Fourth Wing Author Rebecca Yarros on What to Expect From ‘Onyx Storm’
Rebecca Yarros is going to take some time off. Really. When we speak, the best-selling 'romantasy' author is planning a getaway with her husband. 'I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself,' she admits. Yarros is the epitome of a cool millennial mum, her blonde hair tinged with fuchsia streaks. She has also gotten to the level of busyness where you don’t even remember what free time feels like.
Ever since her first New York Times bestseller, Fourth Wing—the initial installment of her Empyrean series, which centers on cadets in military training, set in a fantasy world complete with dragons—broke out in 2023, she’s become a success story in an industry where success stories are fewer and farther between. The latest book in the series, Onyx Storm, comes out this month. Amazon MGM Studios is developing the series for TV, with none other than Michael B. Jordan set to produce, while Netflix is adapting her romance novel In the Likely Event.
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Growing up as an army brat who moved frequently, Yarros was an early convert to genre fiction. Books have always been 'my safe place', she says, even as the landscape around her changed. By age 12, she was reading historical romance novels by Jude Deveraux, plus 'all the things I probably shouldn’t have been'. Seventeen years later, she wrote her first book, a fantasy novel. It landed her an agent, but the project never found a publisher; it 'died on submission, which happens more than I think people want to talk about in publishing', Yarros says.
She got back behind the keyboard when her husband, who served in the U.S. Army for 22 years, was deployed to Afghanistan. 'He’d already been seriously injured once,' she says, 'and I needed to process some emotions.' Full Measures, a military romance, was her literary debut, and she entered the uneasy ranks of what the book world calls the 'midlist'. 'It’s wild. I almost quit,' she says. 'When I was writing Fourth Wing, I felt like I hadn’t found my ideal readership. I had the people who loved me, but I wasn’t growing. And in publishing, you’re either growing or you’re declining, right?' Yarros is a fast talker, her words clattering like Jenga blocks, her pace clearing the speed bumps of her emotions. 'I remember how often I’ve been told, "This is the book that’ll break you out." And it wasn’t, and it is devastating for someone who suffers with depression to keep hearing, "This is the book," when this is not the book.'
The popularity of Fourth Wing, which has sold over three million copies globally, has dovetailed with the rise of romantasy and a reappraisal of romance more generally. The genre has graduated from purple prose and waterlogged covers to Kindle smut and hipster bookstores like Brooklyn’s The Ripped Bodice. 'I like romance because I’ve been in love with the same guy since I was 19. That’s it; he’s it. We have six kids. But when I read a romance, I can fall in love over and over and over. It’s the same brain chemicals,' she says. 'So even though I’m in a very happy marriage, I can slip into a romance novel and get a boost of those endorphins.'
'Romance is this beautiful place where women get to say on the page what we want, what we deserve, what healthy relationships should look like. [It’s about] destigmatising what a woman feels she’s worth.' For those who get upset about the amount of sex in Fourth Wing, 'I always have to laugh. I’m like, "Okay, well if you’re more worried about the sex, I understand, but there’s murder. There’s a lot of murder." I would hope that people who are 20 to 25, in that "new adult" age range it’s written for, are having more sex than murders.'
Perhaps the biggest booster of romantasy has been BookTok, the TikTok hashtag that boasts 41.3 million posts. 'BookTok is amazing because it’s putting the power back in the readers’ hands,' she says. 'Watching Fourth Wing get picked up by influencers was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. I still don’t think I’ve grasped the immensity of it. At the same time, hoo dog—social media is like living in a hall of mirrors, and no one should look at themselves that often.'
Yarros ended up exiting the hall of mirrors, leaving TikTok entirely almost a year ago. Before that, she’d tried blocking her name and her hashtag so she could watch her preferred content, 'baby goats and Highland cows and quick bursts of dopamine,' but it wasn’t enough. 'It would be like, baby cow, baby pig, baby cat, "We love your book." "We love your book," baby goat, "We hate your book." "We hate you, we hate your kids."'
Being more offline has given Yarros time to focus on her writing. She says she doesn’t really pay attention to fan theories or online speculation. When she sits down at her desk, she says, 'I lock in.' She calls the time between 10 P.M. and 2 A.M. her 'golden hours', and this semi-nocturnal schedule allows her to spend time with her kids and attend their hockey games. Still, writing Fourth Wing was, she says, 'probably the most unhealthy process I’ve ever put myself through in my life'. When I note that her 12- to 15-hour-a-day writing regimen sounds Olympic-level, she jokes, “Except you don’t move.”
Though her husband is now retired from the military, war is always at the back of her mind—and often in her plotlines. Her husband was seriously injured in Iraq. 'It changed our lives dramatically,' she says, 'watching him go through four combat deployments in wars that you’re not really allowed to question as a spouse. You’re just there to support your soldier and to make sure that your husband comes home. [Then] you start to examine things.' Every time he was deployed, she worried he was never going to return. 'You start looking at, "What are we doing and why are we going and why is this happening?" We’ve buried our friends. One of our friends was recently critically wounded. And it leads you to wonder why we do this to each other.' With her depictions of war in her writing, she wants to 'make people ask the same question—not only in Fourth Wing, as we’re sending 20-year-olds across a parapet where death is imminent—but to pull that question out of the book.' Military spouses often come up to talk to her about books like Full Measures. 'Some men will talk to me about Fourth Wing, which I love. It cracks me up. I’m like, "Yes! We brought the men to romantasy."'
When Yarros was a kid curled up with her fantasy novels, she never saw someone like herself between their covers. The heroine 'was physically well and ready for this challenge. Or girls who were already warriors in their own right. And I wasn’t. There were days I couldn’t move and didn’t understand why.' Yarros didn’t get a diagnosis until her children started experiencing similar symptoms. It turned out she had both Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder, and POTS, a blood circulation disorder that can cause dizziness and fainting, among other symptoms. She suffers from vestibular migraines, during which she experiences throbbing headaches, nausea, and light sensitivity. 'There was a year when my vestibular migraines and my POTS flares just played with each other. I thought I was dying,' she says. 'I told my husband, "Have my body autopsied." And I was just living for the next MRI, the next lumbar puncture.'
In the midst of her distress, she also began to question whether her dream would be out of reach. 'I had to ask myself, "What does this mean for the rest of my life? What does this mean for tours? For my writing schedule? For the amount of time I can spend at a computer?"' She was inspired by watching her sons navigate their own health challenges. 'I thought, "If they can do that, I can do this." I went to my publisher and said, "I want her to have what I have."' Giving Fourth Wing’s main character, Violet, chronic conditions that Yarros has confirmed are EDS and POTS 'was kind of a gamble. We don’t see a lot of successful books that have chronic illness represented. And I was just dying for that one moment where the girl who’s the weakest and breaks constantly and can’t do everything everyone else can—when that power flips.'
Now, when she does an event, 'I can say, "Who in here has a chronic illness?" and all these hands go up.' Disabled readers have seen themselves represented in Yarros’s pages, with one fan even dressing her service dog as a 'service dragon' in tribute to Fourth Wing. Yarros has also been open about the way chronic illness has impacted her career. On tour in Sydney, she experienced a vestibular migraine attack and a POTS flare. 'I was crawling across my hotel floor because I couldn’t stand up, and I had to be onstage in three hours,' she says. Her sister, who travels with her, was on hand. 'She’s the older sister; she’s kind of mean,' Yarros says affectionately. 'And she’ll be like, "We’re leaving now." We had to use every rescue med and every technique I could possibly do to get on that stage. You can see the pictures: My shoulders are curved in, and it’s because I didn’t know how we got to where I could walk. We had to miss sound check, and I felt so guilty. All I could think was, "Okay, you missed sound check, but you didn’t cancel the event." But also, "Man, I hope you give normal, intelligent answers. I hope your brain hasn’t quit on you. There are hundreds of cell phones aimed in your direction."'
Cut to today, as Yarros prepares for her vacation. 'I’ve been really clear that I’m going to rest now,' she tells me. Between the writing and touring, 'I drove my body to a place that was untenable, and I knew it, and my family knew it, and my husband knew it, and it shouldn’t have happened. I shouldn’t have allowed it to happen.” When she returned from her most recent tour and turned in Onyx Storm, the third novel in the projected five-book series, she says, she decided to just tune out the questions about what was coming up next on the conveyor belt and take a break.
She’s tight-lipped about the Amazon series. ('I’m so new to this industry. I will Tom Holland it,' she jokes, referencing the famously spoiler-prone actor.) And no, she has not yet met Jordan. 'I’d probably just keel over and die.'
She has a bit more to tease about Onyx Storm, though. 'Fans can expect to see Violet with one singular motivation, which is to save Xaden. You’re going to follow the implications of what’s been revealed in Iron Flame, and you’re going to see Andarna very curious about where she comes from. I think that’s the biggest thing I can tease before a publisher jumps out and tackles me to the floor.'
Amid all the reading and sleeping she plans to do on her break, Yarros says she’ll be putting things away in her house, 'because I don’t know where our light switches are yet'. She has a casual way of sandwiching in new information, so it takes a second for me to process when she explains, 'People found our old house and scared our kids, so we had to move, and I didn’t get a chance to put anything away because I was in the middle of a deadline.' Ever since she was 10 years old, scrawling her byline on notebook spines, Yarros has wanted to be an author, and she’s thrilled to have her dream job. 'At the same time, I think of the look on my son’s face when things started arriving at our doorstep. And I immediately regretted writing the book. Immediately.'
When Chappell Roan spoke out this past summer about setting boundaries with fans, Yarros burst into tears of recognition. 'I think a lot of people are scared to say it, because we don’t want to look ungrateful. And it’s not that we’re ungrateful, but it’s so overwhelming,' she says. 'In my experience, it hasn’t been the readers who cross boundaries. It’s been people like resellers. I’ve had people stalk my incoming flights. I’ve gotten off a flight, and people have been waiting with books, hoping that I would sign them so they could resell them.
'It’s a shock. You handle it the best you can. Unless I have my children with me: [Then] I am not going to play. I’m not going to put my kid in that position. And it’s happened with one of my children, where we were found at an airport. The person knew we were coming, and my son was like, "This isn’t okay." And I said, "I know. I’m sorry." Or people find my kids’ social media. That’s probably been the hardest.'
Yarros admires the way Roan drew a line in the sand. 'She has a strength that I wish I’d had in the last year and a half. When she canceled her performances [at the All Things Go festival in September], all I could think about was crawling across the floor in Sydney and knowing we had to try every single thing to get the world to stop rocking so I could go onstage. The most healthy answer would’ve been, "I can’t do this tonight." And I didn’t say it. So I really admire that she did.
'Especially when we skyrocket this fast, I always feel like it’s women who get the hate piled on them, at least in author world. There should be a way to say, "Hey, I’m not okay." If we don’t take care of ourselves, there won’t be any more books.'
Lately, Yarros has been spending time in her garden, where plants behave more predictably than people. She signed up to receive text messages when it needs to be watered: 'I named it Reb’s Mental Health, and it’ll send these texts like, "How long since you checked in on Reb’s Mental Health?" And I’m like, "I know. Be quiet."'
And every so often, she gets a reminder of just how far her imagination has taken her. While on tour in New Zealand, she told her publicist, 'I just want to see the Shire.' The mental landscape Yarros had conjured and committed to paper had now propelled her all the way around the world, allowing her to stride right into J. R. R. Tolkien’s dreamscape. She and her sister were 'taking the most ridiculous pictures in the Hobbit doors and just soaking it up because it’s the Shire. How do you not?' she says. 'Again: raised on nerdy books.'
A version of this story appears in the February 2025 issue of ELLE US.
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