83: A Prison of Fours
3/8/2014
I wrote the new scene for Chapter Three: The Fever today. The three boys are spear fighting with hot embers in the darkness beneath the village. It’s kind of fun, and expanded a tad on the allusions of how Diallo got The Fever. It turned out okay, but more than anything I’m just glad I can finally put the first half of Book One to bed. Shouldn’t have to touch it for another eleven years now.
Present-Day Reflection
8/16/2026
If only saying it made it so. That 42 year old version of myself had only scratched the surface of his rewrites and reimagining, and had yet to even make the transition away from referring to his chapters as scenes. The thing that kept me entrenched in that old model so long was my clinging to a symmetry of fours. I wanted four volumes in the series, four Books per volume, four Parts per book and four chapters per Part. Four levels of Four.
Four is the only sacred number among Batu, and it’s used as the metronome for the entire series – providing a sense of rhythm and harmony to everything. There was a time when I kept track of all my uses of four, but after compiling a list several pages long I eventually lost track and stopped documenting its use. That was about 15 years ago. Suffice it to say that the number four is used almost every time there’s a number put to anything.
A brief sampling of the more obvious uses would be:
· The four villages that comprise the tribe as a whole.
· The series centering around four best friends (Diallo, Tamal, Bakar, Dougga).
· Four members of the jola representing the four spiritual disciplines of the tribe.
· The four songs comprising The Napatawalata song cycle.
· The four segments of The Yara prelude to Wings of Providence.
· The word Batu has four letters in it.
· There’s four gateways in and out of Ephrathah.
· There’s four emergent trees with their own fire circles in Ephrathah.
· Mosai’s kulu has four holes in it.
· In the Kanar Exegesis there are four glyphs in each set and every glyph has four levels of meaning.
· The Twa Yal-Jukun takes place every four years.
· Each book in the series spans four years.
· There’s four rites of passage in a person’s lifetime that occurs every four years (if they live long enough).
· Every ritual has 4 stages to it…
As I said, the list goes on and on. And it was this obsession with the number four that kept me fixed to the idea that every book in the series could only have four chapters. Letting go of that took a lot of convincing. The strongest argument was the realization of how ridiculous it is to have 50+ page chapters. Ultimately though, it was my need for creative freedom that broke the chain of fours.
I build my own prisons, and only I can forge the keys that set me free.
