The Notebook

Subtlety and nuance is only rewarding for those who understand it. Working on spiffing up "Lone Wolf" for release, it occurred to me that there are probably very few people who would understand some of the more minute nuances. It doesn't come from the story, but from the formatting of the pages itself.

In "Wolf Pack," readers will note that the page headings are dual language English and Cherokee. The chapter headings are Cherokee only, but it doesn't take more than a few brain cells to figure out that they're Chapter One, Chapter Two, etc. However, there are a few things that the average reader will not notice.

I wasn't going to do this, but formatting "Lone Wolf" kind of pushed me to it, which I'll explain.

First off, in just the word "ᎠᏯᏙᎸᎢ" (and here it's displaying correctly), the middle letter ("do") is upside down on the page. Second, in Cherokee, whenever things are in a series, they are labeled as "First Thing, Second Thing, etc." Doing things like in English, "Chapter One, Chapter Two," etc. is frowned upon in literary etiquette. So it's easy to conclude that things in the book are upside down and backwards as the Cherokee lose their historical way of life and begin migrating toward a more English way of doing things.

Next, in "Alpha Wolf," the page and chapter headings are divided. For Ola Achukma's chapters, they are in Choctaw. For Nendawagan, Lenape. Easy enough, the people are still very divided.

Coming into "Lone Wolf," then, readers will note that literary etiquette is being observed, that the chapters are labeled "First Chapter, Second Chapter," and so on. Second, they are consistent throughout the chapters (to be fair, there is only one narrator here, but even if I had included others, it would have been consistent).

However, readers may also note that the writing has changed a little. An astute reader will note that there are combination Cherokee and Aboriginal Syllabics used. You may recall that Ola Achukma was working on developing a writing system for the Krydik back in "Alpha Wolf" and while it was heavily influenced by the Cherokee syllabary of the time, there was some other influence there as well. Sabelu also makes mention of how some of the more similar characters were reworked so they didn't look so similar (seriously, fk Ꮃ ["la"] and Ꮤ ["ta"]). Therefore, the chapter and page headings used in "Lone Wolf" are sort of the natural progression of the written language. There is also some overall linguistic evolution as one word was favored over another or some got mashed together.

Fun facts that you are now aware of going into "Lone Wolf."