The day has come! Seek the Traitor’s Son is out in the world!
This day is a little bittersweet for me, to be honest! As I’ve said before, I started writing Seek the Traitor’s Son in September 2019, and I went through ten drafts of playful experimentation to arrive at the one you can now read. I enjoyed every second of writing this book because I packed it with so many things I love, and it’s only bittersweet because this means it’s really done, and it’s time to embrace new stories.
I’ve said that before—that this book is full of things I love—but I don’t usually list what those things are. So I decided to celebrate Seek’s release day by doing just that. Here are just some of the things I love that are in this book. I hope you love them, too.
A Woman of Principle
“Principled” is not often an adjective we assign to women characters. When women are principled in fiction, they’re often described as uptight or rigid—or teased for being control freaks. A man of principle, though, is strong, capable, and decent. Maybe that’s why Elegy, the leading lady of Seek, was a man in some of my drafts. But Elegy is principled. She won’t lie to the man she loves. She won’t leave one of her own behind. She won’t violate someone’s autonomy to get what she wants. It’s the first thing I knew about her; it’s what I admire most about her. But she is neither uptight nor rigid. I love a woman of principle.
Sad Hotties TM
Ah yes: a trope I love deeply, the Sad Hottie. To explain, a Sad Hottie (by my definition) is a character who is weighed down by sorrow, guilt, or loss, who is nonetheless strong, capable, and determined, usually stuffing their pain away while they Get Shit Done. The formative Sad Hottie in my life was Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but there’s also Akiva from Daughter of Smoke and Bone, and for a not-male example, Mizu in Blue Eye Samurai or Harrow from the Locked Tomb books. You could argue that in Seek, both Elegy and Theren are Sad Hotties, but the one who really breaks my heart is Theren. He’s been through some THINGS, guys. But he soldiers on, and on, and on.
Oaths and Rituals
There are quite a few rituals in this book. Seek is (among other things) about the conflict between the Cedrae and the Talusar, and the Talusar worship the Fever as a god, so getting infected with Fever is, naturally, done through a ritual. Theren’s Knight oath to Elegy is a ritual. The big sequence where Theren reveals a series of memories to Elegy is a ritual. On a creative level, I love rituals because they’re efficient mechanisms for worldbuilding—a ritual reveals what’s most important to people, what they believe, and how they communicate that belief. But on a surface level, rituals are also a vibe. Smoke spilling out of a thurible, kneeling on a cold stone floor, candles flickering in a draft, holy words that carry a weight you can almost feel—yes. Yes.
The Fantastical Future
The reason it’s hard to describe the genre of Seek is that it’s a part of this wonderful tradition: a story set so far in the future that the future has started to feel like the past. If we didn’t understand technology, we might think of it as magic, after all. In Seek, everyone has inherited advanced technology from their ancestors, and the exact mechanisms of it are lost to time…so it feels mysterious and strange, this tech that lives in the blood and allows people to connect to machines. You can find one of my absolute favorite examples of this subgenre in the games Horizon: Zero Dawn and Horizon: Forbidden West. But Star Wars also feels like this for the viewer, even if the people in that world do understand their technology. The tech is old and dusty, the world is lived in.
Battle Couples
Yes, I am going to include this Reylo gif, sorry not sorry. It’s a useful visual aid.
You could argue every fictional couple I’ve ever written has been a “Battle Couple” (the TV Tropes page says “the couple that slays together, stays together”)—essentially, this is a duo that fights together instead of one protecting the other. What I like about this is that the couple respects each other’s autonomy and capability—there’s no “I’m so worried I’ll lose you that I won’t let you fight and maybe I’ll even imprison you to stop you” here; instead, there’s “if you need to do this, I will have your back.” To me, that’s the peak of romance. So whether it’s Buffy and Angel or Geralt and Yennefer or Malec (iykyk), I am on board and that’s why Tris and Four, Akos and Cyra, Niko and Dymitr, and now Theren and Elegy exist.
The Desert at Night
In the fall of 2020, my husband and I took a cross country road trip to live with his brother in Los Angeles for a couple months so we weren’t quarantining alone anymore. We drove through Utah, making a detour through Zion National Park, and then Nevada and finally the Mojave Desert. I was obsessed with that part of the drive. That’s why several scenes in Seek take place in the desert (mostly in the aforementioned Mojave Desert, since a lot of the book takes place in or around Los Angeles). I especially loved it at night. Big sky, clear stars, the strange shape of the land, the silence, the heat radiating from the ground. It makes me aware of my smallness; I think it does the same on the page.
A Wacky Side Quest
The third largest POV in the book is Hela, Elegy’s sister, and she spends most of the book on a wacky side quest to figure out the origin of a mysterious glowing plant that seems to be psychically connecting her to a beautiful woman. And she listens to romance audiobooks on her journeys. She’s much funnier than Theren or Elegy, and I loved writing her adventures. My fondness for the wacky side quest comes from the more light-hearted missions in The Witcher 3, usually in Novigrad or (if you played the Blood and Wine expansion) Toussaint or…whenever he’s interacting with a troll. Geralt’s usually dealing with some serious business, but isn’t it great when he gets a bit silly?
A Scene of Shocking Vulnerability
If you liked the scenes in Divergent where Four takes Tris through his fear landscape, I have good news for you: there’s a comparable scene in Seek the Traitor’s Son where, through complicated means you will understand when you read, Theren takes Elegy through some of his worst memories as part of a (you guessed it) ritual. I love scenes where one character chooses to make themselves profoundly vulnerable to another; I love it even more when they use the fantastical or science fictional means available to them to do it.
Sidebar: A Playlist
I write to music, and I really like the somewhat eclectic mixture of songs on Seek’s playlist. This is the curated one; the real playlist I used has like 200 songs on it.
As I have mentioned before, I’m going on tour— and it starts tonight! If you want to come see me, chat books, and get a signed copy of Seek the Traitor’s Son, check out the tour stops below!
You know what? That’s a fair question! It’s Divergent’s 15 year anniversary this year and that has meant a lot of editions. Here’s what’s out there:
Seek the Traitor’s Son (my site has a bunch of different retailers)
Deluxe US edition - black sprayed edges!
Book of the Month Club edition - rainbow sprayed edges!
Deluxe UK edition - galaxy sprayed edges, on sale on Thursday!
The Divergent Deluxe Limited Edition, with bonus content from The Sixth Faction
Special versions of Divergent from FairyLoot and Acrilypics.
Plus like…everything else by me?
That’s a whole lot of books, so here, have an Avi to make you smile. Don’t worry, she won’t miss me too much while I’m on tour.
All right, that’s all I’ve got for you this time! If you haven’t yet, go grab a copy of Seek the Traitor’s Son, and hope I see you on the tour!
V
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