Jon E. Evans | Science, Story & the Soul

Tonight’s research looks a little different.

I’m about to watch Giselle.

Not because Kemai is about ballet, and not because I suddenly decided to become cultured. I’m watching it because the book is asking questions about beauty, discipline, sacrifice, and the strange line between control and surrender. Ballet happens to live right at that edge.

One of the things I love about writing is that research doesn’t always look like research. Sometimes it looks like sitting quietly and letting a work of art do what it was designed to do. Movement tells stories language can’t. Bodies in motion carry ideas about devotion, cost, and consequence that are hard to fake on the page.

Giselle is a story about grace and obsession. About precision pushed too far. About love that becomes destructive and beauty that demands payment. That tension is central to Kemai. I’m trying to write a world where excellence is everywhere, but direction is not. Where people pour everything they have into the wrong center of gravity and call it transcendence.

Watching something like this helps me calibrate tone. It reminds me what it feels like when discipline becomes identity. When performance replaces offering. When the line between devotion and self-worship quietly disappears.

And honestly, I’m grateful writing gives me permission to do this. To watch a ballet and call it work. To sit with art I might not otherwise seek out and let it shape the story in ways I won’t fully understand until much later. These are the moments where a book starts to feel alive, where the world inside it gains texture instead of just structure.

Kemai is different from Kaisoisee. It’s more embodied. More intimate. More concerned with the cost of being seen than the wonder of discovery. If Kaisoisee asked what happens when humanity finds something it shouldn’t, Kemai asks what happens when the world watches you respond.

So tonight, the research looks like this. Velvet curtains. Controlled movement. A story told without words.

Back to the work.

Image: Giselle scene, from Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Arts du spectacle, 4-ICO THE-2781