137: Creating a Sense of Verisimilitude
2/23/2025
This Chapter 69: Wanyana’s Song was an oddball chapter. It turned out to be only seven pages and 2,065 words, but I was working on it with every spare minute I had over the past six days, having just finished it last night at 11PM right before going to bed.
The ending snuck up on me as well, because I planned for the last beat of the chapter to have Kanunga appearing in Wanyana’s hut’s hatchway. His having just returned from the hunt was supposed to be a herald of Mosai’s eventual return, and the first reappearance of an adult male figure in Diallo’s immediate sphere of influence since Chapter 40, 246 pages ago. Though Kanunga returned ahead of Mosai, his sudden appearance was intended to make Wanyana believe it was in answer to her call for help via the kra-karanja ritual. Then when she learns Mosai still hasn’t returned, she says that by the time he does he won’t have a son to return to.
But I decided not to write any of that. By the time I finished Wanyana’s healing song to Damara last night, it felt like the perfect ending for the chapter, and the additional scene with Kanunga appearing would weigh the chapter down and throw it off balance, without conveying enough for the story to justify it.
It’s one of those things I can always change my mind about later, but for now it feels complete and better without it. The only reason this chapter took as long as it did, aside from all the distractions at work and here at home, was that I got completely caught up in developing the Kanar language for Wanyana’ spells. I spent days trying to work out the philology, orthography, grammar and basic linguistics, despite knowing full well that it will require a lot more tweaking down the road before it can go into print. Because as soon as it’s published, it’s written in stone, and any defects or inconsistencies will be forever locked into Batu canon.
As of now, what I got with my Kanar language is based primarily on Swahili, though there’s a lot of amalgamations and conflations from a hodge-podge of African languages drawn from all over the continent. Much as Swahili is. Swahili has a lot of Arabic, and even European languages mixed in. Not to mention English.
I want Kanar to be something of a proto language for all the other African languages to be stemming from, so I want there to be some similarities. But if I’m to do it right the similarities have to have a direction chronologically to the influence. Right now, the direction is backwards, where any expert in linguistics could immediately tell my language derives from pre-existing ones. There’s a natural evolution to such things, and what I have now is backwards.
Anyway, my anal obsessive-compulsive nature for such details got me lost down a rabbit hole of language, spending two or three days trying to formulate a passable approximation of the right words – which when it was all said and done totaled 75. Or more precisely, a couple dozen words that were arranged and repeated in sentences that totaled 75.
Not a waste of time, in my opinion, since at least it currently gives the right feel for what I eventually want – it feels organic and consistent, i.e. believable for the layman. So, it’s falling under the heading of good enough for now, with a strong emphasis of needing to update it sometime prior to publishing.
The oddball nature of this chapter wasn’t entirely due to linguistic issues, but to the tone and content as well. I may have even gone too far with the fire blowing out and reigniting all on its own, and the shaking hut and platform, the hearing of voices, etc. This doesn’t necessarily break my rule that there can’t be any supernatural phenomenon without also having a natural/rational explanation for it as well, but it comes close. I never prefaced any of this by mentioning Wanyana had taken some kind of hallucinogenic drug to explain her experience. All a rationalist can argue is that the intensity of the ritual itself induced the hallucinations. Or maybe consuming some sort of drug is part of every ritual of this kind and was simply not mentioned.
At any rate, I knew as I wrote it, I was flirting with maybe going too far, but I wanted to spice things up with the unexpected, and I figured I could easily take it out on later drafts without effecting any of the other elements around it.
All in all, I like this chapter. It turned out better than I thought it would – just as they all should and usually do. I hate to say that I particularly liked the healing song at the end, because there are so many elements in this chapter that stand out for me fondly. But yes, I am very happy with the song about Damara and how it spun the reader out of the chapter in the playfully witty way it did. The last stanza in particular made me think of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Garden of Childhood Verses, in terms of its aroma of cleverness.
Now… On to the next chapter: Siona’s Song.
Present-Day Reflection
10/9/2026
It’s always a fine line I dance along when it comes to whether I’m going too far or not, and I find it almost impossible to judge accurately on first drafts. The difficulty lies in how I want the entire series as a whole to feel like a sensational dramatic epic imbued with fantastical supernatural elements, while the page-by-page experience of the reader feels entirely organic, natural, and grounded.
It isn't just about holding the line on magic though – it’s about texture. Looking back at this entry, I see two distinct instincts at play: the urge to over-engineer as I spend three days on 75 words of Kanar, versus the urge to trust my scene's emotional truth by cutting Kanunga’s arrival because the song was the true ending.
The net effect I’m going for is that the most bizarre and grand aspects of the story work because the human moments underneath them are airtight. When Wanyana’s fire reignites or the hut shakes, the reader suspends disbelief not because I provide a drug explanation, but because Wanyana's emotional reality in that moment is unmistakable.
Fantasy elements thrive in the margins of ambiguity.
