When the writing team got together for our second Bookburners story summit, we knew that one of the most important questions we had to answer was: How is Season 2 different than Season 1? Because as happy as we all were with the work we had done, now that we had gotten our heads around the format and the characters, you could feel in the room that everyone was ready to push just a little bit harder, to do just a little bit more.We came up with several key concepts and themes for the new season, but the one that got me most excited was just five words scrawled on an index card: "Adversaries are Humans, not Demons."Don't get me wrong, we've still got plenty of weird books doing weird stuff this season. But as Max mentioned in his commentary for Episode 1, The Tide is Rising. There's more magic coming into the world now than there has been for centuries, and that means that Team Three is facing new and different challenges. For one thing, instead of our heroes fixing problems caused by people who stumbled across a magic book and ended up in the thrall of a demon, they're fixing problems caused by people who went looking for a demon because they were trying to stir some shit up. Which is really exciting for us as writers (and hopefully you, as readers), because it means Team Three can't necessarily solve the problem of the week just by closing the book on it. And speaking of characters who have been trying to close the book on things....At some point last season, I was chatting on Twitter with our fantastic audiobook narrator, Xe Sands, and I told her that she made me want to write more lines for Liam so that I could listen to her Irish accent. While Liam didn't get a ton of the spotlight last season, he's making up for it this year as he realizes that the hole in his memory might be something he needs to deal with sooner rather than later. That all starts on the Silk Road with the return of Liam's ex, Christina, who you may remember we got a glimpse of during Grace's Day Off, last season. Will he take her up on her offer to meet her in Shanghai? And didn't anyone tell Christina that the Bookburners have been banned from China?Process Notes: One of the things I love about this episode in particular is that I finally got to tell a story that makes use of my long-time obsession with the idea that you ought to be able to work sympathetic magic to connect two places that have the same name. This fixation has yet to save me time or gasoline on road trips—wouldn't it be great if you could start driving on one Main Street and then seamlessly transition to any other Main Street in the country?—but it did give me the key to the weird-of-the-week for this episode.
