135: What I Don’t Know
2/9/2025
I finished Chapter 67: Asking For Help yesterday, though I transcribed it all to paper today. I wrote it both by hand on paper and digitally on my tablet. I can’t take my tablet to work though, so most of it was done longhand at work, while most of the editing was done on the tablet. It amounted to 11 pages, and 3,220 words, which is a lot longer than I imagined. But that’s okay, because it turned out far better than I imagined as well.
I scrapped almost everything of the original concept. Indeed, all I kept from the original was that it would be from Joyul’s POV, that Alena would be asking for Siona’s help with Diallo, and that they’d meet up with Bakar, Tamal, and Dougga at the end in order to connect with the next chapter – Banyoro Badru.
Originally though, the whole thing was to take place in a hut. First Siona’s, then reimagined for the Jola Hut. And it was to possibly involve some kind of divination ritual, but mostly it was conceived as Joyul overhearing through a hut’s thatched walls as Alena confronted her mother about Diallo.
That concept died of boredom.
I already described here all the new visual material in my last journal entry. The primary additions that were not preconceived that emerged from the actual writing of it were all the insights into Joyul’s perspectives. Her needs to be more proactive and not just following Alena’s lead. Her fear of being lost in Alena’s shadow.
I’m very happy with this chapter and how it turned out, not because it was better written than most – because it probably wasn’t from a craft-stylistic-writerly POV – but because it was visually engaging and expanded the scope of the Batu world in just the right ways for this stage in the story. It was surprising and unpredictable for me, which I can only hope will translate for future readers as well.
I finished right on schedule for my chapter-a-week goal, and now onto the next – Chapter 68: Banyoro Badru.
Present-Day Reflection
10/7/2026
The characters in the fiction I create are just like the real people in my life in terms of how they’re always capable of revealing facets of themselves I never imagined existed. They’re always more complicated than I think, and not at all as I believed them to be. They not only reveal themselves gradually in fragments, but those fragments can change. So, what might be true about them one minute, may not be true the next. Let alone as the years pass.
This is so obvious with the real people in my life, it’s hardly worth mentioning. Yet when the same phenomenon is found in the fictional characters I thought I created – characters I should know inside and out – it seems peculiar. I think it all comes back to issues I’ve touched on in these journal entries repeatedly. Expectations, surprises, choices and free will, discovery and growth through the act of writing, allowing things to evolve organically, etc.
It’s all for the better that I’m unable to play god. At least not an omniscient one. What a dull and vapid undertaking this would be for me if it were so.
