I had originally thought of using Morena Prieto as the love interest for the Emperor-to-be, but the timing didn’t work out. The Verano Intervention was eleven years before Bobby died, and, given any believable age for running the Verano operation, Prieto would be too old. So I gave her a daughter, and a rather extraordinary one. At eighteen, she was beautiful, mature, and poised, she had a college degree in history, spoke three languages, and had some training in tactical shooting and the martial arts.
I can hear the calls now: ‘Mary Sue! Mary Sue!’ Well, I have three things to say to that. First, I have never had any interest in the martial arts. Too sweaty. Ugh. So she is not my Mary Sue. Second, there are exceptional people in the world, and with a population as large as the Empire, there will be billions of them. Writing about the action at the very top of the Empire, you’re going to run into a bunch of them, as cream rises to the top. And finally, like all writers, I base my characters on people I’ve met. There is a prototype for Marie Louise Bouchard, an actual person I’ve met, who was, at eighteen, every bit as extraordinary as Bouchard, if not more so. So there.
I introduced both Bouchard and Parnell in EMPIRE: Investigation so they would already be part of the cast the reader was familiar with as I started EMPIRE: Succession. The endpoint of EMPIRE: Succession from the start of writing was to put Parnell on the Throne, with Bouchard as his Empress.
The nature of the usurper was a problem. I didn’t want an evil mastermind type of character. Too pat, too boring. Instead I chose a good man, but one who couldn’t, by temperament and experience, do the job. The issue then is, How do you get him off the Throne and make Parnell the Emperor? The solution was to use Amanda and Bouchard to convince Goulet that the best thing for the Empire was for him to abdicate the Throne. They did that by legitimizing his temporary role and painting him as a hero, not by sweeping him aside and painting him as a cad.
When I started writing EMPIRE: Succession, I hadn’t figured Amanda Peters as being such a major character in the plot. But she was right there in the Imperial Palace, and she had sixty years of experience of the Throne, the loyalty of the staff, and the loyalty of the secret Section Six, which Goulet didn’t know about and which wouldn’t take his orders anyway.
And of course, the Stauss family is back. Part of Bobby’s success on the Throne was owed to Otto Stauss’s loyalty to him, and that loyalty to Bobby and his ideals and goals was every bit as much a part of Otto Stauss’s legacy to his son and grandson as were his wealth and power.
As always in my writing, my primary themes in the Succession Trilogy are love, honor, duty, and loyalty. Good will ultimately triumph, because it has more advocates than evil, and good is more apt to inspire people to take great risks, to make great sacrifices, to achieve great feats. The good also have better unit cohesion, because the good can trust each other, lean on each other, and bear each other up. So in the end, the good guys win, the bad guys get their just deserts, and the Empire carries on.
I hope you enjoyed the story as you read it. I certainly enjoyed it as I uncovered it.
Rich Weyand
Bloomington, Indiana
November 1, 2020
EMPIRE: Succession Page 28
