is to write one page a day and to get a pen name. She said she wishes she would have gone the pen name route to protect her family a little better. Remind me I chose not to use a pen name when I’m a bestseller? 🙂
She wrote her first book during one of her husband’s deployments. He was injured during his first deployment, and that was when she learned about “non-notification hours,” a block of time overnight when next of kin aren’t notified by the Army of the injury or death of a loved one. She couldn’t sleep because she worried that something had happened to him and she wouldn’t know for hours, so she started writing. When he came home, she had her book finished. He helped her figure out how to get it published.
Onyx Storm is her favorite book of the series so far. She put in 12-15 hour days while writing it and had the last sentence of the book in mind when she wrote Fourth Wing.
She loves Violet’s confidence and the character growth across from board in Onyx Storm. She also loves how Violet and Xaden’s relationship has evolved at this point.
When characters become perfect, she gets rid of them. Liam was a perfect character and had no more room for growth. She killed him for a few reasons, the first being the fact that he was, in fact, perfect. Second, as an army wife, she knows too well that friends don’t come home from war. And third, she wanted the reader to know she wasn’t afraid to kill off a character.
Ridoc is her favorite character to write, but she cackled when she wrote Xaden being called ‘Dain Aetos.’
She loved expanding the world in Onyx Storm and had the most fun writing those scenes.
Someone asked who would be the most competitive at a game night. She said it would be Ridoc, hands down, and that Xaden would absolutely refuse to play.
She is a plotter. She knows every beat of a book before she starts writing and typically has the epigraph and last sentence of each Empyrean series chapter ready before she dives in.
She doesn’t read fan theories or things people write about her on the internet. She absolutely avoids Goodreads, called it a dark place for authors. She doesn’t allow readers to influence the direction of her story.
Her characters come to her fully formed. They “walk into her office” and introduce themselves. She asks them questions to get to know them, writes a one page bio on them, and gets to work. This is exactly how my characters come to me, so I loved this!
While fans don’t influence the storyline, and she has everything plotted, sometimes things shift based on pacing or if she ends up adding a scene at the insistence of a character. She broke the news that a “beloved character” was supposed to die in book three, but because of pacing, they are now a goner in book four. She would give no further hints.
Someone asked if Violet’s compass was really broken. She said “I don’t know, is it?”
Someone else asked if Mira’s gift would be important later on. “Maybe.”
She was asked if we would meet Violet’s second ex. “There are two more books.”
She was asked if she would share the scene her niece was reading in the Instagram story she posted of said niece reading Onyx Storm. She answered, “in like six months” when she felt we were past the spoiler window. She also spoke to having a really hard time with people posting spoilers online ahead of the release.
Book four is going to be a minute. She’s taking some (deserved) time off and will write her next contemporary romance over the next few months. She promised her kids she would spend the summer with them. Once they are back in school, she will open a Word document and see what happens. As of now, she has no deadlines or release dates, which will allow her time and space to write the best version of the story.
She really loves Asher and Lilith’s love story and hinted that there is more to be revealed about the two of them and the things they have done to prepare and protect their children.
As for the rune on Brennan’s hand? “There are two more books.”

It was an absolutely wonderful night. It was my first time attending an author event, and as I sat there, all I could think was, “I want this. I can do this.” Rebecca Yarros has already inspired me so much through her work, but getting to hear her speak lit a fire in me. Hanna and her husband dutifully listened to me talk about writing and dragons and Rebecca all the way home between bites of the Levain Bakery cookie they brought me while they had a little date night down the street from the theater. I think they can both give detailed summaries of Fourth Wing now even though they’ve never cracked the cover!

Rebecca Yarros was the catalyst for my trip to Philadelphia, but the long weekend was exactly what I needed during what’s turning out to be a stressful start to 2025. Hanna and I have been best friends for 10 (!!!) years as of January 2025, and we were both in need of some best friend time. We drank a lot of coffee, explored some fun boutiques in her town (and the QVC outlet), made enchiladas, went through a lot of ginger tea, corralled our four small dogs – two were hers, two were mine – made bracelets, went to Philly… and her and her husband took me skiing for the first time, too! There were tears when I left on Monday to drive back to Knoxville.

If you have an opportunity to spend an evening with Rebbeca Yarros, take it. If you have a chance to spend a long weekend with your best friend? Take it with both hands.

Get inspired. Make the memories.

And stay the course in the virtual ticket line.