Goodreads asked Courtney M. Privett:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Courtney M. Privett Arrow of Entropy floated around my head for years, but I had to finish the books that came before it first or it wouldn't make any sense. By the time I started writing it, the idea was so developed in my head that the words fell from my fingers and bled across my screen. I finished the first draft in a short and furious seven weeks.

I always knew the story of the Aulors had to end somewhere. I have this certain character who I wanted to redeem, a complicated former villain who wasn't as horrible as he originally seemed, and Arrow of Entropy gave me the narrative for his redemption. I also wanted to play around with the concept of Oblivion, a phantom Elemental who had been whispered about since the very beginning of the Malora Octet. You'll finally get to meet Oblivion in this book.

Once I decided to make redemption a major theme of this book, I knew I had to develop a suitable narrator. All three books in the Emergence trilogy are written in first person, which gives a small and intimate glimpse into a sprawling world. I thought about writing this story in third person to give multiple perspectives, but that never felt right. This needed to be the story of one person living at what could be the end of time. Her personal struggles are juxtaposed upon a series of cosmic temblors, and I want the reader to see the events unfold through her eyes. Her name is Zella Thula, and I never set out to make her a "strong female character". I wanted her to be a real person with strengths and weaknesses, and I needed her to be a worthy protagonist for my ex-villain's deuteragonist.

Zella came to me as a manifestation of my own social anxiety, and then took on a life of her own. Even though she ends up being a well-trained warrior, that is not all she is. She is a daughter, a sister, eventually a wife and mother, a physicist, a musician, and a rabid reader, all while struggling with severe social anxiety and the challenges of being a half-blood in a still-segregated world. She is an innovator at the start of a technological revolution that will eventually see this world transition from epic fantasy into an entirely new genre, a transition that began when Arden, the narrator of Sand into Glass, began sharing his materials science discoveries with the world four centuries before Zella's birth.

flag