So, I got in a good amount of writing today on The Walls of Troy. All the way up to the appearance of the third member of the core cast, in fact. But it's funny how changes have a way of snowballing.
When I changed the very brief pre-escape and escape sequence from the original draft of the novel into a 22,000 word text game, I changed a lot about the nature of how they got aboard a ship off of Lesbos. Combining that with a better understanding of the geography and sailing times and suddenly I had the girls deposited in a half-rebuilt city that had been burned down during the war (by one of their fathers!) on the same day they had left the island, as opposed to dumped randomly on the Trojan shore several days later.
Add to that a better grip on just how guest-friendship and pre-monetary trade and travel worked, and a new wrinkle to the history of Troy following the war, and suddenly instead of meeting Eurysakes, son of Aias of Salamis, all alone at the grave of Achilles, where he had been deposited by his own ship, they meet the crew of his ship first, because his excuse to come to Troy at all was as an official visit on behalf of his uncle, founder and king of Cyprian Salamis. So now instead of them walking to Troy from the site of the Greek camp, they're going to be sailing there in a Cypriote ship. And instead of only meeting the new king after stopping some marauding bandits, they're going to be at a formal feast before setting out to fight the bandits.
There are going to be so many changed dynamics to this that it's kind of hard for me to wrap my head around it! But the new version is going to be vastly improved over the old one, and that's what's important. :)
Unfortunately, I only got about an hour and a half written, because I exacerbated this injury I've been putting up with all freaking year. :( Last year on New Year's Eve, I twisted my ankle really badly. This is nothing new for me; I've had weak ankles for years. This time was worse than usual, though, and I ended up on the floor in a lot of pain, much worse than usual. I probably griped about it on my old blog a lot, but the short version is that when it wasn't even a little better after several days, I went to the urgent care center, they x-rayed it and did the usual sprained ankle stuff, only then they also said that I should see a specialist, because a chip had come off the bone. That explained a lot to me, because I knew it had felt different at the time and ever since. So I duly went to see a specialist, who laughed off the whole thing as "that's why I tell people not to go to urgent care centers, because they get all worked up over nothing." It was totally routine and normal, he claimed, before giving me a sheet full of the usual exercises to do to strengthen the muscles.
Most of which I couldn't do because they hurt too much.
And here I am, close to a year later, and that oh-so-normal bone chip hasn't gone anywhere.
Well, no, that's not technically true. It's moved around inside my ankle. It's done that a lot. But it hasn't disintegrated and it hasn't reattached to the rest of the bone. And if this was normal and routine, one of those things would have happened.
Uh, yeah, so, anyway, point is, sometimes I do something a tiny bit wrong and the chip slips further than usual and it hurts like crazy. And today when that happened, I had to stop writing because that would have made it worse. :( So, that sucked. But there's not much I can do about it now. It's pretty clear that bone chip is never going to go away on its own; the only thing I can hope for is to have it removed surgically, and I am not having any medical procedures done that aren't strictly necessary, not in the middle of a pandemic. That's a really good way to risk getting contaminated. So I'm just going to have to live with a lot of pain for another year or so. Which sucks, but what else can I do?
But at least I have my writing to sustain me! (Also my video games. But that doesn't sound as good.)
Total time in November to date: 39:41:27.15
No comments:
Post a Comment