23: Foreshadowing Prominence
11/26/2011
Been working on Chapter Four: Twa Yal-Jukun, every day without bothering to log it here in the journal. I have 9,344 words of it done, which is over a thousand words a day, and yet I haven’t even got everyone on the river yet on their way to the festival. Diallo just got his reading from Siona in scene five. Which, by my reckoning, only puts me 2/3 of the way through the chapter. Which means it’s going to be way too long. And there’s hardly any exposition to edit out to shorten it – it’s 98% dialogue and action. Easy to improve and modify, but hard to cut without losing something needed.
We’ll see. At any rate, it’s coming together well. The spontaneous addition of Banyoro Badru was divinely inspired and helps a lot. Her free spirit helps to alleviate the uptight feeling I get from the other characters. I like Badru, and she’ll find her way back into the story later somehow.
Foreshadowing Broka, Topol, and Dugal through Bakar, Tamal, and Dougga worked fairly well. A couple of nice vignettes with them.
Deciding to turn the tables on all my preconceptions for Siona’s scene, I gave the POV to Alena, and she did a good job with it. There’s a lot of things to tweak and improve, but I believe I was right to give the scene to her rather than Diallo or Siona. It gives it a fresh twist so I’m not just taking dictation on the preconceptions and thoughts I’ve had about the scene these last couple years. If I’m bored, the writing will be boring. Going with Alena made it more complicated and more difficult, but also more interesting.
The rule of thumb may be to give the POV to whoever is most affected in a scene, but that would mean Diallo would get almost every POV. That would bore the hell out of me.
Anyway, my goal is to finish “Twa Yal-Jukun” (and Part One) by the end of the month. Difficult, but possible. I’m feeling good about this.
Present-Day Reflection
6/17/2026
It’s interesting to reread this entry where I write so casually about the introduction of characters who are now the heart and soul of the entire series. Bakar, Tamal, Dougga, and Badru may have been peripheral and relatively unimportant back then – merely “foreshadowing” their eventual status – but as the first book stands now, they are right at the center of things from the very beginning, each getting their own introductory chapters. Badru is still a secondary character, but she’s also the most colorful for me to write for. The three boys, however, get just as much fleshing out as Diallo does – despite not getting quite as much “screen time”. They’re also often more sympathetic and fun to follow than Diallo. Which probably isn’t a good thing for a protagonist.
