109: Lost In Translation
4/13/2016
I finished Chapter 46: Conscience. It was Alena’s purification ritual and the realization that she needs to do something to help Diallo. I also got the fable, The Weakening, done earlier this month – having renamed it from The Wild Man, and reimagining it for Tapu. I wanted to keep all the fables in this first book geared towards children, with anthropomorphic animals as protagonists, since all my main characters are still children. And it helps to lay a foundation for Tapu and The Napatawalata. I like how The Weakening turned out and ended up adding more relevance to Part Three’s theme, too.
The Conscience chapter came in much longer than I envisioned. What with the purification ritual and the scenery backdrops I wanted to bring out, it sort of got away from me. That said, it was MUCH better in my head during the writing of it than it was upon rereading it. It had been a living burning and fascinating vision during the creative process but came off flat and as a pale reflection of that on the reread.
Some of that is due to my seeing a dozen word choice changes I’d want to make on every page if I had a computer. But I really don’t feel like rewriting ten-plus pages just to pretty it up right now. I’ll save the polish for the computer drafts, which will hopefully bring it to life the way I envisioned it in my mind.
But it’s there on the page for the most part. So, onward to Diallo’s chapter, Into the Dark.
Present-Day Reflection
9/11/2026
This happens a lot, where the intensity of the experience while writing gets lost in translation when I go back to reread it. Not always though. Sometimes it translates fairly precisely, and sometimes it’s even better than I thought upon the reread. Now that I have the aid of a computer, Microsoft Word’s Read Aloud feature to read it back to me is also a nice tool for making sure things are translating nicely.
Indeed, I just now used the Read Aloud feature on this journal entry, which led me to adjust some of its punctuation. Having written the original draft of all these journal entries by hand in a single-bound Composition Book, there was no editing or rewrites of any kind possible. So, what you get here is the raw and ugly truth concerning the flow of my thoughts about things.
Though these Present-Day Reflections are all composed on the computer, and I utilize all the resources of modern technology available to me so that they’ll translate as I intend them to.
