Notes: The Secret Academy, Pt. 2
Finishing up the adventures of Zare & Co.
WARNING: These notes will completely spoil Servants of the Empire: The Secret Academy. Haven’t read it? Stop and go here.
(Go here for notes for Edge of the Galaxy, here for Rebel in the Ranks and here for Imperial Justice. And here’s Pt. 1 of The Secret Academy. )
All right! It’s our last go-round for Servants of the Empire author’s notes. Thanks to everybody who’s followed along this far – I’ve had a blast writing these notes and hope they’ve been useful, whether you’re a budding author or an interested reader.
Part 2: Merei
At the end of Imperial Justice, Merei Spanjaf escaped her service to the crime boss Yahenna Laxo and her mother Jessa’s investigation of her intrusion into the Imperial data network. Yet Merei then immediately used her forged credentials to resume her snooping, discovering that Zare Leonis was sent to Arkanis at the Inquisitor’s orders.
I did that in Imperial Justice so the reader would go into The Secret Academy worrying about Zare and suspecting that Merei wouldn’t be able to leave well enough alone – in Godfather-style, she thinks she’s out but they pull her back in.
What pulls her back in is her determination to save Holshef, an elderly poet endangered by Laxo’s demise. She’s worried about Holshef himself, but also frustrated by her inability to help Zare and guilt-ridden about Laxo’s death. Holshef becomes her way of turning that frustration and guilt into something positive.
Originally Holshef’s rescue had more moving parts: Merei enlisted his daughter to help and played a game of cat and mouse with the bounty hunter trying to apprehend him. But I realized I didn’t have room to weave another strand into the plot. In fact, I was worried I didn’t have enough room to do everything necessary to wrap up book and series properly. So Holshef’s daughter got pared down to a quick reference and the bounty hunter was reduced to a briefly glimpsed antagonist.
I had to economize elsewhere too, sometimes to a fault – I agree with reviewers who found the last two sections of The Secret Academy a little rushed. This book taught me that while wrapping up a series is easier than constructing a middle chapter, the little grace notes needed for a satisfying ending require more words than you think. Live and learn.
One dynamic I liked in Merei’s story was how Jessa turns cool and resourceful once Merei reveals the truth about the Empire. Rather than waste time mourning misplaced loyalties, Jessa swings into action and becomes an effective partner for her daughter. Which makes sense – apple and tree and all that. But I wish I’d seen the dramatic possibilities earlier and played up the conflict between Jessa and Merei in Rebel in the Ranks and Imperial Justice. That would have made the payoff from Jessa’s turn more satisfying.
An unexpected complication was how to get Holshef, the Spanjafs and the Leonises from Lothal to Garel. My original idea was that Merei would call in a favor from the Spectres via Old Jho, with Ezra insisting that his compatriots pay their debt to Zare by joining the raid on Arkanis. But at that point in the Rebels timeline the Spectres were laying low and avoiding Lothal. I could use them for the raid, but not the rescue.
Plan B was using Lando Calrissian, but I hated the idea – Lando had played no role in the series and I felt a cameo would distract readers and slam the story to a halt. At that point I needed readers to be biting their nails, not going, “Hey neat it’s Lando!”
Plan C was using Old Jho himself, and I disliked that idea too. But I warmed to it out of necessity since there was no Plan D. At least I liked the character – his trolling the Imperials in “Idiot’s Array” was pretty funny – and I’d already decided to pair him with Holshef as another elegiac voice for Lothal. Expanding Jho’s role from go-between to rescuer wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t the end of the world, either. So I added some light comedy about whether or not his ship would fly, dropped a few The Force Awakens Easter eggs and moved on.
Some notes on Part 2:
“Wox ho uffdon comda,” mutters a speeder truck after Merei cuts it off in traffic. That’s Bocce, derived from the Galactic Phrase Book and Travel Guide. An approximate translation would be “You go shut down now.”
Merei and Holshef talk about jogan blossoms, with the old poet musing that scent can unlock memory. This is, of course, exactly how Zare will cut through Beck’s brainwashing around 60 pages later. I’d woven the theme of scent and memory through all four books, but needed to double down on it now that I was so close to the story’s climax.
The events of Chapter 14 tie in with the Rebels episode “Call to Action.” I liked that Tarkin’s toppling the tower creates problems for the Empire that insurgents can exploit – I thought that was a realistic consequence, and one it would be natural for Jessa and Gandr to comment on.
Operation Guiding Light, the directive that Holshef ran afoul of, is another fascist strategy designed to mesh with Imperial Justice. Its directive that nostalgia should be suppressed as “a product of dissatisfaction and anger” is an homage to a line I love in Don DeLillo’s White Noise.
On a less highbrow note, Old Jho’s sorrowful note that the forests of his youth have been “turned into mines and machines” is right out of Lord of the Rings. Which makes sense, as Ithorians are basically the Legends version of Ents.
Merei’s long speech to her parents recounting everything she’s done behind their backs was meant as a bit of domestic comedy, with Jessa and Gandr staring at their daughter in disbelief as this treasonous chronicle rolls on and on. There’s a similar scene with Tycho and his family in Jupiter Pirates: The Rise of Earth, which was written at much the same time. In both books, a few readers missed the joke and complained about getting a big chunk of exposition about things they already knew. Oh well.
Something went awry with the bit about the locator in Chapter 17, or else I’ve forgotten what I was trying to do. Jessa tells Merei to leave it with Gandr, but then tells Gandr she’ll send him their location. Huh?
Some readers have asked what happened to Jix. Beats me – I assume he went to prison. An experiment I tried in Servants of the Empire was letting things be a bit messy. Merei forgets to tell Zare about Project Unity, we don’t find out what happened to Oleg or Jix, and Chiron makes a promise to Penn that he winds up unable to keep. I think a certain amount of messiness is realistic – certainly more so than having every single plot thread tied off neatly by the end of a series.
Merei stunning Leo – and Tepha’s reaction to it – was a scene I had in mind from the very beginning of the series. It’s Merei’s Indy in the Casbah moment. Auntie Nags was supposed to then lecture Merei that it’s bad manners for guests to shoot people, but I unthinkingly used that joke in The Weapon of a Jedi and so had to drop it here. I wish I’d done the reverse – C-3PO has plenty of good lines already.
Part 3: The Tower
This section brings everything together and so moves quickly, reuniting Zare and Merei and then Zare and Dhara, sacrificing Beck, then getting everybody off Arkanis for a pair of emotional reunions.
I worked hard on Zare’s speech, reading it out loud to myself until I thought it was right. I like it both as an emotional recitation of the journey he’s been on and a call to arms – an indictment of the Empire that could only be made by someone who’d once believed in it.
Three books’ worth of work on scent and memory pays off with Beck’s turn, but I also brought grav-ball back as a reference point. I overdid the grav-ball references – Zare and Beck talking about a center-striker sneak would have been enough – but think it works. That last image of Beck’s hand with the jogan blossom clutched in it is a little cheesy, but I figured I’d earned it.
Another scene I polished obsessively was Zare’s long-awaited reunion with Dhara. I mulled including brief interludes in the series from Dhara’s point of view, but decided it was more dramatic to reveal nothing about her fate until we see her here. As for why Dhara was kidnapped, there are clues in what she tells Zare in her cell and aboard the Ghost. That’s all I’ll say for now.
Chiron’s death was another part of the endgame that I had in mind from the very beginning, complete with Dhara’s burning eyes and Zare swearing Merei to secrecy about her Force tantrum. I liked that there’s no real villain in Chiron’s demise – he follows his misguided sense of duty to the very end, Dhara acts out of self-preservation, and you can’t really blame either of them. A nice bit of tragedy, if I do say so myself. The logistics were a pain, though – I had to isolate Zare, Merei and Dhara, figure out how the auxiliary elevator came into play and then get everybody to the roof.
The scenes aboard the Ghost were reworked at the very end of the process. My editor Jen Heddle asked for a quiet scene between Zare and Dhara, which was a great call, giving them a moment that Zare had worked so hard for. As for Zare and Merei’s vow to make use of the data she’d stolen and keep fighting, it was another late addition. Once again, that’s all I’ll say for now.
Thanks so much to everyone who’s begged, cajoled or campaigned for further adventures of Zare and Merei. There are no plans that I know of, but I’d love to bring them back for another story. I want to know what became of their campaign against the Empire, where their relationship went, and if Dhara recovered from her ordeal at the Inquisitor’s hands. (And yes, I have ideas about all of those things.) But if that never happens, it’s fun to think of Zare and Merei continuing to fight the good fight, as they learned to do so capably over four books.
Quick notes on Part 3:
The other cadets stripping Zare’s uniform and breaking his saber was borrowed from descriptions of Han Solo’s expulsion from the Imperial Academy in Han Solo at Stars’ End and the Dark Empire Sourcebook. To keep the reader from being distracted by a new uniform, I made sure the cadets wore their dress blacks in an earlier scene.
Beck mentioning that he stopped taking his medication was a quick add to reinforce the idea of the jogan perfume cutting through his brainwashing. I think little buttressing details like that are effective provided they neither stop the narrative nor give the game away.
I liked that Zare doesn’t really have a plan once he and Beck break out. Zare’s a smart kid who’s cool under fire, but he’s in a facility he knows nothing about so he’s just improvising wildly. Hey, when you’ve got a date with a firing squad any plan is better than nothing.
Where’s the rest of the Ghost crew? I left Kanan out because he would have sensed Dhara’s dark-side tantrum and started asking questions. Story Group’s Pablo Hidalgo also taught me a good trick from TV: leave out a member of an ensemble cast in case you need to explain what happened in some later project. That way you can handle the needed exposition through conversation.
I enjoyed writing Dhara’s reunion with Tepha and Leo – after so much tension and anxiety, it was satisfying to craft a scene that was just pure love and joy. But if Servants of the Empire is ever collected into a single volume, I’m campaigning to edit out that last line. After everything the Leonises had been through, Dhara telling the rest of her family not to let go said it all.
If you enjoyed these notes and are going to Orlando for Star Wars Celebration 2017, I’m leading a Star Wars University session about writing and storytelling on Friday April 14 at 6:30 pm. Come on out!
Thanks for coming along on the journey with me, and here’s to new adventures ahead.