So noted! I personally find the contrived conflicts that play so large a role in popular fiction these days dull -- oh, look, here comes another appallingly difficult choice the author has cooked up to make the protagonist suffer, whatever will he do? Yawn. I'm much more interested in exploring personality and action in a more nuanced context, one that has more resonance with the kind of conflicts and resolutions most of us actually experience in our lives. I know that's not a universal taste -- obviously a lot of people enjoy fiction with the kind of thing you've asked about -- but it's my taste.

Put another way, the kind of story where somebody has to sacrifice everything they value to achieve the point of the story has been done to death, and turned into a cliche. What I'm interested in here is not how much canned suffering I can extract from Embery, but how the pursuit of her dream through a variegated landscape is going to change her, and change the way she sees the world, and in the process, change the way the reader sees the world.