One of the criticisms that I received in the first draft of the manuscript was that the genders were imbalanced. While the characters See, Rachel and Zorai are strong women with their own goals and the agency to pursue them, they are still outnumbered by the male characters and, just as bad, don’t really come into their own until halfway through the first volume. I started looking closely at some of the characters I’d written. I asked myself how they would fundamentally change if they were female, and how that female character might make different decisions that fundamentally change the direction of the story. That’s how I arrived at changing Kiree Reeshon (seen above, in a red dress), a key character introduced in #2, from male to female. So many simple truths about the sylued people’s values could be expressed in action by changing Kiree from male to female. Presenting Kiree and See as the presumptive heirs to their parents’ respective thrones instantly asserts that the sylueds do not follow patriarchal lines of succession. (This decision cascaded and soon Kiree’s formidable father, Hakeeda, was likewise changed and became Kiree’s formidable mother.) Leaving Kiree’s status as one of the sylueds’ most fearsome warriors unchanged regardless of her new gender similarly clarifies that the sylued warrior class is a meritocracy. And by simply not changing a word of the star-crossed romance between See and Kiree other than their pronouns, it is made clear that the sylueds understand that love is love.
