God isn’t big on revision. After all, everything He makes comes out right the first time—except for human beings, of course, who are still a work in progress. And even the worst disasters are conveniently smoothed over as part of His grand “plan.”Writers get no such consideration.Which is my way of explaining how I came to write Burning Twilight as a self-contained sequel to my novel The Fifth Servant. Set in 1592, it tells of Kassy the wise woman, an herbal healer who has been banished from Prague for practicing “witchcraft,” and Rabbi Benyamin Ben-Akiva, who is traveling to the Kingdom of Poland with Rabbi Judah Loew to escape the ravages of the Counter Reformation in Germany.I couldn’t get Benyamin and Kassy together in The Fifth Servant, even though I really wanted them to meet. But they inhabited two different worlds, on opposite sides of the wall dividing the Jewish ghetto from the rest of Christian Prague, and I just wasn’t able to make it happen.Until now.Because I wasn’t finished with these characters, and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to give them new life in Burning Twilight, which takes place a few weeks after the action of The Fifth Servant.
