KNIFE a.k.a. FAERY REBELS: SPELL HUNTER -- Your Questions Answered (maybe)

[rj_anderson]

So now that my little faery book is widely available in bookstores, and a good number of you folks out there seem to have read it... are there any questions about the book that you'd like to ask? Leave a comment, and I will do my best to satisfy (unless the answer would totally spoil you for some important aspect of Rebel a.k.a. Wayfarer, that is).

Needless to say there will be MASSIVE SPOILERS in the comments, so people who still plan to read the book for themselves might want to skip this one.

Comments

[kerravonsen]

One of the changes I noticed between the published book and the earlier draft that I read, was that Amarylis remarks about being frustrated with the selfishness of her people, and that while she tried to encourage selflessness, she always failed. It was an interesting change in the character; it made her seem less cold and manipulative, more someone who was just desperate. But on the other hand, it puts the blame for the culture on the people rather than the leader. But cultures don't change if the change isn't supported by the leader; and yet I guess cultures also don't change if the followers don't want to change.

So what was the reasoning behind the change in Amarylis's character? What do you think was the reason why the faeries of the Oakenwyld were so selfish and ungenerous? Was it just because of the loss of magic/creativity/contact-with-humans? Was it the atmosphere of fear?

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

What Amaryllis didn't realize was that her people's growing selfishness was a direct result of being cut off from human influence -- essentially, leaving the faeries with no higher calling than to serve their own interests.

Being a scholar and of a somewhat remote temperament herself, Amaryllis didn't perceive the magnitude of the problem until the faeries' selfishness was already well entrenched, and even when she noticed the problem she didn't know how to motivate the other faeries to do anything about it. You can't order people to care or argue them into caring about each other, after all.

And of course she was so caught up in trying to find a solution to the faeries' loss of magic through her own studies that she wasn't around to provide any kind of inspiration or example for them in that area, even if she'd been a very good one.

I always thought Amaryllis had good intentions deep down -- and that was present in the story from the early drafts -- but I didn't know how to articulate it properly until the later versions. So not so much a change in character as a better way of revealing that character to the reader.

Does that make any sense?

[kerravonsen]

Yes, that makes sense. In a way, I'm glad it was difficult to convey Amaryllis's good intentions, because I think it gave the book more depth; I thought it was more interesting when I suspected Amaryllis of being up to no good.