![]() ![]() I don’t just mean action, violence, confrontation. I try to find external action that can hook Baru’s conflict and pull it out of her. It’s really easy to get sucked into her head, and to noodle on for paragraphs following her calculations about what every gesture might mean, how it connects to the people she’s scheming against, how those people are influenced by global systems of power. ![]() The second book begins with If something hurts, does that make it true? The first book began with This is the truth. Isn’t some degree of human connection and compassion necessary? What happens when compassion clashes with tactical necessity? That’s a huge part of her conflict in this book, and it’s really the heart of the book’s question. So she fights really hard against the need to reach out, the need to heal. She hates what she’s done, she doesn’t believe she can ever deserve kindness or love, and she’s afraid that if she starts to give herself any slack she’ll become selfish. ![]() ![]() Of course Baru won’t accept this, because she wants to remain utterly focused on her mission. You can’t spend parts of your soul forever you can’t, unless you’re a sociopath, go on alone, bottling up all that grief and anguish inside yourself. I wanted to complicate that logic in the new book. Any time she meets an obstacle in Traitor she can sacrifice something, a person or a piece of herself, to get past it. Seth Dickinson: She hits a wall which she didn’t anticipate, because for the entire first book she’s closed up and cold. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |