Starside
Starside
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Alex Aster on Starside
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A secret kept from everyone, including her publisherAfter Lightlark became a #1 New York Times bestseller, Aster had a large audience waiting on her next move. She found that kind of attention reshaping the act of writing itself, and she needed a way back to something earlier and quieter. The solution was to hide the project entirely: her publisher and most of her team did not know Starside existed while she was writing it.
I really just wanted to keep it mine for as long as possible, and go back to that place of me being 12 years old in my bedroom, just me and the page and just no one looking over my shoulder and writing exactly what I wanted to read. The story meant so much to me that I wanted to go back to that simplicity.
The secrecy went further than simply not mentioning the project. When she finally told her agent, the reference she reached for was Midnight Sun, Stephenie Meyer’s long-suppressed companion novel to Twilight, famously leaked and shelved for years before publication. The comparison signals less a fear of theft than a fear of exposure collapsing the private space the writing required.
When I told my agent about it, I was like, If anyone finds out I’m writing this, it might be my Midnight Sun.
The desire to write adult romantasy had been accumulating in fragments before the pieces locked into place. She had notes about sword magic, a deadly quest, an older protagonist. But the world became real at a specific moment in a specific room, while she was still in the middle of the Lightlark series.
I was walking through [the Met] and I saw these gorgeous giant gates, and I had already had Starside in my mind, and the moment I saw them... I saw it and I was like, I know my story. The gates are a huge part of the book. It’s the quest, it’s like the world.
She announced the book to the public six months before publication, an extremely short lead time by industry standards. Even after selling it to HarperCollins, she asked the publisher to stay quiet.
How she wrote it
Five hundred pages and years of early morningsShe described the role Starside played in her mental life during the years she was producing Lightlark sequels for a waiting readership. The book was not a side project so much as a pressure valve, written in the margins of her public schedule.
Writing has always been the only escape I have mentally. It’s the only thing that will quiet my anxiety, like I just need to plunge into a world. And so it really was kind of therapeutic for me to have something in between that series — that has such a large readership — to just write something for me.
Turning 30 while working on the book changed how she understood what she was building. The shift in her own life clarified the difference between Isla, the inexperienced protagonist of Lightlark, and Aris, the adult woman at the center of Starside, and shaped where the opening line came from.
This book starts with the line, ‘This will kill me,’ and she knows that she’s diving head first into something that she should not survive, and she’s okay with that. It was different because in YA, I was writing a character who transforms so much book to book. Aris definitely will transform throughout the series, but in a way that an adult does.
Aris, the protagonist, is a character built around contradictions that Aster found technically demanding to hold in balance across more than 500 pages. The emotional weight of those scenes had a cost she did not fully anticipate when she began.
Aris was also a complicated character to write since she holds so much female rage while also being enchanted by the magical world of Starside. She is unprepared and brave, reckless and strategic. She also feels very deeply. I cried a lot writing certain parts of this book because, in some ways, I felt very connected to her. She goes through a lot, and at times, it was hard for me to write those emotional scenes.
At over 500 pages, Starside is the longest book she has written, and the drafting and revision process stretched across years of sessions fitted around her Lightlark obligations. She described the experience in terms that echo the book’s own central premise: a quest with no guaranteed survival.
I’ve said that writing this book felt like its own quest. There were surprises, roadblocks, breakthroughs, and times where I had to start over. It was a journey I was excited to return to every single day for years, and I’m so glad it’s now out in the world.
On the Kelly Clarkson Show she placed adult romantasy, the genre she was working in for the first time, against the YA she had built her career on. The distinction mattered for what she let herself write into Aris that she could not have written into Isla.
I knew I wanted to write about a deadly quest. I knew I wanted to write about sword magic, an adult book. But it all really came together a few years ago. And then I was like, can I even publish this? And so when Lightlark took off, I was like, okay I love that but I want to do adult.
What she wants us to sit with
Inner growth, not reinventionShe drew a deliberate line between the kind of transformation Starside traces and the self-discovery arc common to YA. Aris, Starside’s protagonist, begins the book already knowing who she is. What the quest forces her to confront is older and more settled than identity.
This isn’t necessarily like a self-discovery. She knows who she is, but it’s inner growth. She’s kind of growing past some stuff that she’s held really close to her heart for a while. She has a lot of female rage, but she’s also very kind and loves the magic of Starside.
She considered not publishing Starside at all. When she finally decided to release it, after years of private drafting and real uncertainty about whether the book should leave her hands, what she was left with was something close to a statement about where her writing actually comes from.
It’s my favorite book I’ve ever written. I cried when I wrote a lot of parts. It really means a lot – I truly feel like this is the story that just comes from my soul.