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gold_piece, me too: Best I've managed is a kiddo-shaped blur climbing over the book on his way to get to my camera.

 Okay, as promised, here is the story of how Lesser Evils came to be:

This is not the sequel I intended to write.

While I was finishing Brimstone Angels, I had a lunch meeting with my editor, Nina to start talking about the sequels. I had a list of things that I wanted to happen and approximately which book I thought they would fall into (at this point I had two books contracted, with the potential for more). Nina looked at it, told me that this sounded cool…but they had another idea. They wanted a book that brought the Harpers back to prominence in the current timeline, and tied into things they were planning with Zhentarim. I could say no, and write the sequel I was pitching, but if I wrote this Harpers book, there was a good chance my book would get more attention. And let’s be honest,  what author doesn’t want that! She told me that my third book could be the sequel, no problem. So you might have been reading a totally new story, possibly using this thread to demand where the heck the next Brimstone Angels book was.

But it so happened that right before this meeting, I’d made Tam a Harper in Brimstone Angels to use the NWCG background (in the first draft, he had just been an unspecified spy). So while I was trying to think of a new idea, I kept coming back to Tam. And I realized I really wanted to figure out a way to make this work as a Harper themed book and as a sequel. I had a scene I was really stuck on, of Farideh in a library trying to find a way to pull Lorcan out of the Hells, so I started there, and eventually rebuilt my story to accommodate this new adventure.

I figured out I could push out that planned sequel and fill in the gap with this little side adventure. It would mean solving some of the plot threads differently than I’d planned, but I am nothing if not adaptable! It definitely made me work harder to fit the two ideas together, but I think in the end it pushed me to write something a lot more interesting.

Jan 8, 2013 -- 4:13PM, hawkinsthedm wrote:

Kind of sad. I just picked up both Brimstone Angels and BA: Lesser Evils, and I do not think that I will have enough time to read BA before I need to start BA:LE for this.

So it obviously depends on what's going on in your life...but I have it on good authority that BA is a pretty quick read if you're not pacing yourself. A few days, a week tops. So if you want to sprint for it, you could catch up pretty quick.  But I always check back if there are late questions, so if you do read it later and want to ask something, that's okay.  

 

Jan 8, 2013 -- 7:04PM, trebor_rjf wrote:

This is really more of a writerly question, but I noticed that you don't use italics for internal thoughts. Is that a stylistic choice, or is there a more technical reason behind it?

That's WotC's house style. The technical reason is that italics are reserved for psionic speech. Because it's possible to have a scenario where you're intermixing direct thought and direct psionic speech, they have to be distinct, and they need to be clear and uncluttered.

For example, in the Eberron series Thorn of Breland*, the title character has a sentient dagger for a sidekick. The dagger communicates with her via psionic speech, but she cannot speak psionically and so has to speak aloud to him. That also means she has her own thoughts while they're talking, which he isn't privy to. It ends up looking like this.

Are you even listening to me? the sentient dagger said.
"Of course," the spy replied.
How could I possibly ignore your nagging? she thought to herself. 

If the style was to italicize thoughts, there would be points where it wasn't clear if the main character was thinking to herself or speaking to the dagger. It could create unnecessary confusion.
 
IT does mean you have to attribute the thought almost every time, so that it's distinct from the rest of the text, but the alternatives for psionic speech--<>, *Or this*, Or this--are really just distracting looking, IMO.   


*Which is by Keith Baker and is very good. STarts with The Queen of Stone. You should read it, only not now.   

Jan 8, 2013 -- 10:33AM, ErinMEvans wrote:

MAYHEM.

...somehow, I thought this might be coming when I saw the question.


Back onto the literary note, there is something I have asked of other authors that always intrigues me... so I am going to be cheeky and ask it of your too, Erin!

When creating characters, do they come to you fully formed or in a more fragmentary fashion? I mean do you sit down and suddenly someone like Tam arrives in your brain, or does the name/species/important scene containing this character arrive first and you build outward from that?

Jan 9, 2013 -- 5:48AM, Iluvrien wrote:

 Back onto the literary note, there is something I have asked of other authors that always intrigues me... so I am going to be cheeky and ask it of your too, Erin!

When creating characters, do they come to you fully formed or in a more fragmentary fashion? I mean do you sit down and suddenly someone like Tam arrives in your brain, or does the name/species/important scene containing this character arrive first and you build outward from that?

Okay, this is going to sound potentially pretentious, so brace yourselves: There's a story that the Pope, after marveling at Michaelangelo's The David asked how he managed it. And that Michaelangelo replied, “It’s simple. I just remove everything that doesn’t look like David.” So that's probably completely apocryphal, but the idea that the creation is lurking in the medium is a powerful one, and I think it sort of speaks to my process. More often than not, I don't start with the whole character, but I usually end up with the sense that the character exists whole cloth, I just can't see parts of it yet.

Tam is an excellent example of this. He first appeared in the short story "The Resurrection Agent" for Realms of the Dead (Which is here if you haven't read it yet; this will make more sense). Originally, I started that story with the idea of a repeatedly resurrected warrior carrying his patron's dead body back to it's final resting place. I had this idea I could mix the loopholes of the resurrection spell with Sumerian myth. :p

 But I very quickly discovered there was a hole in that story--the POV character had no one to talk to but a dead body. So he (now she) needed someone to talk to. And I thought a cleric would be interesting, and probably come in handy. And Tam was one of those characters who showed up with his voice already clear in my head, his appearance already decided. He was super-easy to write...and then completely out of the blue he said "I have a daughter." 

WTF? I had no idea he had a daughter. I had no interest in giving him a daughter. But, hand to god, every time I deleted that line, I ended up writing it again. So I rolled with it: he has a daughter. And that was the key to shifting his and the Harlot's relationship.

When it came time for Brimstone Angels, I had this scene in my head where Farideh's hiding in a church and ends up talking to a nice priest about the state of her soul, etc. Originally I wanted that guy to be an old-school tiefling...somehow...but my editor at the time pointed out that would be confusing and pretty complicated to explain (why's he still alive, for starters?). I had no intention of ever going back to Tam...but I needed a priest. And now and again I'd get messages from fans asking what happened to him. So he got to be the priest--but from the second I added him, he kept leaking into other scenes. Why? Well he's probably still a spy. Why is he even talking to these people? Because he knows Brin kind of. Because he hires them. Why Neverwinter? Because he's a Harper now, and he's going to hint at things in the NWCG.

And as I mentioned above, he kind of barged his way into Lesser Evils. Or, I guess it's more accurate to by barging in he rescued Lesser Evils, as he is wont to do.   
  
  

Jan 9, 2013 -- 8:47AM, davidgiven wrote:

> They wanted a book that brought the Harpers back to prominence in the current timeline
AMEN! and I assume that "they" in this context referes to all of Candlekeep which is once again very active and all abuzz with talk of the Sundering! Care to drop any hints on how all of the above will tie into that? Thanks, David S.

Hehehe--"they" in this case are the Powers That Be at WotC. But I know they were thinking of fans like those at CK when they decided to do it. (There is nothing quite as nail-biting as being handed a beloved world element with legions of fans. I will probably talk about how I decided to handle the Harpers at some point).

I will say...that the end of the book points to the larger thread that The Adversary and it sequels will concern.  So you will have a leg up on the rest of the world once you're done!

Also, most of the characters in here return in The Adversary--so there are more Harpers if that floats your boat. As much as the addition of the Harpers/Zhentarim theme shaped Lesser Evils from one end, The Adversary ended up shaping it from the other.