Welcome to the
Belonging โVerse re-release blog tour with
Aleksandr
Voinov and
Rachel Haimowitz! Weโre 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.
Weโll 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 largeโwhich, as youโve probably guessed, is not a
particularly pretty place. But good things can and do happen in this world, and
we hope youโll stick with us to find out what!
Speaking of good things, donโt 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!
# # #
I conceived of the
world of
ANCHOREDโa
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 โoutgrownโ as society progressedโbefore Iโd 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 whoโd drunk the Kool-Aid, so to speak: one whoโd 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: itโs very much putting on a show for the
entertainment (infotainment?) of its viewers. But itโs 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 โsoul-suckingโ 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 whoโd grown up a slave and thus was, essentially, โbrokenโ from the
start, I also wanted a character with enough perspective to make a good stand-in
for the reader. Plus, letโs face itโsomeone whoโs 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 โruleโ
youโre 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 freemanโs worldโtwo inevitabilities for a reporter on a show
catering to freemenโyou 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 anchorโby placing him at the deeply uneasy intersection of the
two worlds occupying the same space in this societyโI 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, letโs face itโmakes
for a fascinating examination of the world in which heโs 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.
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