About writing The Bright and the Dark / FAQs
The other impulse for the book was more mundane. Publishers like sequels. I had plans for a volume entitled Chasing Fire, to take place several decades after the events of Confidence Game. It was not intended as a sequel so much as another story sharing the same world; I found a place for Aron Jannes in it, but he was the only crossover character. I pitched this book to my publisher, but what they wanted was something more closely tied to Confidence Game, closer in time and featuring more of the same characters. So I placed The Bright and the Dark between the two, to act as a bridge and introduce the plague as an arc, and to develop Aron's character and see how he gets to where he's headed.
The publisher billed this as a "semi-stand-alone sequel," an interesting marketing term referring to the fact that while there is an arc plot that carries over from the first book into the second, the main storyline of The Bright and the Dark is new and contained in this book. (It does create its own arc that gets resolved in book three, Chasing Fire.) I have read some reviews by people who did just that - picked up Bright without having read Confidence Game first - and they seemed to do just fine. (Read the reviews here and here.)
Explain the Sages and Magi. How does their magic work?
What's with Aron's "angry young man" act?
The reviewer, by the way, noted that Aron's development "is realistic, but it isn't pleasant." Speaking from my own writerly bias, if I've made it realistic, I've done my job.
About writing The Bright and the Dark
In this book I was exploring opposites: the obvious dichotomy between Aron Jannes and Julian, and to a lesser extent, between the spy Thessa and Elzith. Julian is clearly the bright to Aron's dark: optimistic where Aron is pessimistic, as well as physically lighter and fairer. I wanted to explore the unusual friendship between these two characters and see how they affected one another. With Thessa, I wanted to create everything Elzith is not: emotional, driven by anger, and living with the weaknesses that Elzith was not able to face.Frequently Asked Questions
Can I read The Bright and the Dark if I haven't read Confidence Game?
The Sages and the Magi are two classes of the people of Sor'rai, differentiated by their magical abilities. Magi are the typical wizards: they cast spells large and small. Theirs is the ability to move things and change things. As Elzith notes in part 1, chapter 7, " If they need meat but they have bread, they make meat. If they have leaves, they make bread. They make fire and they make firewood. They move it so it changes." The Sages, by contrast, do not move things but move through things; they pass through walls and can remain untouched by wind or weather. This is related to their ability to see time as a spiral rather than linearly and to reincarnate--they can also pass through time. People with some Sage blood tend to have minor abilities to pass through things, often manifested as selective mindreading. Elzith can pass through the walls of the mind to read what's in it, but only whether a person is lying or not.
I actually had a reviewer say he didn't like my book because Aron was too angry. When I plotted out Aron Jannes's character from Confidence Game to Chasing Fire (remember I had not originally planned to write a trilogy, and The Bright and the Dark came about because my contract said so), I envisioned him as a middle-aged adult, making a significant choice at the end of Chasing Fire. When I was contracted to write a sequel to Confidence Game, and realized that this second book could serve as a bridge between Confidence Game and Chasing Fire, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to develop Aron's character over the course of the books. The choice he makes at the end of Chasing Fire would be more significant if he has faced it before and made the wrong choice. Aron choses wrong in The Bright and the Dark because he has somewhere yet to go; he's angry because he has lessons to learn about anger and overcoming it.