Annotated Raven's Children - Issue #1: Page 2

[layla]

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Shanti (the word, and the concept) is lifted from Buddhism. Cultural katamari strikes again! In all fairness, the Wagaibe were (semi) consistent in that most of their "borrowed" elements were Eastern in style. (Er, except the ones that weren't. Which I'll get to later in this issue.) But their overall culture did actually hold together pretty well. I just wish to heaven that I'd filed the serial numbers off the things I did borrow -- there is a difference between being influenced, and grabbing anything shiny and yoinking it into your world, and I was definitely doing the latter.

The letters on the pottery shard (reading down) are SH-N-T. Wagaibe writing doesn't use vowels.

Jained's use of vulgarity and colloquialisms ("crock of shit") ... ahahaha. Okay. Here we get into one of my decisions for the whole comic that I'm really not sure how I feel about now.

I made a decision at the very beginning -- it was a conscious decision, quite deliberate -- that I was going to use contemporary speech patterns for my characters. I didn't want flowery fantasy speech with thees and thous and no contractions. In the case of some characters, this involves a lot of swearing.

This is, once again, one of those decisions that I don't think is inherently bad -- actually, I think it was a pretty good one. I just think that I needed a little more skill than I had to pull it off and make it sound good.

In a lot of ways, Raven's Children is a perfectly good rough draft. It just needed a good hard editing that it didn't get.