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Heartstrikers: thoughts on paths not taken

Saturday, December 9th, 2017 06:54 pm

I recently stumbled upon a couple of interviews with Rachel Aaron, author of the Heartstrikers series.

http://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/2015/08/interview-with-rachel-aaron-interviewed.html
http://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/2016/09/interview-with-rachel-aaron-interviewed.html

I always like finding out how my favorite stories came to be! Interesting stuff.

It wasn't a surprise to me that A Dragon of a Different Color basically budded off of Book 5—there were some pacing issues (like how Marci has a complete character arc but Julius doesn't, and the way it seemed to be getting the UN and China plots dealt with in preparation for a Final Showdown) that kind of implied to me that they were once one book that got too big to handle, so some subplots were pulled forward. I hope that Marci's arc doesn't suffer in the next book the way Julius's did in this one, though!

Also not a surprise: Bob being on the cover of the last book. It's been clear for a while now that he's the driving force of the series, and I've been expecting him to take center stage in the end.

I was, however, surprised to find out how much One Good Dragon Deserves Another changed between drafts; so many things seem carefully foreshadowed that it was a bit of a shock to find that such a big swerve happened so early. And I wonder what the old version of the worldbuilding looked like. I do like what we got instead, but I have to wonder if, for example, Ghost was originally planned as something different. Not to mention Bob's pigeon, or the Leviathan... Or even if the magical drought had a different underlying cause.

Whatever the case may be, I'm very happy with the book she ended up writing; I think it's one of the strongest in the series, along with No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished, and Marci's arc in it is wonderful.

(Although now I kind of want to see those scenes she mentioned, from the scrapped Justin-centric take on One Good Dragon Deserves Another. I agree that letting him of all characters take over the book was a mistake, but I do like him and I would've liked to see how that played out...)

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