Chapter Fourteen (Spoilers Hidden)

Shuden’s comments on marriage early in this chapter have often earned me smiles and jibes from my friends. An author puts a little of himself into every character he crafts, and sometimes we find a particular character being our voice in one way or another. I’ll admit, the way marriage is treated in this book does have a little bit of a connection to my own personal thoughts on the subject. It isn’t that I’m avoiding the institution. . .I just find the formalities leading up to it to be a dreadful pain.

I had a bit of trouble in this book devising personalities for all of the noblemen who would be hanging around Sarene. Some of them, such as Shuden, don’t get very much screen time, and so it was a challenge to make them interesting and distinctive. In the end, however–after several drafts–I had their characters down so well that when my agent suggested cutting one of them, I just couldn’t do it. So, perhaps there are a few too many names–but this is a political intrigue book. Lots of people to keep track of is a good thing.

Interestingly, one of the noblemen most important to the plot didn’t appear very often in the original draft. Telrii was a much more minor character in the first versions of the book. As you’ll see later, however, he has an important role to play.

So, this addition of Telrii in the party scene was one of the more later revisions to the book. He showed up in draft eight or nine, and I’m glad to have him. He finally has a character–in the first drafts of the book, he was a non-entity. Spoken of occasionally, but really only in the book to show how much money Hrathen was willing to spend on overthrowing Arelon.

Another interesting moment in this scene is Sarene’s idiocy act. There’s actually a good story behind this plotting device. I’ve always enjoyed this style of plot–where a character intentionally makes people underestimate them. You can see a similar plotting structure (pulled off quite a bit better) in my book THE WAY OF KINGS. (It should be published around 2008 or so. . . .) Anyway, some of my favorite plots of this type are found in HAMLET and DRAGON PRINCE (by Melanie Rawn.)

Sarene’s own act, however, plays a much smaller role in the book than I’d originally intended. I soon discovered that I’d either have to go with it full-force–having her put on a very believable show for everyone around her–or I’d have to severely weaken it in the plot. I chose the second. There just wasn’t a reason, in the political climate I created for the book, to have Sarene pretend to be less intelligent than she was. (The original concept–though this never made it to drafting–was to have her pretend to be less intelligent because of how many times she’d been burned in the past with people finding her overbearing and dominant.)

I decided I liked having her personality manifest the way it is. The only remnant of the original feigning comes in the form of this little trick she plays on Iadon to try and manipulate him. Even this, I think, is a stretch–and it has annoyed a couple of readers. Still, it doesn’t play a large part in the plot, and I think it does lead to some interesting moments in the story, so I left it in.