Rachel Haimowitz | Belonging Blog Tour: ANCHORED

Welcome to the Belonging ’Verse re-release blog tour with Aleksandr Voinov and Rachel Haimowitz! We’re very excited to be bringing you edited second editions of our Belonging stories, ANCHORED and COUNTERPUNCH (in the case of ANCHORED, very edited, with over ten thousand new words and a completely different beginning and ending!), which are finally under the same roof and back in print after about a year out of circulation.

We’ll be touring for about two weeks, Aleks discussing his slave boxer and the barrister who tries to free him, and Rachel talking about her slave news anchor and the talk show host who covets him, and both of us discussing the world of Belonging at large—which, as you’ve probably guessed, is not a particularly pretty place. But good things can and do happen in this world, and we hope you’ll stick with us to find out what!

Speaking of good things, don’t forget to comment on this post for your chance to win a $25 gift certificate to the Riptide store! Each new post you comment on earns you an entry into the drawing, so be sure to check out the rest of the tour schedule too!

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I conceived of the world of ANCHORED—a modern-day society much like our own, but in which some specific origins of slavery (primarily crime, debt obligation, and caste systems into which you were born) were never “outgrown” as society progressed—before I’d conceived of the more specific setting of the book or the main characters who would inhabit it. I have a long history of exploring the dark underbelly of human nature in my writing, and I knew I wanted ANCHORED to be no exception. I also knew I wanted to tell the story from the point of view of a slave, and just as importantly, from the point of view of a slave who’d drunk the Kool-Aid, so to speak: one who’d been born into and raised within the system.

So why a news anchor? Two reasons. For one, at the time I was actually working in broadcast news production, so it was a world I was deeply familiar with, and also one we almost never get to see behind the scenes of. Broadcast news shares a lot of elements with Hollywood: it’s very much putting on a show for the entertainment (infotainment?) of its viewers. But it’s also full of incredibly bright, dedicated, driven people who want to do good in (and by) the world, who try their damndest to stay true to the mission and get hobbled by executives beholden to the bottom line. Ultimately, it is a soul-sucking place for idealists, and “soul-sucking” seemed like a pretty good backdrop for a story as grim and, well, also soul-sucking as legalized slavery.

The second reason I chose a news anchor was because, as much as I wanted a character who’d grown up a slave and thus was, essentially, “broken” from the start, I also wanted a character with enough perspective to make a good stand-in for the reader. Plus, let’s face it—someone who’s totally broken would make for a terrible main character. As it is, the main character in Anchored is primarily at the mercy of outside forces (which, by and large, is a narrative “rule” you’re not supposed to break: your hero should do things, not have things done to them). But by placing a slave in a position of tremendous knowledge of and exposure to the freeman’s world—two inevitabilities for a reporter on a show catering to freemen—you force that slave to self-examine and other-examine in a way that others born into the institution never would or could. By making the main character an anchor—by placing him at the deeply uneasy intersection of the two worlds occupying the same space in this society—I instantly saddled him with a multitude of internal conflicts driven by doubt and the curse of knowing and understanding far too much to accept his lot.

Which was pretty terrible for my poor main character, but, let’s face it—makes for a fascinating examination of the world in which he’s trapped, and how good people can do and support bad things, and how and why people make the decision to stand up (or not) to the system that rules them. And that is why a news anchor.