R.A. Salvatore On His New Book The Finest Edge Of Twilight

Legendary fantasy author and Dungeons & Dragons lorebuilder R.A. Salvatore is back with a new book, The Finest Edge of Twilight. Of course, while he has written plenty of fantasy outside of Dungeons & Dragons, Salvatore is best known as the creator of Drizzt Do’Urden, one of the most iconic characters in the DnD pantheon.

After 40 books, though, Salvatore has said all that he has to say about Drizzt, Catti-brie, and the other Companions of the Hall. This time, his new book focuses not on Drizzt and his own adventures with his companions, but on Drizzt and Catti-brie’s daughter, Breezy. As the daughter and granddaughter of legendary heroes, Breezy Do’Urden has struggled to escape the towering shadow of her family.

The Finest Edge of Twilight explores the beginning of Breezy Do’Urden stepping out on her own to create her own legend, just as her parents did before her. With the help of elusive drow and Drizzt companion Jarlaxle, much to the dismay of her overprotective parents, the fiery, talented Breezy is determined to forge her own destiny, and the book is a fascinating snapshot of the exact moment in time in which someone is no longer a child, but not yet the fully matured adult they will become.

ScreenRant‘s Alisha Grauso spoke with R.A. Salvatore for a lengthy interview about his new book. They spoke about how Breezy is a parallel for how kids in the real world have so many more challenges now, changing the way he approaches his writing, exploring characters he’d long since thought he’d never write again, and more.

Alisha Grauso: The lore of DnD is so deep and, even just Drizzt alone, it can be a little daunting knowing where to jump in. But this book is a really good jumping off point.

R.A. Salvatore: Yeah! That was the whole point. One of the problems I have, honestly, is that when you have a series that’s this long, and you have a new hardcover come out, publishers want to sell that hardcover. That’s the prize. How do you do it when people are ten books behind or when people go, “Oh, I want to get back into that series, but I don’t even remember where I am.” Because it’s the 40th book – not even counting the Clara Quintet and The Stone of Tomorrow Trilogy and the anthology, all the stories I did.

So I mean, I thought I was done with Drizzt because that’s when they stopped publishing. And then a couple of years later they licensed me so that I could go do the Generations Trilogy and The Way of the Drow, and The Dao of Drizzt, as well, came out then. But that was with a different publisher.

And one of the other problems, quite honestly, is, if they put out new Drizzt things like statues or Funko Pops or whatever, it wasn’t helping the new books. It was going back and helping ones like Homeland and Crystal Shard, those books. Because people are like, “Oh, what’s this? I got to check this out.” So I thought I was done several times throughout this series, but I also thought I was done after Lolth’s Warrior because I wasn’t sure where to go.

But I had been working on the Webtoon with Purpah–do you know her work?

Alisha Grauso: I do!

R.A. Salvatore: I was blown away by her professionalism, her talent, and in working with her, I had to explain Breezy to her. I had to explain all the different things that were going into this character. And so, as we were doing this over a year and a half or whatever it was, I just said, “I really want to take a better look at this character”. And so I didn’t even have a contract, I just sat down and wrote the book because I wanted to write it, and then I sold it.

Alisha Grauso: True storytellers never really stop telling stories. I mean, you said you thought you were done, and I always laugh and think about how many times Stephen King has said he’s retiring, and–

R.A. Salvatore: Not retiring. By the way, Polygon shouldn’t have put that headline out there.

Alisha Grauso: That’s fair.

R.A. Salvatore: I just figured that I was done with the Realms for a while. Let something else germinate, and Breezy popped up. I still working on the last book in my DemonWars series. Now, there are a couple other books I want to write, maybe.

Alisha Grauso: This book is truly such a torch-passing book. It’s balanced in that the people that will pick it up because they love Drizzt and the Companions of the Hall–and they’re still here–but the book is still firmly a Breezy story. Did you find that approaching it from that kind of fresh perspective really helped you to, if not reinvent, then at least give you a new appreciation for the older characters?

R.A. Salvatore: Absolutely. Especially Artemis Entreri, Jarlaxle, what Dahlia had gone through. I don’t say my books are analogies, but you can’t help but take note of what’s going on in the world around you. And one thing that was made very clear to me, and even more clear this last week and when I was at Comic-Con is that I know I did not grow up remotely with the same experiences as the generation coming of age now, or even the one above them, or maybe two above them.

I mean, I was very in touch with the millennials. I have three kids who are millennials, and I have grandkids now, but I’m seeing the way they’re growing up, and it is fundamentally different. I always try to look through the eyes of my characters to answer questions. So Breezy gives me that opportunity a little bit.

Alisha Grauso: Right. Everybody around them, and even readers, revere these legendary characters. But it doesn’t matter if you’re famous, or revered, or reknowned; you’re still just lame parents to your kids, So through the eyes of Breezy, you see that maybe Drizzt and the rest, it’s not that their time has passed, but it may be that they’re too entrenched in their own worldview and their own experiences to understand the world as it’s changed.

R.A. Salvatore: That’s very evident in the book on purpose. Because, here’s the thing… If you look in the book, and this is something I’m seeing in politics in the U.S. right now. I mean, I’m watching a Senate race in Maine, a primary between the 77-year-old governor and this young guy who’s stepping in, who says, it doesn’t matter how old you are, it’s how old your ideas are, the Graham Platner guy. And what occurs to me is that however well-intentioned someone my age or older wants to be, we really don’t get what it’s like to be coming of age now.

Because when I was a kid, I believed I just go out, I get a job, I work hard, and I’ll get ahead. And my wife and I did. We had our jobs. We were working hard, we had very little, but we knew that we could keep building. And if I hadn’t been a writer, I would’ve had a successful career in hi-tech as a manager, and my wife would’ve had a great career as a teacher. But that’s the way I grew up, I grew up believing in the status quo, but I didn’t grow up and come out of college $150,000 in debt with loans that were never going to be able to be paid, or where you can’t stay at a job, you’ve got to keep bouncing around jobs if you want to have a career. It’s just a very different world. And if you look in the book, Bruenor really doesn’t understand why Icewind Dale doesn’t want the gate up there. But Breezy gets it immediately.

And then also think about this, too: Breezy is very egalitarian. She believes you’ve got to make your way. You’ve got to prove yourself. I’m not better than anyone else. No one’s better than me, but I’m going to prove I’m better than them. I’m going to work harder than them. This is Breezy. So how does Breezy feel about Bruenor being a king? And if he dies, then Fist and Fury take over, and it’ll go down the line. How does she feel about something like that? She can peel away all the traditional baloney that the older characters came in. Everything.

Alisha Grauso: There’s that moment after she loses the fight, which felt inevitable, that she realizes, “Oh, I’ve been pushing away all these things about me, the truth of my life, my privilege, so to speak. But the truth is, I am privileged. I have gotten a foot up. I do have all these people around me. I can’t pretend I don’t.” But for the first time, she also realizes, “…and I’ve also secretly kind of internalized that. Well, yeah, it sort of has made me better. I don’t really have to follow the rules.” And it was a really humbling moment for her. It seemed important that it was a realization she had on her own and not one that was given to her.

R.A. Salvatore: Yeah, that’s really important. Breezy, the word I would use to describe this character is “agency.” She gets a lot from so many people, but she doesn’t need it if she wants to believe she doesn’t need it.

Alisha Grauso: I was somebody, like Breezy, who bounced around a lot. It took me a while to figure out who I was, or, at least, who I was in the world, what I wanted to do. I bounced around from jobs, and then later in my late twenties, in grad school, I was diagnosed with ADHD, which made a lot of sense. And that is–

R.A. Salvatore: I knew you were going to say that!

Alisha Grauso: Exactly! So, you love all these things and can focus, but then you get bored. But if you learn how to harness all of that, it can become a gift. You really see that in Breezy, finally learning, “Oh, I don’t have to be any one thing. This is actually a gift that I do this.”

R.A. Salvatore: Have you ever visited a game studio, like a top-tier game studio?

Alisha Grauso: That’s not been my realm, so I have not, no.

R.A. Salvatore: Okay. If you did, you would know this immediately, that most of the people in there were neurospicy. I love that word. Nevermind this “neurodivergent” or “on the spectrum,” “neurospicy” is the word I love. Because one thing I know I went through, is that when I was growing up, you had to fake it. You had to learn to fake it. And that’s really hard. It’s really hard to live your life like that.

[Kids] don’t have to anymore. And I’m seeing creativity that I never could have imagined being accepted when I was a kid from kids. And I love it. I absolutely love it. It’s easy to get grumpy. And when you look back now? I look at Little League, and quite frankly, most of the kids there are terrible. They can’t catch, they don’t know how to play. They might hit one in 10 pitches if they’re lucky, and they close their eyes before they swing. But I think a lot of people get upset about that because when I played, all we did was play baseball. I was 10 years old and hitting the ball, out of the park home runs, and now the better 10-year-olds can maybe hit it into the outfield in a lot of these places, except for the top kids who are driven. At least, I’m just talking about the general Little Leagues.

But the thing is, their lives are so much different now. We had three TV channels. We didn’t have a Game Boy or whatever, a Nintendo Switch or whatever it is. We didn’t have all this extra distraction and fun distraction. We would get out of the house, come home when the street lights came on. You threw your books, you grabbed your glove, your football, whatever you had, whatever season it was. You went out, you played. And that was the way we did it.

So I can look at the generation now, as I try to understand them, because I want to always be understanding instead of judging. It’s a better way to live your life. And what I realize is that it’s not a pejorative, it’s just different. And I love that. I do think we’ve lost some things, and I’ve said it in a bunch of interviews, and I’ll say it again: social media has become a cancer, an addictive cancer.

Alisha Grauso: And that ties back to Breezy. It’s a lot harder, I think, to find yourself now because there’s a lot more opportunity, like there is for Breezy. There’s a lot more opportunity than was presented to her parents–when Drizzt and Jarlaxle were born, they orginally only had one preordained fate. But Breezy has all these options open to her, that makes it harder to figure out who she is.

R.A. Salvatore: Yes, exactly. That’s exactly it.

Alisha Grauso: There’s an interesting parallel between Breezy and Dahlia/Delilah. For Breezy, it was all about coming to terms with who she was.. She can’t deny her past, her upbringing, the people around her. She makes the decision to incorporate that into her to become more fully who she is, whereas Dahlia does the opposite and wants to deny everything from her past. She wants a new name, a new life, and to put everything behind her. But because she hadn’t made peace with it, she couldn’t let it go in the end. That’s what destroyed her. Was that deliberate framing?

R.A. Salvatore: Not at all. I thought Dahlia was going to be a very, very minor part of the book, just one part of the adventure that Breezy would be on. But I got to thinking about her, what I really wanted to do with her. Dahlia had a tough road with the readers because she was replacing–I mean, we had gone through Fourth Edition, a hundred-year jump, beloved characters are gone, and it looks like forever, even to me.

Even though we were trying to fix the Realms, a hundred-year jump was tough on people who were in long-running series, but I didn’t think it was going to happen. And so now, suddenly, here’s Dahlia, who’s nothing like Catti-brie, and she’s got demons and she’s scarred, horribly scarred, understandably horribly scarred, but nonetheless horribly scarred. So what I really went for when I decided that she would become the entry to Breezy, if you will, the parallel, I really wanted people to sympathize with her. I wanted the last part of that book to hurt a little bit, to think of what might’ve been and how unfair things can be.

Alisha Grauso: I felt a little bit of that with Keely, and I was glad at the end that she was saved. She wavers between the potential of becoming a vampire and still having her humanity. So I’m glad that it was balanced out: Though Dahlia had gone too far down her path to ever be redeemed, Keely hadn’t.

R.A. Salvatore: I got to give props to Paul Lucas, my agent, for that last scene because he really made me think about it. He read the before it came out or was edited, and he said, “Bob, I love it, but I really want it to be less of a choice and more of it has to be [Breezy].” And I think that made it, I think that made it. Then you see that it wasn’t an, “Oh, I should have done this instead” moment for anyone because there was no other choice with their nature.

But yeah, Dahlia Zaka in this book caught me by surprise. Very pleasant surprise.

Alisha Grauso: Jarlaxle plays a huge role in this book, but as you said, Breezy is all agency. That word defines her. While Jarlaxle loves Breezy and he truly wants what’s best for her, he’s also going to do what’s best for him, and if nudging her down to what he wants her to do that would help him also benefits her, well then so be it. They’re both getting what they want, but it does also feel like eventually there will be a point where there will be a reckoning for him.

R.A. Salvatore: I looked at that a little differently, though. I agree that Breezy’s going to feel that way, but to my way of thinking, Jarlaxle’s just telling Breezy to go be Breezy, and he’s letting the chips fall where they may, right. He did not know what was going to happen at the end. He didn’t know how that was going to play out. This was a formidable enemy here, and he wasn’t there holding her back.

Alisha Grauso: Maybe a better way of putting, is that it’s a hard lesson to learn that there are shades of gray in the world and everything isn’t so black and white. While Breezy was content with him allowing her freedom, unlike her overprotective parents, now she has to contend with the fact that Jarlaxle will do things like striking a deal with a vampire instead of killing them.

R.A. Salvaatore: For sure. Jarlaxle will point her in a direction so she can walk her own road. But I agree with you that if I continue with this, eventually–and probably not that far down the road–Jax would point her in a direction where she says, “Wait a minute. No, no, no. This is over a line.”

Alisha Grauso: Do you have her story all mapped out or are you just writing as it comes?

R.A. Salvatore: There’s one other thing I might want to do with her that I won’t talk about, but no, I wrote this book because I was fascinated by the character and the possibilities. My outline, I didn’t even do one because I only do outlines when I’m under contract because they won’t pay me if I don’t give ’em an outline, but I just wrote this book by the seat of my pants and just had fun with it, and it took me in wonderful places that I didn’t expect, which is when I know I’m doing it my way. This is what I want when I’m writing.

So I have no idea. I have no idea if there’s going to be another Breezy book. I mean, I would expect maybe, that this is where the whole “retirement” thing came from. I’ve got eight grandkids. We’ve got a big pool. The kids come over, use the pool. I’m in the pool. I got three little dogs and a wife I adore. We want to go on vacation, we go on vacation. I don’t want deadlines hanging over my head anymore.

I’m going to write until I’m dead, and if I write a book and finish a book and feel like that book is worth publishing, I’d probably be able to find someone to do it, but I don’t want to have to not go to my grandson’s hockey game because I have to get a chapter done.

Alisha Grauso: Like Breezy, you’ll do it, but you’ll do it your own way.

R.A. Salvatore: My agent’s very understanding. He’s a great guy, but we have a lot of other things going on. They’re kickstarting my DemonWars original series in these beautiful book editions, as the company is doing hopefully all seven, but at least the first three or four. I’ve licensed to a computer game company for DemonWars. We’ve got the webtoon hopefully coming up, that graphic novel. Del Rey is reprinting the entire series in trade paperback, and hopefully they’ll do hardcover, omnibus editions all the way through. So finally all of the books will be in the same format with the same type of covers, and that’s going to take years to play out.

So we’ll see. There are too many other things I need to see to that, for me at my age, are more important to me. Not more important than the writing itself. The writing is who I am. I’ll do this for the rest of my life, and when I’m up here, I’m in it. I’ll put this book against anything I’ve written in terms of just being a good story to read and a character that develops and all of that. I’m very proud of this book. I put my heart and soul into everything I do, but I don’t want to have to do it the way I used to, where I’d go to hockey games and I would be in the stands typing when the Zamboni was out. That’s what it was like. I mean, I wrote The Legacy in six weeks, I wrote The Crystal Shard in less than three months because I had to, and I don’t want to do it like that anymore.

Alisha Grauso: I’ve really enjoyed this interview and am looking forward to any future projects.

R.A. Salvatore: Well, hopefully we’ll have this discussion if they ever do the Drizzt TV show that they keep telling me they want to do. I don’t get it. I think at first it was because of the color of the skin, and they were afraid, And I think another reason is because everybody coming in wants to write new Drizzt stories for the show, and I have no control over that, but I’ve made it pretty clear that I’d feel like I was slapped in the face if they did that. I mean, why do you want to use Drizzt and his stories, then? Because I’ve spent 37 years building it.

The Finest Edge of Twilight is in bookstores and all available retailers now.