Blush Born Midpoint Breakdown | Chapter 18 Colorful Revelations | Part One
Coloristas Culture and Naming
Welcome to Find Your Colors!
This is where I am building a conversation around the narrative of The Shards of Color Trilogy and more specifically the first book of this trilogy titled BLUSH BORN.
I'm Jeff B. White and I am the writer and creator of these stories. Find Your Colors allows me to provide the breakdown of these chapters exploring the psychological concepts that are present within the narrative of BLUSH BORN, while also explaining how I created this world from my own personal story of struggle and survival.
Last week I shared "Chapter 18 Colorful Revelations" and because of the sheer volume and length of that chapter, I decided it would be best to leave the breakdown for a separate episode.
In the process of writing that breakdown I realized once I had completed it that it was 6,792 words. This would have activated all of the word limit issues and presented something that would have taken me two hours to record and would not be read by the 11 people who read my stuff.
So I decided instead of doing that and sacrificing the valuable information that goes with this chapter, and because of the importance of this chapter, that I would break down the breakdowns. So that is what I have done. I am making this into a three-part sub-series that covers the three distinct points, the first one being culture and structures within the Colorista community as it compares to the rest of their world, and a brief look at some of the characters that were introduced. Later, I will be posting the second part that explores the real world inspiration behind the Rainbow King.
Finally, I will be wrapping it up with the third part that explains the psychological foundations of the seven songs including the Rainbow King and Jethran's place in all of this. I'll also be making a special announcement that I'll get into later.
This gives me time to still be able to provide content while I am working on my chapters that come after this.
Hopefully, I will actually be building up a bank of content if I am able to win the battle against my inner saboteur who tells me that life would be more fun if I dedicate all of my time to working on my unpublishable manuscript that is based on a retelling of The Little Mermaid from the point of view of a sea witch named Octavia because Ursula is owned by the mouse with fat lawyers.
The Breakdown
If you have been reading along and have already finished this chapter, you probably felt the shift in the air. Something fundamentally changes here. The story opens wider, and the emotional rules of the world become much clearer. The questions Jethran has been carrying since birth are brought into sharper focus while new and much larger questions begin to take shape.
This is undoubtedly the most important chapter in BLUSH BORN and quite possibly the most important chapter in the whole series. It acts as the midpoint of the story and fundamentally alters the direction of the narrative. It serves as the exact moment when Jethran's understanding of the world and of himself deepens irreversibly.
Everything that has happened to him up until this point begins to reorganize itself. His birth, his Blush, Collis and the forced pills, the Attention Necessity label, his mother's lullabies, the colors awakening within him, and the strange pull of the Seven Songs all come into conversation. He experiences a breakthrough, starting to believe that his mother knew far more about him than he ever realized.
He currently lacks the proof, meaning the pieces are just now falling into place.
One of the things that makes this story so much fun is that it takes him a long time to get the answers he has been seeking. Even these new questions may remain unanswered in this particular book.
But before that happens, there will be drama.
On Colorista Culture and Avoiding Real World Associations
You may have noticed a change in the story. I updated the name of the Coloristas, as well as their gendering.
Within the culture of the Coloristas, the women are known as ristas, the children are called colorlings and also known as lings which is just the word for kids. While the men are known as colormen.
I want to be 100% transparent and firm on this. This is not a reference to colored men or colored people. I’ve worked very hard on ensuring that the word colored is not even used in this entire narrative and across all three books. I don’t even say that when I’m describing something by its color.
You will never read characters in my stories say that’s a yellow colored plant or say that that’s a blue colored shirt. They say that it’s the shade of or the hue of or it’s blue-hued or blue-shaded. They will describe something saying that it’s the color of.
They also don’t say "of color" due to the racial gravity and weight that is applied to that term in the real world. Although the trilogy’s name is Shards of Color and that was an oversight that stared me in the face every single day that I wrote all of this without ever being seen.
With that part aside, when we’re describing the world in the story we just use the phrase with color or about color. Because the world doesn’t suddenly become a world of color. The people who were once gray become people with color living in a world of vibrancy. They suddenly exist in a reality about color because color is physics and color is magic and color is reality.
So while I do understand and anticipate some people reacting under the assumption that I'm placing real world racial terms into the story, I just want to be clear now that I'm actually working hard to do the exact opposite. The word colorman or colormen is actually taken directly from the world of Art History.
Before pre-mixed paint in tubes existed, artists purchased raw pigments and mixed their own paints. Colormen took over this time-consuming task, grinding pigments with oils or binders, which allowed painters to focus more on creation.
In another context, there is a term referred to as Farbenmensch. This is actually German for "color man" or "color person" and refers to an artist who thinks in color before line or composition. The German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner used this term for himself.
Further, while art history uses this to describe a person who is a supplier of pigments, it also can be used to describe a person who applies color in printing or a worker who mixes dyes.
There are Coloristas in the story who when they are seen their fingertips are stained from the colors of the dyes that they’ve used and the pigments that they’ve used to color their weavings. Their entire society and culture and spiritual belief is based around the art of movement and around the threads and they see and feel and experience the world through the colors of their people. They are very well established as possessing a full cosmological relationship with the existence of color. And color is part of their actual racial name being that their race is Colorista.
Before I did this I had already done very similar social linguistics and etymological creation of the other races that exist in the world. There are three races within this story. There are the Here of Evenhere, Silvarii, and Coloristas.
First there are the Silvarii. Originally they were called fairies but I decided that was too regular for my story, so because they have silver skin I made them into silvari which is an Urdu term for silver. It's also Portuguese for woodland. So that word works on two levels describing this race.
When I was coming up with their social linguistics and such I decided to just cut the word down the middle. I decided to name the women in their race Sils or sil. Their children, I decided to name sillies. It just felt really whimsical and seems like it would work for this group of people, plus because they are an extremely patriarchal society they treat children on the same level or less than they treat their females of their race. So that's why they call the children sillies, because it's just an extension of the women. However, the males carry an even darker undertone with their name.
The men I named Varii. And I'll get further into this later but it allows for people in the Kingdom to hear that word and to mispronounce it and just start calling them fairies which becomes a derogatory term.
Derogatory term but it's more just like a mispronunciation and the Silvarii took offense to it because it's not what they are. And while it is completely lost as to whether or not it actually was ever meant as derogatory it remains the fact that they deemed it derogatory and therefore it is.
Because it doesn't matter what the intention is what matters is the outcome.
Splitting the root word to reflect their patriarchal hierarchy is a highly effective worldbuilding technique. Designating the women as Sils and the children as sillies communicates their systemic oppression instantly. It establishes their societal value organically and bypasses heavy exposition.
It’s simply the exact same path of naming these races in the story that I took with the Here. The men are called heremen, the children herelings. The women, who are deeply deeply oppressed in their society, are given the gender specific descriptor of wem. Which is partially utilized for the mental image of them being reduced to nothing but a womb. And that one of the very first laws that we experience in this culture is that they are deemed to be "in possession of the delicate female mind which is better suited for playing with the children until dinner time." And they are assigned a man to oversee their family if they have a child and they’re not married because they’re not deemed capable of managing their homes.
Circling back, color men were instrumental in the development of new, brighter pigments, like chrome yellow and cobalt blue, for the Impressionists.
Personally, I found that bit of information to be utterly fascinating. I utilize those exact terms in this book. Jethran possesses his blue magic that manifests as a cobalt blue mist. So this work wouldn't even be possible if it weren't for the work done by the color man and the color men years ago. That they are used to describe the male Coloristas shows that this term is based in real world architecture, outside of racial connotations.
This means that the use of that term in the story allows me to honor the work that was done by those men by codifying their very existence into the fabric of the world within the story that benefits from the work they did in our world.
Easter Eggs and Character Naming
Along with the update to the cultural linguistics, there is another small Easter egg that I just put in this chapter.
Sometimes I think naming my characters has been one of my favorite parts, I think it's all my favorite part honestly, but dealing with a narrative where the story is so deeply rooted around the color it presents me with some cool opportunities.
Of course I'm talking about the family that Fable and Jethran were having dinner with before they went to the Hall of Tapestries. This specific scene serves a few purposes in that it was an opportunity to show Jethran for the first time in the story actually feeling comfortable and relaxed. Being calm and learning to breathe for the first time without the crushing weight of the oppression and the fear that had been facing his entire life. One very important moment came when he was watching Yola's kids. He saw them playing and enjoying themselves and he kind of not in the narrative but it was kind of as if he thought, "Aw that's nice why aren't they at work?"
Because he's only 16 years old but he's had a full-time job at this point for the last six years because of the Ling Labor Law that demands people above the age of ten work to be able to pay for the burden of their upbringing. When Cray tells him that they are only small splashes of color and their only duty is to enjoy their childhood. This very concept is completely foreign to him.
The reason that this scene matters so much is because, as the book moves into the more whimsical and happier parts of the story it's important to continue reminding the reader of exactly the stuff that he's come from and how far he's come in the very short amount of time. Also, he is about to have his life completely flipped upside down in just a few moments and so it was necessary to have him have a moment of peace and exhale.
But another crucial thing about this scene is the actual characters of Yola and her children and her husband Cray. Because you know... Crayola. The Coloristas are a culture based solely around color and so I get to play with giving them names that align with that way of life but, also sound completely like an actual character in a fantasy story.
As for the children of Yola, they remained unnamed in this chapter. While I won't reveal it here today, we do actually encounter Yola's children twenty years later in the story and at that point in time we learn their names. When it happens, it's a moment that shows that the history of this world is built-in and it's a living and breathing place that existed long before we came along. Also this shows that within this narrative is life and that life continues living on even between books, not just for the main characters but for the whole Kingdom of Evenhere.
What all of this is really trying to show and what I'm trying to say is that this is more than just a regular fantasy story with a boy doing some stuff and being a hero and whatnot. There is a living and breathing world of people to meet. Each person offers a distinct purpose throughout the course of these stories. There are even people who you see in the story and you think they're just like an extra or just somebody that's filling up some narrative device at that moment and then you find out later that they have a whole other level of importance. And there's pretty much no one who is mentioned or steps onto these pages who would be considered an NPC.
Nothing that I do in the story is done with a sense of flippancy or with a lack of intentioned purpose and designed thought. It's important to me that they feel real and that they feel lived in, and mostly that whatever their purpose is in the story, that it's served in a way that lands with the reader leaving them entertained, educated, and seen.
What's Next?
Next time, I am going to present Part 2 of this breakdown where I will dive into the real world origins of the Rainbow King, my personal experiences as an LGBTQ activist that inspired the title, and the deeply personal inspirations behind the Colorista magic system.
After that, will be part 3 where I will discuss the psychological foundations of the Rainbow King and the rest of the Seven Songs. And with that breakdown I will be making an announcement about the future of Find Your Colors. So you're not going to want to miss that!
Let's Discuss!
Jethran finally finds a moment to relax and to calm himself. After an entire lifetime holding his breath it's a beautiful moment for him.
Do you know what it's like to have to go through your life unable to exhale because of all the nonsense?
How did you finally reach a point when you were able to release it?
How long have you been holding your breath?
Are you clenching your jaw right now? Is your tongue pressed against the top of your mouth?
If it is, why don't you go ahead loosen that shit up and take a breath.
Better?
Maybe you've caught every episode of this or you've just got a chapter here and there or maybe you just tuned in for this specific breakdown.
But now that we've reached this Midway point in the story there are some things that I'm curious about. I've discussed quite a bit of background information and narrative lore, a lot of it's been extremely personal, but vital to actually explaining the story.
Do you feel that the narrative probably captures the real world aspects that I've described them to be representing?
If you have been reading along with this, what do you think so far?
How does the story land with you?
Who's your favorite character?
What are your thoughts?
I would really love to know.
Feel free to answer these questions in the comments section below or take them with you as you go.
Read the Story Behind the Story
Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of my memoir Shards of Hope A Tweaker Witch's Journey are all available to read for free right now on my website! If you're interested in exploring the true story that inspired the emotional journey of BLUSH BORN, head over and check them out.
While you're there go ahead and join the email list so you can get updates about my publishing journey and other bonus content that is exclusive to my mailing list.
All of that is available at www.jeffbwhite.com
Subscribe Today!
Find Your Colors is a reader-supported publication and a listener-supported podcast. It is through the support of my subscribers that I am able to continue writing and sharing my stories with the world. If you've enjoyed what you've read here, please consider joining as a free or paid subscriber. And click this button for 25% off for your first year.
If you prefer to listen, make sure to check out the podcast version featuring other content along with breakdowns on Spotify YouTube podcast and Apple Podcasts. Click the button below to join the conversation on Spotify.
As always, if you read this all the way to the end or if you listened all the way through you are absolutely my hero.
Thank you for allowing me the time out of your day, and the space in your brain, to share my story and introduce Jethran to the world.