Her Silent Heart and the Open Sky
Sometimes stories come from strange places. One small piece of this was from the redeployment of troops in Afghanistan. Most troops had been withdrawn, but that caused a deadly resurgence of the Taliban. Like Iraq, the local government is incapable of defending themselves sufficiently against the most radical and violent attackers.
Another small piece was discovering an article that named Lashkar Gah both Little America in the 1960s and the Capital of Hell in the 2000s.
The last piece for me was Azadah. There are characters that are unknown, unexplained. They arrive in a writer’s story and only with gentle coaxing do they reveal themselves.
The simple path, usually, is to write the “accidental character” out of the story. I attempted to do this with Di
