Daniel José Older is no stranger to the weird and fantastical. As the author of sixteen novels and one of the key story architects for Star Wars: The High Republic, the newest addition to everyone’s favorite galaxy far, far away, Older has certainly kept his hands busy as a writer of fantasy and science fiction, and now it’s once again time for him to strike out on his own, this time as a part of Rick Riordan Presents, a Disney Publishing banner that promotes and spotlights authors from underrepresented cultures and backgrounds.

Ballad & Dagger, the first in a two-book duology, follows Mateo Matisse, a young teenager who feels like he doesn’t fit in even in a crowd of misfits. Just one of many displaced to New York City after his island homeland of San Madrigal sunk below the sea, Mateo — a musical prodigy — feels out of place, having continent-hopped with his parents instead of immersing himself in the colorful, diverse roots of his community, and, like any other sixteen-year-old, wants nothing more than to feel like he belongs.

All Mateo wants is to catch the eye of his musical idol, Gerval, and escape Little Madrigal to travel the world, but when he witnesses something grim the night of his one chance, things quickly spiral out of control, opening up doors the young boy didn’t even realize existed, and pulling him into a world beyond his wildest dreams, filled with magic and mythology and menace. Teaming with the enigmatic (and dangerous) Chela Hidalgo, Mateo must unravel deadly secrets about his and his homeland’s past, uncovering and mastering a power deep within him that could hold the secret to survival for he and those he loves. But all magic comes with a price, and Mateo is tasked with something much larger than himself — something he may be inexplicably tied to whether he likes it or not.

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Image via Disney Publishing

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During this one-on-one interview with Collider, Older discussed where the ideas for Ballad & Dagger came from — the real-life inspiration for Little Madrigal, as well as ideas from within himself — as well as the novel’s unique and powerful magic system, and what comes next for the power within Mateo. Check out the full interview below, and be sure to pick up a copy of Ballad & Dagger wherever you get your books.

COLLIDER: So I know you've already achieved fairly big acclaim with your work. You're a story architect on Star Wars: The High Republic, which is also very fantastic, but what does it feel like to have this story, your own universe, working with Disney Publishing to publish something completely your own?

DANIEL JOSÉ OLDER: Oh man. It's so... It's really amazing, especially because this story is very much me on so many different levels, and also I feel like it's a story I've been writing my whole life in a lot of ways, and then just all the cool, fun mythological elements. So all that coming together just makes it feel very, very me, and in that way it's sort of different from the collaborative process, which I also love a lot. The sweet spot is having both and getting to jump back and forth between Star Wars, a galaxy that I've played in my whole life, literally with action figures when I was a kid, and then this world, which I feel like I was kind of playing in my imagination my whole life as well, but in a very different way.

That's fantastic. I know you've described Ballad & Dagger as the “book of your heart”. Is that sort of what that feels like, to have something that's so completely yours?

OLDER: Yeah, it's that. I just dug deep for Mateo and for his world and for his community. People I love are in there, and parts of myself that I don't love are in there, mistakes I've made. He's better at piano than I am, but certainly just his love of music and his trajectory as a healer, all those are just things I really pulled from deep within myself and gave to the page.

I love that, and you can feel it in the writing as well. I know writers always describe themselves as like, when you're writing your characters are just kind of tiny pieces you break off of yourself and give names. And you really feel that in there, you really feel like the community is sort of real.

OLDER: Right.

And on that note, were there any specific real world things you researched to come up with San Madrigal? Because it's this beautiful, rich community that you feel like, if you went out and you searched for it, you'd find it sort of hiding in a corner in a city somewhere. Was there anything specific that you researched for that, other than obviously the Jewish and Santero elements of it?

OLDER: Yeah, there was a lot of book research and also just talking to people research over the stuff that you would imagine. I read a lot about pirates. I read a lot about Jewish presence in the Caribbean over the colonial years, and the Inquisition itself, and Sephardic history and philosophy. And as a Santero, I also just did a lot of my own work in that and also talked to lots of people and researched that.

But specifically beyond all those things, actually yes. There is a neighborhood in Brooklyn that is very much the inspiration, the lived inspiration of Little Madrigal. And it's exactly where Little Madrigal is. It's over in that area of Brooklyn that's getting towards Queens, where no one's really sure if they're in Brooklyn or Queens at any point, and it's under the tracks on Fulton Street. It's a Latino community, and there's tons of bakeries and all night music spots and just amazing food. I used to work there on [an] ambulance, so we would pass through all the time. And I would work the graveyard shift, and I would stop at these Dominican restaurants to get coffee, or Ecuadorian bakeries or whatever. And there was a mix of people and really different folks, but also really coming together and forming this really vibrant community.

And most of all, I remember the music because it's very — I guess what you would call off the map in certain [gentrified] terms, like off the beaten path or whatever. But there's such a vibrant music scene, and you would just walk into any bar, and there would be an accordion player or a pianist or someone on keys or whatever, or a whole group jamming. And I loved it. It was just so amazing to stumble on music like that. And I just felt like, wow, this is this amazing place that I feel really at home at even though I'm an outsider, and those different levels were kind of real.

I love that. And going back to the musical aspect of it, I was really fascinated by the magic system in this book, because this magic system is...obviously when you invent one it's so, so complicated, but for Mateo, it all comes back to that adoration of music. Was that where you started with the magic system? Was it all built into that, or as you were developing the story and the arc and Mateo as a character, did that sort of come later?

OLDER: That came later. I had the two pieces together. I knew Mateo was always going to be a musician and a healer, and those were kind of [the intentions] in his life. That was sort of the heart of the novel in terms of his character development. I didn't realize how beautifully they would intertwine until I got to that point, and I was like, “He needs to connect to this magic better.” That moment when Chela is — I think it's Chela, who's like, use music, and it felt like her telling me that too, in a way. Like I needed that kind of wisdom, to be like, oh, that's how he connects to the magic, [it’s] through music. His powers are all through his love of music, so it makes sense. And that's when everything really came together.

That's fantastic. And I know I love, as part of the process of writing, sometimes you're frustrated about something, and it's like, I don't control these characters. They just do the things and they tell me how to do this. So it's funny to hear that that's how it sort of worked out.

OLDER: Yeah. I always think of it as a conversation, right? The characters sometimes want to do their own thing, and that's always a great moment because they're alive. But on the other hand, sometimes you have to wrangle them back to the story, and it can be hard. The other example I have of that is Tia Lucia, who fully came to life on her own. And I felt like she was teaching me things, like with the Chela moment. There's things that she says in that book that I'm like, man, that's really smart. With no ego. I'm not proud of them, because I feel like that was all her.

Yeah, these are…almost real people in that sense.

OLDER: Exactly.

I wanted to go back to Chela for a second. You described this book as your most romantic book to date, and I obviously don't want to spoil anything for your readers, but can you talk a little bit about building that and what that means for Mateo and Chela going forward?

OLDER: I just always knew that the heart of this book was their love, and the tension between them too, and their differences, and them figuring out what that means to be the entities that they are, and have the powers they have and live in the world that they live in, and how to navigate that together or apart, with each other or against each other. And that immediately was such an intriguing idea to play with. The idea of healing, this healing — someone who has healing powers, a healer, and someone who has destroying powers…how do they get along? But the whole concept of the book, the beating heart of the book, is the idea of opposites walking hand in hand. And so the deeper theme really clicked with the surface romance. And then it was just sort of about playing that out and seeing where it would take me, which was really fun.

I haven't sat down to write a book that I was like, this is going to be really romantic, right? There's love interests in my books, and certainly in Midnight Horizon there's a number of them. But with this book, I was like, this is going to be the story of their love as much as it's the story of one young man coming into his powers and a community being torn apart and everything else, and this mystical island. The heart of this book is their love, and figuring out how to make that work was really the challenge of the book.

Yeah. I think the entire time, really, at least for me reading it, that was sort of what was pushing me through was, oh, I need to see how they resolve this relationship and then you get to the end, and you're like, oh, this is the most satisfying thing. This is exactly where I wanted this to go. So reading that, it was like, oh, I didn't realize this, but this is exactly where this book needed to go. And I think it all comes back around in sort of a perfect circle. So I'm really excited to see where the second book goes in that sense.

OLDER: I'm putting the finishing touches on it now, and I can tell you that...things really do take off immediately from the last beat of the first book and escalate very quickly and very dramatically. And I will tell you this, it's a much more intense book than I even set out to write. It really took on a life of its own, and it went to much darker places than I imagined it would, and I love it for that.

I saw you on Twitter, you were talking about calling it just “Book Two: The Sequel”, and now that sort of makes sense.

OLDER: I'm truly stumped on a name still, but that's all right. I have to finish it first.

Names are always the worst part, yeah. But I was wondering, a large part of the story of Ballad & Dagger is about kind of finding your own identity even when you feel isolated from everything, when you've lost your history, when you feel like you don't have a place in your history. Like Mateo feels because he was so far removed from Little Madrigal growing up. Was that an intentional thread that you chased, or was that just something that happened, that came about as Mateo came about as a character and as you developed his world?

OLDER: It was a little bit of both. I'm always writing, [and] especially when I'm writing for young people, I always end up writing characters who are finding their own powers, in part because I think young people most of all need to find their own powers. Whether it's their voice or their skills or their destiny or what have you, it's just such an important journey for a young person to go on. And there's so many voices telling them that they don't deserve power, or they don't have the right yet, or they haven't earned it, or all these other lies. And they really are amazing people. They change the world so much, and there's so much for them to do, and they are so powerful. And so I just want them to walk away from my books with a sense of their own power, by seeing it, seeing the journeys of other young people finding their power.

So that's almost a given when I start out a book, that there's some element of that, not always intentionally. But a lot of Mateo's struggles with sort of finding home…I wove them in throughout the process, including to some extent late in the game as I was realizing different things about Mateo, and that's also stuff that's really close to my heart for sure.

And then finally I'll say, I think there's a major piece of this book that's about realizing the lie of history. Even the histories that are supposed to be rebellious are sometimes caught up in the same forms of oppression that we see all around us today. And what do you do when you find out so much of what you thought was great was a lie, is a lie? And how much do you start over? How much do you do your best anyway? There's no simple answer to that, so those are a lot of the questions I wanted to struggle with on the page of Ballad & Dagger.

I think you did that really effectively, so congratulations.

OLDER: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Just as one last question, is there anything else you'd like to impart on us, about the book or San Madrigal or anything else?

OLDER: Definitely that last piece I think is just really important is…it’s really a book that's asking the question about, “how do we move forward given where we've been?” And that's a question for all of us, I think. There was so much going on in the world around me as I was writing this book, and you see that in the pages very clearly, I think. And so I hope people find hope in it and also find anger in it, and find love in it, and figure out what their path forward is.