Interview: Xavier Llewellyn on "Snowfall"

We decided to celebrate a few of our favorite stories and their writers from 2024, so we asked our friend Plum to do some interviews! And Plum had some fun with it.

​Today Plum is talking to Xavier Llewellyn about their story "Snowfall" from our holiday book, "A Christmas Codex." Enjoy!

Hello! I am Plum, I am going to be interviewing you via text. [ominous robot voice] Please State Your Name and Story for the Record. 
I am Xavier Llewellyn, author of the short story Snowfall, the third story within The Christmas Codex.

What drew you to this series or project initially? 
Genuinely, the fictional worlds depicted within Arcbeatle Press’ books are extraordinarily compelling to me, as through an array of voices, new and old, tell complex and interesting stories — genuine page turners — which include rich and nuanced characters and ideas. I don’t say this as if I’ve a biased motive; my respect and appreciation is truly that of a fan.

I’ve been keeping up with Arcbeatle for a while — having been here since the days of the Cyberon novelisation — and have licensed out some of my own characters and concepts for use in published stories. Now, I’ve always been on the look-out for any opportunities to contribute fully to the projects, and between A Christmas Codex and something else I’m probably not at liberty to discuss, have been perfect for me.

What makes your story different or special? I know that’s a broad question, but work with me here. 
I would consider what makes Snowfall different from the rest of Arcbeatle’s output is that, while it is in continuity with Arcbeatle’s Doctor Who spin-offs (specifically S.I.G.N.E.T.), it isn’t meant to truly be part of any ongoing range so I had the freedom to create an all-new character, Luna Montgomerie, through whom you see the world. I wanted to make Snowfall a character-driven piece, so I explored her bottled trauma and her isolation with her grandfather, Pierre.

I also felt a strong desire for well-written transgender representation. There is barely any in the media as a whole and surprisingly for the worlds of even Doctor Who, there are less than a few dozen. Luna is transfeminine, and I specifically sought to showcase the intricacies of her identity in modern and accurate terms. As someone who is having a lot of introspective thoughts on identity, I’ve tried to pull from my own experiences and ideas, to really give Luna humanity. She’s more than a character to me, really.

I would linger on the fact that this story is also set in Birmingham, a city which despite being the UK’s second largest, is rarely seen in fiction — but you see, Birmingham is still Birmingham and I don’t think anyone deserves to have to suffer going there, let alone having to learn about it. (I jest a bit, as admittedly its history is interesting; Sheffield has its steel, Birmingham has cars and jewellery.)



Do you plan things out meticulously or write by the seat of your pants and let the characters guide you? Did your writing process surprise you? 
To say that I plan ahead wouldn’t be… entirely accurate. It’s not that I don’t have notes or a general idea of where I want to take the plot, but I often find that I have interesting premises for stories while having less ideas on how to wrap everything up into a satisfying conclusion. I find that redrafting large chunks does tend to help.

Is there a writer or a creative artist that inspires you? A series? A part of life?
I wouldn’t pin my inspirations on any one person or source. It’s an amalgamation of basically everything I’ve learnt, experienced and read about in my life.

That being said I fell in love with Paul Magrs’s stories years ago, and his holistic perspective that the lives of everyone crossover and intertwine, and how they were incorporated into his fiction, stuck with me. It informed how I write stories a lot.

Snowfall story has a reunion, it has first meetings, it has friendships and it has family. I would assert that there is a rich depth to the connections.

It’s not just Magrs though. I really want to portray characters who have true-to-life experiences, with loss, self doubt and issues, whilst also having the ability to understand something is wrong and want to do something about it. I want to incorporate even a fraction of the crap anyone who isn’t a cisgender white man has to put up with, such as transphobia and queerphobia (although these elements don’t play a significant role in the story they are still brought up). It’s not a good world we live in yet, in spite of its issues, we can move towards a better future.

As I’ve already said, Luna’s characterisation pulls from own experiences. While they only appear briefly, Epsilon is a character named after a young adult novel when I was a little kid when my school was insisting I had to read those Golden Key books, despite them being incredibly simplistic to my level of literacy. I picture Pierre being played by Ralph Fiennes. I could go on and on about the small things but I think I’d be here all day.

Oddity keeps me going. What’s something strange and unusual about your work?
Well, there is definitely something going on with that fizzy drink, Gevity. How on Earth does fruit pop give people the ability to see overwritten versions of time? And what’s with Epsilon? Are they responsible, or are they clearing up the mess someone else made? 

Time will tell.

Speaking of oddities, I have an exceedingly random question for you here. What’s your favorite colour? No, seriously. This used to be very important when we were young, I have to know.
I’ve no good answer. It used to be blue, but that is really linked to gender normativity and in a sense therefore I want to say pink, to rebel from it, but really the colours that I think actually suit me best are forest green, mustard yellow, charcoal black and burnt orange. An intersection of bright and subdued tones.

Writers are often described as having to kill their darlings. Is there anything you had to cut that you wish you didn’t? Anything that didn’t fit quite the way you wanted to?
Apart from the rewritten ending (I’ll get into details about this later), I was able to incorporate everything I wanted to except for one really small thing. The book Luna was reading at the dining room table was meant to be a true crime book about Walter White, the main character of Breaking Bad, to fit in with my overarching idea that that show shares a universe with this one. It didn’t really fit the tone of the story though so I prevented its title from being revealed.

Still canonical that she was reading a book about Walter White though. Fight me.

Do you get writer’s block? 
Sometimes. There’s one story I’m working on that, while I have an idea for its set up, have absolutely zero idea how to actually write the antagonist and how the protagonist defeats them. That story has been bugging me for well over a year.

A similar problem exists with a newer story idea I have, but I think with a bit of brainstorming and workshopping it can work.

Otherwise I mostly get writer’s procrastination. Projects build up and I put them off and I barely scrape by. There is a Jenny Everywhere story I’m working on that I had intended to release over a month ago and I need to rewrite it from the ground up. Whoops.



What’s your dream job? Is it to write a particular thing or is it to do something else entirely?
Really it would just be being an author. And then I’d like to write an equal amount of my own standalone works and tie-in media. Always loved reading and now I have the ability to actually write stories for other people! (If they’re any good remains to be seen, haha.)

I also would’ve liked to be involved in television and film production but alas, education is for the rich and I didn’t fancy going into life-long debt. (Thank you capitalism!)

Do your characters have secrets? Do we know those secrets? 
Pierre definitely has secrets; this story made no secret of that. Pun intended. It makes sense that he does, given he worked for a French organisation that researched strange phenomena over the latter half of the 20th century.

Luna is more tricky. She certainly keeps things internalised, which compounds into her own self doubt, but the causes of this aren’t exactly hidden. Although it wasn't revealed in this story, Luna has gone through experiences she hasn’t confided in anyone else about.

Although Epsilon’s motivations aren’t diegetically secret, they are secrets to the readers currently. You might be able to piece together an idea of what those motivations are through the character’s other appearances, but I will say this: you are looking at an incomplete puzzle.

Basically there are a lot of things that have yet to be revealed. I hope they live up to expectations.

Have you, or any of your characters, seen the 2007 animated feature film The Bee Movie?
I have, multiple times. I, um, actually think the film has a surprisingly progressive environmental theme that showcases how humans abuse animals for industry and profit. Putting aside its façade of jokes, it's actually quite meaningful.


Luna? Yes, she can recite quotes from the film in French.

“‘Travailler à travers elle comme toute émotion: La colère, la jalousie… la convoitise.’ Oh, and! ‘Que diriez-vous d'un pacte de suicide?’”

Pierre? Nope, he has no idea it exists.

“Have I watched a b-movie? I suppose so, I’ve watched late-night television before…”

Gérard? When Luna was little.

“The Bee Movie? I remember that. Wasn’t that the film with the guy from Seinfeld?”

Charles Zoltan? I’d like to imagine he saw it recently when Olivia binged Earth cinema.

“You know, bees aren’t the only animals that are actually capable of speaking English. Cats, for example…”

Epsilon? I can’t imagine how you’d even ask the question. If you did however…

“You have, against all odds and my best efforts, managed to locate and seek an audience with myself to have the imprudence to ask… if I’ve watched a film from that one planet that continues to irritate me? What do you mean, that’s ‘not an answer’? If you know what is good for you, leave this damned place and have the sense to never be in my line of sight again.”

When did you write your first story? Was it when you were young, or was it last year? What do you consider to be your first story? Are you proud of it?
I can’t remember my first; I’ve been writing for fun for years. I’ve many old things I wrote for college and for fun, in varying states of completeness. I also told stories through other means — y’know the Alien Wars cards in my story? They’re my new take on these homemade trading cards I created when I was a little kid. They were just called Alien back then, and I made all sorts of things like a Monopoly clone, a magazine, a card binder, drawings of themed cafes and of in-universe scenes such as the aliens incompetently attacking a building full of Wall-E-like robots.

How much do you redraft your work? It’s often said that writing is rewriting. How many iterations did you go through to bring us what we see now? 
Here we go, I've got a fun answer.

I’ll let you in on a secret: it had a completely different ending.. Originally the story was less than half of its current length, and ended after Pierre left Luna to go to York and she was left in Birmingham, while it snowed. This… wasn’t very good. It didn’t fit with how I had characterised Pierre, and really it was terribly anti-climatic and fast, and didn’t even begin to resolve the emotional arc that I set up with Pierre and Luna.

So I basically rewrote it so much the story doubled in length, and — putting myself in the shoes of a reader — thought about what I would find actually enjoyable to read. That’s how the story came to include Luna taking Pierre to her home, where the uncomfortable truth that neither Luna or Gérard (Luna’s Dad) were not handling the death of Luna’s Mum healthily at all, leading to Pierre’s resolve to help however he could. I am far prouder of this ending and I hope that Arcbeatle’s readers prefer it too.

I don’t regret it at all.

Otherwise the first half of the story remained, in broad strokes, the same as the original draft, but refined and pruned to ensure it was “up to snuff”.

A27 / the Warsong and Cwej both have storied and detailed backgrounds. How familiar are you with their prior work? Is there another piece with these characters that you particularly enjoy?
Admittedly the Arcbeatle works I am most familiar with belonged to the P.R.O.B.E. and Cyberon ranges. Cyberon was honestly really damn good and I remember how hard it was to put down, one time, when I was on a train leaving Birmingham, coincidentally enough. Bit unfortunate about this post-BBV, but my enjoyment of those remains unmitigated.

As for A27, I’m about 3/5s of the way through And Today, You and Sang Mi is someone that needs to be protected at all costs. And I don’t like the fact that the book is set some years before a major war, if I’m not mistaken. Nothing bad can happen to her, right?

I’ve read more stories with Chris Cwej. I’ve entered the series in probably not the best way, as I have actually never read any of the Virgin New Adventures nor listened to any of the Big Finish Productions audio dramas that feature the character; my first story with Chris was Arcbeatle’s A Bright White Crack. Felt a bit like I had jumped in at the deep end but I ended up enjoying the story regardless. Since then, I’ve read an odd assortment of stories with the character, although I have still yet to attempt any main entries in Cwej: The Series.

Is your story exactly as you imagined it? Is it different?
Well, as I said before, I rewrote the ending after technically finishing Snowfall so I would say it's a safe bet that it wasn’t as anticipated.


Can the main character of your story defeat seventeen rabid wolves? The wolves are hungry.
Not sure how exactly it would go down, but considering that werewolf fiction is very queer coded (wolves, werewolves, tomato tomato) Luna would distract a pack of seventeen rabid, hungry wolves with oestrogen supplements. She’d figure something out. Besides, there are no wild wolves in the United Kingdom.

She’d be fine.

Which character do you have the hardest time understanding? The least?
I feel writing Charles Zoltan was the hardest. As he is a character I haven’t created, I had to work with James Hornby to ensure his characterisation was consistent with his vision. Then there is Pierre, who I wouldn’t necessarily say I struggled with — I have a clear idea of what he is like, personality wise — but as he worked for C.R.U.X., a creation of Aristide Twain, I’ve comparable feelings to Zoltan. I just want to make sure I don’t muddle things up.

Luna was much easier, as she is my own creation, and similarly with Epsilon, although there are still parts of their backstory I’ve yet to quite pin down.

Is there a message you’d like to tell the world?
Many, really. But I’m not sure whether going into a tirade about the state of global politics and the harm that is being committed against everyone by the powerful, is entirely appropriate or wanted here. I’ll just say “be empathetic, the rights of minorities do matter and don’t stand for oppression. Don’t give up and don’t give them what they want”.

Otherwise, I really hope everyone enjoyed Snowfall and the rest of A Christmas Codex. I’m really proud of how everyone came together to make this book possible and, frankly, it's a soulful and fun collection.

Also, drink Gevity.

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Read "SNowfall" Here!