35: Fantasy Versus Reality
10/22/2012
After a few weeks of leaving my Batu work untouched I’ve been back at it now for the past few days. I’ve been pushing through the leopard sequences for Lost in the Darkness. Went back and rewrote the fourth scene, which lacked the necessary details for reading the spoor. Spent an entire day reviewing my notes on true accounts of animal attacks (leopard attacks in particular) and wrote a step-by-step choreography for Pardos attacking and mauling Mosai. The actual writing of that scene will be within the next couple days. I also collated my notes on the ways of leopards to write the sixth scene from Pardos’ point of view, which I’m almost finished writing. And I touched up and added material to the fifth scene, where Diallo wakes from a nightmare and sees Pardo for the first time.
On an entirely different track, one of philology – in going through my notes I once more came across my old ideas for a calligraphic form of Kanar and fell in love with them yet again. I had abandoned them as being too fanciful and unrealistic for hunter-gatherers, and too similar to Tolkien’s Elvish calligraphy. But for that matter, my Kanar glyphs are also too similar to Nordic runes. So, I’m thinking about overriding my earlier judgement, purely for aesthetic reasons, and bringing back the calligraphy form of Kanar as an element in the books. I really love the look of it.
And I abandoned reality a long time ago anyway. Technically, they shouldn’t even have villages if they were really hunter-gatherers. Not permanent ones anyway. They’d be nomadic, like the Mahalia band to the south. There’s much to be said for keeping it all fun and romanticized, rather than taking it too seriously with an eye for historical accuracy. And it’s with that spirit that I make creative decisions, like using the calligraphy form of Kanar.
Present-Day Reflection
6/29/2026
As a young man, when my skills with drawing and painting began to reach the level they are now, I allowed myself to be influenced by the praise from others around me. Photo realism is a dead-end, artistically for me. Spending hours doing what a camera does in a split second feels like a waste of time, but impressing people with this magic trick kept me stuck in that rut. I sacrificed creativity and artistic expression for having my ego stroked and giving people “art” that is easy to judge as either good or bad. It either looks just like the real thing, or it doesn’t. Makes it easy to assess my skill without the messiness of subjective aesthetic taste.
I refuse to make that same mistake with my writing. First and foremost, I write for me and what I want to read. And I’m determined to err on the side of creativity and the aesthetically fanciful. We’re already living in reality, to replicate that in my art and fiction would be redundant and a waste of time. I’m not an ethnographer, trying to portray a real culture that is different from ours for mere appreciation of those differences – as Clavell did very well in Shogun.
I want to create and explore things that never were, that I think would be amazing if they did exist, but don’t. That is my taste, and I refuse to let myself be influenced by imagined critics who will have a field day tearing apart all my historical and ethnographic inaccuracies, or even the anachronisms. I try hard to create a sense of verisimilitude for the average reader who has no background in traditional African cultures, but that is as far as I’m willing to be influenced when it comes to my creative decisions with my Batu.
