I know these characters and the arc of their lives so well that it’s easy to track. There’s a point in time, directly after the fourth intended novel, where the Caliph’s vizier is actively trying to thwart them, having moved on from finding them moderately embarrassing to actively disliking them because he thinks they’re deliberately trying to make him look bad, particularly Dabir. Because the caliph esteems them, the vizier can’t have Dabir and Asim removed in an obvious way.

I like starting in the middle and then backing up. In “Hypnopompic Circumstance” that middle was “Thomas’s first encounter with the alien was terrifying.” It works for the reader because now there are a lot of questions in need of answers (who is the alien, why is Thomas the only one encountering it, how many encounters have there been, etc.) which keeps them interested. Possibly as important, by starting with this kind of sentence, I’m interested in writing more.

These caretakers may be doing their genuine best to help Jain and Stromile, but they don’t understand what they’re doing. Humans need food and water and shelter more than they need understanding, but it’s a close thing. We are all driven by this mad desire to have other people really get us, to make the neural ghost in someone else’s head as close as possible to the one we carry in ours. The caretakers can keep Jain alive, but they’ll never get closer to knowing her than Stro did, and the facsimile is uniquely painful for that reason.

“The Giving One,” like all the Burnt Empire legends, is loosely based on a legend from the great story cycle, The Mahabharata. I first wrote about it in my Mahabharata Series published in India over a decade ago. I adapted it freely and brought it into line with the timeline and character history of the Burnt Empire trilogy, especially A Dark Queen Rises.