Last Day of NaNo!

     To get the actually on-topic stuff out of the way from the start, today I wrote 2,701 words, making for a total of 122,078 words in November.  Not bad.  Though I'd have preferred to get further into the VN script than I did, but...I'll take it.  :)

    Since I'll be talking about my NaNo experience tomorrow for IWSG, I thought I'd talk about Black Friday-Cyber Monday instead in this post.  Because I feel like it. :P

    I set myself the goal of not spending too much time or money on the various sales this year.

    I didn't really live up to that very well.  Particularly the time part. 😅

    Spent more money than I'd have liked, too, but at least the two of the three really expensive purchases were clothing I actually needed, and most of the purchases were from small retailers.

    So there was the two clothing purchases--one from a major chain that has stores in most malls, and the other from a small business that I found out about when I supported their Kickstarter some years back--and I bought a couple of albums on Bandcamp, not because they were on sale, but because I think they were having one of their days where the creator gets all the money, also one of them actually released on Black Friday, so it was literally the first time it was available, and I wanted to help it have a nice strong release day.  :)

    I also bought a couple of games on sale in the Switch store (I meant to buy some games on itch.io, too, but somehow I forgot 😭), one from a major publisher and the other from an indie developer.

    That was going to be the extent of it--it was already probably too much, since both clothing purchases were over $100--since I figured out a work-around with stuff I already had at home so I wouldn't need to buy an actual standing desk.

    But then yesterday the people across the street from me declared war on the tree in front of their house.

    By which I mean to say that this happened:

    8:00, I wake up (yes, I know, that's late, but I'm self-employed/online-freelancer, so who cares when I get up?) to the sound of a big truck idling in the street in front of my house.  I look out the window and grimace to see that it's owned by a tree-trimming company.  By 9:00, there are two of them, and there's a wood-chipper waiting between them.  Both trucks have their engines running, btw.  At no time were the engines on those trucks off.

    By the time my brother came to pick me up and take me to his house to escape from the noise (I couldn't drive myself because the stupid trucks were across from my driveway, making it pretty much impossible to get a car out of the driveway, because why would they care if they're inconveniencing someone who isn't paying them?), it's maybe 9:30, and they've already started chainsawing branches off the tree and feeding them into the wood-chipper.

    When I come home again mid-afternoon, they're still at it.  They ended up lopping off every leaf-bearing branch of that tree.  Not that they cut off the whole branches, I mean, just that they cut off the parts that bear the leaves.  So next spring, that tree is going to have to work a thousand times harder to survive, because it has no way to put out any leaves without growing new sections.  It looks like the skeleton of a tree for a particularly cruel Halloween exhibit.

    So it's not so much that my neighbors decided to wage war on that tree as that they wanted to wage war on the entire planet in miniature.

    Because in order to murder that poor tree, they also had two huge trucks running their engines for at least eight hours.  So on top of preventing that tree from doing its part to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, they also paid someone to have those trucks spewing out even more CO2 into the air, plus they were supporting the destructive fossil fuel industry in order to run those trucks in the first place!

    I already hated those people because their guests always park across from my driveway despite countless other places they can park, but now it goes beyond that.  Like, now I know that they are truly evil as well as thoughtless jerks.

    Sorry.

    I just had to vent about that.

    Anyway, because I was so ticked off at what was happening, I ended up deciding to give myself a present for surviving it.

    Which ended up being two dolls from Pullip Style, and became my most expensive purchase of the extended weekend.  But there was a coupon code on the order for 10% off, and both dolls were a lot cheaper from Pullip Style than direct from the manufacturer (in fact, one of them was cheaper new in her box from Pullip Style than the loose sample doll being sold by Groove!), so I feel like it could have been a lot worse.  (Scratch that, I know it could have been worse:  if I'd gotten the Sailor Saturn doll from Groove, I'd have paid more for her alone than I did for both dolls at Pullip Style.  Of course, now I need a Chibi-Moon to go with her, but...)

    I had thought about buying one of the "pop statues" from Today is Art Day, but the problem with that was that the sale price wasn't that much lower than the regular price, plus the statue I like best (Nike of Samothrace, of course) had the absolute worst color scheme by a mile.  Like, it's got the only bad color scheme in the bunch, in fact.  :(  Hence I ended up going with dolls instead.  Also I wasn't sure where I'd put the statue:  whether I'd gone with Nike of Samothrace or Venus de Milo, either way it would have fit in neatly with my Minoan axe goddess and Athene statuette, but there's no room on the shelf with them unless I move Poison Ivy or the Sailor Uranus/Sailor Neptune duo.  (Yes, I have statuettes of ancient goddess surrounded by pop culture figurines of tough, sexy ladies.  What's wrong with that?)

Phew. Glad November's almost over.

     It's been an interesting few days.

    (And I'm sorry to say I've spent too much at all the online sales...though at least two of the biggest purchases were actually necessary clothing items that I'd merely held off on buying until they were on sale, because saving money.)

    So, didn't post yesterday, but I did write!

    As of the 27th, my total written for the month was 114,827 words.

    On the 28th, I added another 1,430 words (ugh, below NaNo par!) for a total of 116,257.

    And today I wrote 3,120 words, making the month's total 119,377.

    Today felt like something of an accomplishment, though, because I successfully completed one route through Chapter One.  (Each decision the player makes creates a new branch through the chapter, and no branches ever join back up again, so there are a lot of dead ends (many literally so), and the amount of extra writing is crazy.  But it's an interesting experiment in controlling information flow, since players will necessarily have to see various of the failure branches as well as the success branches (unless they decide to stop playing before getting to the end), so I don't want there to be too much information that they learn repeatedly...but I can't guarantee that any player will want to see the different successful paths through each chapter (the Prologue had two, Chapter One will have at least three), so I have to make sure each successful path contains the same basic information, so I don't have to worry about if the players know something once the paths finally join up again at the start of the next chapter.

    I doubt I'll ever do it this way again, but it is, as I said, an interesting experiment.

Oops, fell behind in posting!

     I didn't fall behind in my writing, though, so that's something!  :D

    So, the last time I posted my word count for my NaNo rebel progress (those handy-dandy graphs are the one thing I truly miss about taking part in the official NaNoWriMo process), it was the 24th, and I was up to 109,131 words between the main novel, the prologue for a different novel, and the start of my next visual novel.

    On the 25th, I wrote a measly 1,700 words in moving forward on the visual novel, moving my total up to 110,831.  (I call it "measly," but I think that's actually about the "suggested" number of words per day for the official NaNo...)

    On the 26th, I had another slow day and only added 1,962 words to my visual novel, bringing my total up to 112,793.

    Today, I added another 2,034 words to my visual novel's script, bringing my November total up to 114,827.

    Clearly, my output has dropped dramatically since I moved from standard fiction to visual novel script.  I was writing much more slowly when I was working on my other visual novel, A Song of Warriors, too, so I think part of this is just that it's a slower, harder process to write a visual novel's script than to just write a novel or short story or whatnot.  You have to worry about how much needs to be said and doesn't need to be said regarding non-dialog (do you describe the action in detail, give it a lick and a promise, or say nothing and plan on there being special art to show it?), and of course trying to figure out how to handle dialog choices and branching storylines.  (And this one is super-heavy on the branches!)

    This one--which still hasn't got a title yet--is particularly tricky, because it's a "yandere" take on a Greek myth, turning half the cast (or more) into mentally unstable individuals who gladly kill over the one they love.  Now, this is not actually as crazy and wrong as it sounds at first blush.

    Especially since one of the people being made into a yandere is Achilles, who canonically goes on a bloody rampage and spends more than two weeks torturing a corpse because of the man he loves.  Granted, that's in vengeance rather than "how dare you talk to my boyfriend!" but the principle is not so different.  Likewise, Thetis happily asked Zeus to visit death and destruction on the other Greeks in order to avenge the insult to her beloved son's honor, so she's clearly quite eager to visit harm on every other mortal if it will protect her son in any way.  Neither of them is mentally unstable in the myths (well, Thetis isn't, at least), but...they're probably not really unstable enough in my VN to count as proper yanderes anyway.

    The main thing is, I'm not really good at writing violence, crazed behavior, or jealousy that doesn't come off as shallow and pat, so it's a good challenge for me...but it also makes writing it slower. 😅  Still, I think the idea is pretty fun, and I'm enjoying some of what I've come up with so far, so there's that.  :)  Trying to do the art for the game myself is going to be a challenge in and of itself, but the game jam this is for isn't until February, so hopefully I'll have enough time to get at least the prologue and first chapter finished by the time the jam ends, if not the whole thing.

Moving on...

     So...a lot of the cell phone thing was my own fault for misreading a form.  :cough:  It's all cleared up now, anyway.

    And on the NaNo rebel front, I started work on my next visual novel last night, because I was so unsettled over the whole cell phone issue that I couldn't really focus on Shin Megami Tensei V, despite all the cool discoveries I made when I arrived in Ginza, so...yeah, ended up writing another 1,285 words yesterday, which brings yesterday's total words written up to 105,198, a total of 6,882 written yesterday alone.

    Then today I brought the game's script up to 5,218, which makes for a total word count of 109,131.

    Meaning today I wrote 3,933 words.  Which isn't great, but isn't bad, either.

Mixed

     On the one hand, my cell phone woes continue.  My new provider needs a "port out pin" in order to transfer over your phone number.  My old provider has never heard of such a thing, and all they have is my regular pin or my account number.  Neither provider will tell me which of those it wants.  Furthermore, my old provider guards account numbers with far more zeal than the government guards our social security numbers, and I had to jump through a lot of annoying hoops to get my account number in order to submit that, only to hear back that the account number is "incorrect".  Meaning either the person at the service provider who gave me my own account number got it wrong, or it wasn't the number the other carrier wanted.  This is patently absurd.  They're holding our account numbers hostage in order to force us not to leave.  I've been getting cell phone service from a yandere service provider.  That's actually really freaky.

    On the other hand, I finished the current draft of The Golden God of Aiolia.  Which meant rewrites of six lore scenes and writing two new ones.  Plus figuring out where all the chapters were going to end (since many of them are no longer ending where they originally did) so I could put the lore scenes in the right place instead of in a separate file or tacked on at the end.  The complete draft came to 102,005 words.  (Without the lore scenes, it was 96,408.)

    So, for my current NaNoWriMo rebel numbers:  yesterday, my total words written for November so far was 98,316.

    Today's total word count is 103,913.

    So, today I wrote 5,597 words.  Wow, those two new lore scenes were even shorter than I thought...

Hopeful

     So far, mostly so good today.  Not being able to use my standing desk set-up with my good laptop is maddening--actually painful, in fact--but on the plus side, practically everything on the internet will be on sale starting on Friday, so I can at least order a more traditional standing desk set-up somewhere that expects a separate keyboard, so once I manage to make room for it, that should work out.  Somehow.  :cough:

    In better news, I managed to finish the main body of the new draft of The Golden God of Ailoia today.  I still have the extra lore chunks that need to be sprinkled in between chapters (previous draft on that was about 5k), which I'll have to finish up tomorrow.  Honestly, I wanted to get it all done today, but I couldn't bear any more writing on that computer today.  It's hard to describe why without being embarrassing, but the short version is that it's a complication of my obesity.  (And yes, I know losing weight would be a better solution than buying a standing desk I don't have room for, but that's something that takes years when you consider how much weight I need to lose.  There has to be a solution for daily living in the meantime.)

    The full new draft, minus lore bits, for The Golden God of Aiolia is 96,408 words.  The previous draft was 87,500 words.

    My total word count yesterday (counting a bit I'd written for another novel) was 92,060.

    My total word count for today is 98,316.

    So today I managed to get through 6,256 words...so actually if I had done the lore bits as well, that would have made it one of my best days ever, so I probably shouldn't feel too discouraged about not having gotten through them...I guess?

Another day...

      So, yeah.  My run of bad luck continues.  I dropped my glass water bottle (which I use to mix my caffeinated Crystal Light packets because it has lines on it to show me how much water I need) in the sink and broke it.  This led to a ten(ish) minute long crying jag about how the universe has it in for me.  So...yeah.  Paranoia is now setting in, I've had so many little things go wrong lately.

      And I tried a new setup today with the USB keyboard, which worked pretty well...except that it really hurt my back. Like, a lot.

       As I said, another day of petty bad luck.

     Yesterday's writing total was 88,308.

     Today's writing total is 92,060.

      So, today (despite back pain) I wrote 3,752 words.  This got me through the final battle, so all that's left is a couple scenes of aftermath and the short scenes of lore that will be sprinkled between chapters.  With luck, that will have me finishing the book on Tuesday, letting me move on to the script for my next game to continue my NaNo rebel wordcount...which will have the added benefit of being written on the computer that *doesn't* have a broken keyboard!

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     Well, today was at least a lot better than the last two days.

    I spent all morning backing up my laptop before risking connecting that USB keyboard to it, which is honestly neither good nor bad.  (Though I really should back it up more often.  *cough*)

    Then I went out to lunch and the local anime store with my brother, so that was actually really good.  I mean, lunch was sort of mediocre at best, but going to the anime store is always fun, and they had gotten in a bunch of new stuff, and I spent much too much money. 😅  Though it was a lot less because they were having a sale on everything in the store 'cause it's their anniversary, and also because they had sold a bunch of the stuff I've had with them on consignment for, like, probably close to ten years at this point, so that money came off my total, too, so it wasn't so bad as it might have been.  (Way less than my brother's total, at least!)

    Upon getting back home, I finally hooked up that USB keyboard to see if it works.  And it does.  Of course, it's slightly different in size from a laptop's keyboard, which is weird and for some reason was hurting my pinky finger (like I was keeping it curled up high for some reason without meaning to and that was making it hurt?), and the method to write on a loose keyboard and on a laptop are totally different, and the loose keyboard methods don't really work in any of my usual setups, so that sucks.  I'm going to have to get a proper standing desk, I guess.  Though I have zero clue as to where the heck I would put such a thing.  😓

    I even got through one of the "slated for total rewrite" scenes today; in the earlier drafts, there was a minor villain(?) character who has so little "screen" time that when she shows up during the final battle and is able to literally merge herself with wood (if you've seen Vampire Hunter D:  Bloodlust, one of the enemies in that has that ability, which is what I was shamelessly ripping off, lol) it's like "where the f%^ did that come from?!"  So, in the previous draft I had put in a scene in her POV to show off her ability and let you know what she's thinking...which totally took any mystery or suspense out of how she was going to behave when she showed up to the final battle.  For this new version, therefore, I took the core elements of that scene (having Cheiron actually show up, since a large chunk of the book takes place on and/or at the foot of Mount Pelion, where he famously lives, and clarifying some stuff about some new divine backstory I invented for the novel), and wrote a new scene in Cheiron's POV so that the villain(?)'s behavior would still be uncertain, but her ability to merge with wood is fully revealed before it becomes a plot point. :D  The scene still isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination (I mean, nothing I write is, but I could probably do a lot better, is what I mean), but it's a huge improvement over what I did with the previous draft.

    Anyway, on to the numbers.

    Yesterday's total word count was 86,302.

    Today's total word count is 88,308.

    So, I wrote 2,006 words today.  Which is pretty bad, but given the whole "trying to adapt to a totally new method of writing," I didn't want to push it by trying to do the next scene.  (Even though the next scene is very short.)  Also I wanted to get all my computer stuff done by dinner time, because after dinner I need to go do an enormous grocery run, because I need to stock my fridge, freezer and pantry with enough food that I won't need to go to another grocery store until about a week from Monday, because next week is Thanksgiving, which means grocery stores will be insane from now until...well, actually, pretty much until Christmas, really, but they'll be especially bad between now and Thanksgiving itself.  (Admittedly, the holiday does mean I won't need as much food to get by, since Thursday's lunch will be at my parents' place, and I guarantee that even though they try not to get more than the four of us are going to eat, there will definitely still be leftovers, so that'll probably provide me with another meal or two.  Still, more than a week is a lot of food...)

It's been another "interesting" day...

     So, I dealt with yesterday's (metaphorical) cell phone meltdown by finding a cheap, no-contract, no-credit-check provider and after probably not nearly enough thought, decided to sign on with them.  (I had fewer options because most of them seemed to use the same satellite network that my previous provider used, meaning that they too would want to force me into getting a new phone, as I was told that it was actually the satellite network that made the arbitrary decision to no longer support the iPhone 6S.)

    But I just have to say to the company that refused me service because of my credit rating:  subjecting your customers to the whims of the draconian credit reporting companies is directly in opposition to the progressive mindset you claim to represent, Credo.  (Also, is anyone surprised that of the three of their employees I talked to on the phone about this, the two women were very helpful and understanding, and the man was purposefully obtuse and idiotically kept talking about "once you've upgraded your phone" as if that was the problem, not the fact that credit reporting services actually punish you for not having credit cards even if you're paying all your utility bills (including phones) on time?  Despite that I repeatedly explained that not wanting to replace my phone was the entire freaking reason I was looking for a new service provider in the first place?!  He just could not--or would not--get it through his thick skull that what he was expecting me to want to do was the exact opposite of my stated intention.)

    However, the cell phone thing is hopefully now more-or-less solved, since the new place is sending me the new SIM card by 2-day express, so I should be switched over several days before the current company can charge me for another month of service.  (Assuming I can manage to switch the SIM cards, 'cause that little thing on the side of the phone did not look easy to open...)

    But that was not the extent of my crappy day!

    I ended up doing a lot more writing than usual, because I took my laptop with me when I went to my brother's place to do my laundry (long story there, but basically my washer is broken and also my basement kind of scares me), and as the drier was taking freaking forever to get my laundry dry (is it the cold weather?), after a while we got tired of watching stuff, and I went back to writing.

    I've been having trouble for a while now with some of the keys not acknowledging it when I pressed them.  The "h" and "n" keys especially, but also "y" and the left arrow key lately.  So while I was writing again in the later part of the afternoon, I started getting really tried of it, and tried to lift up the key a bit to see if I could see what was blocking it and maybe get it out.  Because I thought maybe it was a crumb or something.

    It was dust.

    Like, massive dust bunnies.

    Inside my laptop's keyboard.

    I've had this laptop for...I don't even know how long.  At least fifteen years, probably.  I know I already had it when I went to Peru in 2008 (not that I took it with me, lol!), and I think I'd had it a few years already at that point.  It is precious to me, and I've written a lot of novels on it.  (Also a lot of drafts of the same novels.)

    And evidently, this dust has just been building up slowly over all that time, and is now reaching critical mass.

    My plan was to finish the scene I was working on, save, turn off, wait until I got home, back up everything, and then try to carefully pry off the keys and remove all that dust with tweezers, or maybe a tiny vacuum if I could find one.  (I remember getting one at one point, but it had very weak suction, and I don't remember where it went anyway.)  But it was getting so that I couldn't finish the scene.  I had put "h" in the clipboard and was copy-pasting it when I needed it, but I didn't want to waste time repeatedly changing the clipboard from "h" to "n", as that seemed like it would have taken even longer than repeatedly pressing/mashing on/holding down the mostly not-working keys.  (The fact that they sometimes still worked (and even overworked) only makes this whole experience more frustrating.)  So I tried pulling the "n" up to get the dust out (I'd already pulled an astonishing amount out from under the "h" key, not that it had helped much) and you can guess what happened:  I messed up the mechanism that held it in place.  :<

    I had to just save the file as it was--not merely in the middle of a scene, but in the middle of a sentence!--and shut down the computer.  (The fact that the battery was almost depleted wasn't helping anything, needless to say.)  My brother had a spare USB keyboard, so I borrowed that, and tomorrow I'll back up the laptop and try out the USB keyboard.  If it doesn't work, I'll have to finish writing my NaNo novel on this computer.  Which sucks, because I don't like this one as much.  (Although the fact that I haven't worn the text off half the keys might actually make things a little easier.  It's hard to just go back and add a period, comma or missing m/n when all four of those keys have nothing written on them anymore...)  Even if the USB keyboard works, I'm not sure what kind of writing setup I'll have to use, since most of my usual ones won't work that way.  There was a folding standing/sitting desk I saw on sale at Michael's (of all the weird places for it) which I may look back into, because my current standing desk situation is just a folding desk tray on top of a regular table, so there's no special place to hold up the separate keyboard, you know?

    So, yeah, basically, I've had two garbage days in a row.  😭

    ...ugh, and I just slipped and fell on the way to answering the front door, and I think I actually managed to hurt myself in the process.  Definitely a garbage day.  😭

    Yeah, I definitely hurt my wrist, and possibly my knee and my back, but definitely the wrist.  Because what better to hurt in the middle of NaNoWriMo, right?  Ugh...

    Anyway.

    Yesterday's total word count was 78,368.

    Today's total word count is 86,302.

    So, today I wrote 7,934 words.  Which is pretty darn good, actually.  (Would have been more like 8,100 words if I'd managed to get through that scene.  The fact that I was so close to the end of it just made the whole experience even more frustrating, of course.)

Ugh.

     So, my day has sucked.

    I had to unfreeze my credit with one of the credit reporting monstrosities so I could try to get a new cell phone carrier because my old one is sadistic and evil and wants to force me to spend hundreds upon hundreds of dollars for a new phone, and what happens?  

    They say my credit score is too low.

    For a non-contract, $35-a-month phone service.

    $35 a month.

    You can't eat on that little.  But they think I can't cover it because I have a low credit score.

    Seriously?  Because I'm not beholden to some credit card company and spending umpty zillion dollars on credit, they won't let me have a freaking cell phone?!

    Because yeah, I don't have any credit cards.

    Not one.

    Because back when I was in college, I did have one.  And I spent money I didn't have.  And I learned my lesson.  (After telling my parents about it and getting them to pay back said money, a luxury that most people sadly don't have.  So, yes, I realize that much of this rant is deeply based on my situation within white privilege, which is not cool on any level.  There shouldn't even be such a thing as white privilege, but unfortunately there is.)  Because I didn't want that to happen to me again, I decided never again to have  a credit card.  As long as I'm spending with my debit card, I can't spend money I don't have.  And if someone gets hold of my card?  Well, they can't spend money I don't have, either.  Yes, it puts a slight risk on me that they could spend all the money in my bank account and maybe they'd get away with it on their end, but so long as I could prove the theft (which would not be hard given how limited my range of usual purchases is) the bank would reimburse me at least some of it, if not all of it.

    But that doesn't repair my credit history.

    So now the only way I can get out of the hellhole cell phone service I already have--the one where the guy in the store knew the age of my phone was the problem, but insisted on first transferring me to a more expensive service plan (with a service charge for the "privilege"!), then on having access to my Apple id and password, then on updating my IOS, despite that there is no *$#%^ing way that my IOS was causing his computer to reject my phone for a new SIM card, before finally just laughing and saying that yep, I was gonna need an expensive new phone, just like he'd known from the start--is if I either find another shifty, shady company that will try to force me into overpriced new hardware at the drop of a hat, or if I get someone else to go in with me on the phone line so the company will run their credit score instead of mine.

    I cannot express how much this pisses me off.

    It makes me really glad that I'm currently playing a post-apocalyptic video game, because suddenly I'm not so sorry that the world is about to end.  Because it's people like this who are the reason the world is burning.

    ...and now I'm crying.

    &$%^.

    Right, so, anyway, I don't really care right now, but I need to record this for my own sanity and because I'm not officially participating in NaNo, so where else am I gonna put my NaNoWriMo daily word counts?

    Yesterday's total word count was 74,927.

    Today's total word count is 78,368.

    Which means today I wrote 3,441 words, thankfully before the cell phone company dropped that particular bomb on me.

Plugging along on NaNo 2021

     Today I actually stopped to ask myself the question "will I finish the novel at the rate I'm going?"

    And unfortunately the answer was "well, maybe, but only barely."

    Because I'd gotten down to the habit of only doing one scene per day, in order to maximize my time with Shin Megami Tensei V.  Because priorities.

    But with the number of scenes I have left in the main novel--plus the "bedtime stories" that are to be woven in between some of the chapters as some background on the villains--I was only just barely going to finish on time, and that's only if I do all the "bedtime stories" in one day, despite being half a dozen scenes long.  (Though they're all very short scenes; the file with the "bedtime stories" in it is only about 5k words.)

    So, given that it was looking a bit tight, I decided to push on through and do two scenes this morning instead of just one.  Which barely shows in my word count, because the second one was actually really short scene.  😓  Of course, as I was going through it I found myself thinking "wait, is there a way I could make some of this info-dump of Ariadne's thoughts a bit more active?"  To which the answer is "probably," but that would require so much more rewriting than I have time for right now.  *sigh*  (Or rather it would require me to sit down and rethink how I want to handle the narrative process, and probably to rewrite everything up to this point in order to accommodate the new process.)

    Which may mean that even this isn't going to be the final(ish) draft and there will have to be another one before it can be deemed suitable for public consumption.  Or it may be that I'll leave all that further rewriting for another day--or another medium--and just move on.

    Because I may have found a way to get this done as a visual/kinetic novel after all, but I'll have to wait and see how (if) the graphical format I have in mind is received by an audience.

    Anyway!  Yesterday's total word count was 70,317.

    Today's total word count is 74,927...

    So that means I wrote 4,610 words today, which is honestly even worse than I thought.  :(

I need to figure out more interesting post titles

     Because "NaNo Rebel 2021, Day ??" is just super-boring.

    Even if yeah, that's actually all that's in the post.

    (And no, I don't have any news about yesterday's cell phone "drama," if anyone is actually reading these.  (Numbers say "no" on that, lol.)  I started the process, but it requires a credit check, and I know I froze my credit with two of the three major credit reporting companies, but I could only find info about one of the three in my long-term email storage (as it were), so I just sort of took a gamble that the one they use (yes, they did tell me which one that was) was the one that my credit is not frozen with.  Also the larger gamble that my credit is good enough for them to risk(?) supplying me with a $35 a month no-contract cell phone service.  Because yeah, that's really a giant amount of money...)

    Aaaaaanyway!

    Yesterday's total word count in my double-rebel NaNoWriMo project (not using their horribly mutilated site and doing a re-write instead of a brand new novel!) was 66,388.

    Today's total word count is 70,317.

    So today I wrote 3,929 words...but if my Switch starts having hysterics over me spending too long playing Shin Megami Tensei V, I might go back and do some more writing later tonight, because the next scene is one of the ones that was newly introduced for the previous draft, in the new subplot involving Queen Deidameia of Scyros wanting to have a say in what happens to the armor that was stolen from the grave of her son Pyrrhos (AKA Neoptolemos), and I had a lot of fun with that new subplot.  :D

NaNo Rebel 2021, Day 15

     Today is going to be a very ugly day, because instead of getting to play my new video game all day, I have to spend it on the phone with one or more cell phone companies to find out if I can switch to their service, because the provider I have right now is changing its network in January and won't allow me to keep my phone because it's "too old."  I am not replacing my phone because of an arbitrary decision by the jerks running the company, particularly not when the creep in the in person store forced me to change my service plan to a more expensive one (which also came with a $5 service fee for doing it in person!) because he insisted that was the real reason the computer wasn't agreeing to register a new sim chip to my phone, and then he forced me to update my IOS, which took forever and introduced all kinds of horrible new features that I hate, and after all that, he's just like "oh, yeah, you're just gonna hafta upgrade your phone, like I thought, but hey, you've got a few months to do it" like that was all just fine and dandy!

    ARGH!!!!!

    *Ahem*

    Anyway, I got my writing done first thing, so at least there's that.  And I got through two scenes today, because the second one was my absolute favorite in this book, and one of my favorites in the whole series:  the flashback to Eurysakes' childhood, when he witnesses his parents having a tender moment and hears his father reflect that he actually has beaten Achilles at something, because no son that Briseis could ever bear would ever match up to Eurysakes.  It also has this moment that I'm particularly proud of that's sort of a backwards call-back (call-forwards?) to the Iliad:  in one of the most famous passages of the Iliad, Astyanax is frightened by the sight of his father in his helmet, and Hector has to take it off to show his infant son that "no, it's okay, it's just daddy", so in this scene I'm showing how very different life in the war camp is for the children borne by the enslaved concubines, in that Eurysakes (who is admittedly about three, rather than an infant, but still) is totally cool with seeing his father in his armor, and tries to wear it after his father takes it off, even though it's enormous on him.  I just really love that moment and its unspoken comparison of the different situation for the children in the camp and the pampered royal babies in the city.  It's also the first scene in Eurysakes' POV, so from this point forward he's opened up as a POV character, which helps to both widen the narrative and give a very different narrative voice than that of the two girls who are more like sisters than cousins in most respects, and don't vary as much in their narrative voice as I'd really like (though I'm constantly making adjustments to make the tone and language different in their POV sequences).

    So, getting down to brass tacks, yesterday's total word count was 62,006.

    Today's total word count is 66,388.

    So today I wrote 4,382 words, plus a few hundred more because I also jotted down some story notes for the game I'm going to work on next.

NaNo Rebel 2021, Day 14

     I'm not progressing as fast as I'd like.  Or rather, I didn't progress as fast as I would have liked before the game came out, and now that it is out, my progress is even slower.  :(  On the other hand, I'm enjoying the game so far (and something happened last night that makes me think it's a direct sequel to one of the endings of Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne, which is super-amazing!)

    Aaaaaaaanyway, yesterday's total word count was 59,201.

    Today's total word count is 62,006.

    So, today I wrote 2,805 words, plus a few more 'cause I jotted down some story ideas for my next game as well, but I didn't count those.

    Oh, also today's scene completed what was Chapter 7 in the original 2014 version of this novel.  The new draft of this chapter ran for 9,017 words, and the previous draft of this chapter was 8,186 words.  It would be interesting to pick a chapter and see how its length changed over all the successive drafts!  (Might explain why that one chapter is less than half the length of all the others.  Maybe the others have been inflated over the drafts, and that one short one never was?)

Another Day, Another NaNo Rebel Post

     So...I would rather be playing Shin Megami Tensei V than writing a blog post right now, but I have to let the Switch recharge because the battery keeps draining when I play even though it's docked.  :(

    Anyway, my NaNo word count yesterday topped off at 56,221.

    My word count today reached 59,201.

    So, today I wrote a mere 2,980 words.

    I did actually contemplate going on to the next scene, but it was going to be long and complex, and would have (among other things) made my lunch more complicated...

NaNo Rebel 2021, Day 12

     Not much to say today.

    Yesterday's total word count was 52,978.

    Today's total word count is 56,221.

    So today I wrote 3,243 words.

NaNo Rebel 2021, Day 11

     Today's been pretty quiet.  In part because I hurt my ankle with all that walking around yesterday, so today I've been trying to keep off it as much as possible. 😓  (Ooh, didn't know I could do emojis on here! 😀)

    I didn't get as much done as I'd have liked to, in terms of writing, but I guess I did all right.

    Yesterday's total word count was 46,893.

    Today's total word count was 52, 978.

    That means today's words written were 6,085.  So...yeah, that was actually pretty good after all.  (It's hard to tell before I look at the numbers, because I'm working in terms of scenes, and I only got through two of them.)

    Today's writing also finished off what had been Chapter Six in the original draft of the novel, and it runs 9,270 words in the new draft, and was 8,426 words in the previous draft.

    Not sure if that's good or bad, in the long run, that I'm consistently adding that much to the text as I go.  But the thing is that it's necessary additions:  clearing up things that are unclear, adding some descriptions to long passages that have desperate need of them, and of course fixing places that the old version didn't match the actual terrain of Thessaly.  That was the biggest addition to Chapter Six, for sure; the sequence where they're planning their battle needed a huge additional explanation of why they're going to be having a pitched battle inside one of the passes between one of the few not-flat areas in the entire region.

    In other news, after looking over several alternate spots I could post these novels, I've decided to go ahead and put them on pages here on the blog, because I just do not want to deal with making a new account somewhere, wrestling with formatting, and then dealing with the site's pre-existing audience that has expectations and/or desires not in line with my book.  (Which, at best, would merely get me ignored, and at worst might get me mocked, my work verbally torn to shreds, etc.  Better to just stay here where I can feel safe in the knowledge that the internet as a whole will simply flow on past me without noticing I exist, as per usual.)

NaNo Rebel 2021, Day 10

     Whew, am I exhausted!

    Not for any writing reason, though:  it was a nice day today, so after finishing my writing for the day, I went out to a local antique mall that's in a building that used to be a pretty large supermarket and I walked through every single section (some of them twice, in fact), so I was on my feet for like two, maybe even two and a half hours.  (I probably still have mask marks on my face even now, more than an hour later...)  At least I got my exercise!  :D

    As to writing, I didn't do that much today, but I actually did a lot more last night after posting my progress to the blog. :P

    See, I went to take a bath yesterday afternoon, and as happens surprisingly often, I had a flash of inspiration while I was in there, basically composing a piece inside my head in the latter half of the bath.  As always, it wasn't as good when I typed it out as it had been in my head (someone needs to make a thought-recorder, dangit!), but I'm still pretty pleased with it, and it's way better than what it's going to be replacing.

    Of course, what it's replacing is the prologue to book 4 in a series, and my current NaNo project is the rewrite of book 2, but...hey, a win is a win, and finally having a good prologue to that book is a major win.  (Probably also means that I need to start taking more baths than showers...)

    Anyway, after I wrote that, then I also went ahead and did some more rewriting on the actual project.  So, when I posted yesterday, the day's word count was 4,736, but then I wrote 1,908 words of prologue for book 4, plus another 3,313 words on book 2, making a total for yesterday of 9,957!  (Wow, that's probably in my top ten days ever...)  That last bit on book 2 finished the rewrite of what had been Chapter Five in the original 2014 version, which ran 8,027 words in the new version, and had been 7,498 in the previous draft.

    So, anyhow, that means yesterday's total word count ended up at 43,697.

    Today's total word count was 46,893.

    So today's words written was 3,196.  Which is not a big day, but...eh.  It's okay.

    I need to write a heck of a lot tomorrow, though, 'cause Friday is when Shin Megami Tensei V comes out, and my productivity is likely to take a nosedive once I've got my greedy little hands on that. :D

NaNo Rebel 2021, Day 9

     Not much going on today.  Had another new game idea late last night, which I'll be using to test the graphical method I was showing off yesterday.  (Won't be working on it until December or January, though; it'll be my submission to a game jam that runs in February, but which lets you work before the jam period starts.)

    Yesterday's total word count was 33,740

    Today's total word count is 38,476

    Making today's word count 4,736

NaNo Rebel Day 8; Clash of the Titans

     Nope, no titans in what I wrote today:  I watched Clash of the Titans.  (Which also doesn't contain any actual titans, lol.)  :D  Because recently Big Bad Toy Store listed a pre-order for a life-size Bubo model (which I so want and so can't have because it's almost $300), the listing for which made me realize that the movie came out in 1981, and thus is 40 years old this year.  So, in order to celebrate that anniversary, I decided it was high time that I rewatched it.

    Unfortunately, I made the mistake of seeing if my parents and my brother wanted to watch it with me.  And my mother was...um...not quiet.  And not in a good way. D:  (And I don't know what her problem with Harry Hamlin is...)

    Still, I can't help loving the movie, despite how crazy some of its uses of mythology are.  And I entertained myself with a game of mentally dating the various archaeological finds they reproduced in the set design.  The art spanned about 3000 years, give or take about five hundred years.  ;)

    Most amusing, pretty much none of it was the right period.  Though there's not a whole lot for that period; Perseus is the legendary founder of Mycenae (post-rescuing Andromeda, lol), so a period- and culture-appropriate work would be pretty much anything found in Grave Circles A and B from the famous excavation at Mycenae.  (Y'know, like the hilariously misnamed "funeral mask of Agamemnon.")

    Aaaaaanyway, in addition to watching the movie and doing today's writing, I also worked on a possible form of creating character art for game versions of these novels.  It's just a test, but I've done a 3D/2D render based on a Mycenaean fresco:

    I feel like it might work, except that the lips need...like...everything.  The fresco didn't really do much to delineate the lips (obviously, they didn't go in for lipstick in the Late Bronze Age!) so I was sort of floundering as to how to show them.  They didn't show an iris on the eye, either, so I just sort of had to wing it to give her one.  (It's gray because one of my heroines has gray eyes.)

    I'm not sure I'll do much with it--it would be better to have a full 3D render, but I think that's gonna be outside my abilities--but it's still kind of exciting as a first attempt.  :)

NaNo Rebel 2021, Days 6 and 7

     So...stuff happened, and I didn't post yesterday.  But I did write yesterday, having gone from the previous day's total of 19,894 to 23,870, making for a daily total of 3,976.

    Today I got even further, up to 29,991 words, making today's total 6,121.  I also finished with what was Chapter Three in the original 2014 draft, which ran for 5,368 words in this draft, and 4,430 words in the old draft...so that was a crazy short chapter!  Obviously, I'll be changing around where the chapters end in whatever draft becomes the final one.

    I may be getting a lot of writing done over the next few days, because I slipped night before last and in catching myself to keep myself from falling, I ended up wrenching both my wrists, which makes it actually painful to hold a Playstation controller (hmm, note to self:  check how the Switch controller is), but writing is okay, so I'll likely be doing more writing until my wrists heal, at least until this coming Friday, when Shin Megami Tensei V comes out, because I am a serious MegaTen fan, and will likely be diving right in even if it does hurt my wrists to do so.  (But I'm hoping they'll recover by then!)  But now I can't try to finish up Persona 5 Strikers before that comes out, because I'd rather let my wrists rest to be prepared for the more game that's more imporant to me.

    Uh...that's not actually relevant here, though.  *cough*  I was just supposed to be talking about my NaNo project...

    I've gotten into the first leg of the text that's been massively modified thanks to actually knowing what the terrain looks like, so that's cool.

    I may have some trouble in one of the later sequences, though, because thanks to Google Earth I now know that Thessaly is like the one flat part of Greece, which makes the battle sequence in a narrow pass between mountains a little, uh, less plausible. To say the least.  (I mean, it's not totally without a real location it could be set in.  There are some big hills in the southern part of Thessaly that they do need to go past to reach Phthia, and there are valleys between them, but it's like any real army would just march around the hills and go through the massive flat areas to the east and west of them, so it's sort of...argh.  Yes, "argh" is definitely what it is.  *sigh* )

NaNo Rebel 2021, Day 5 - Ancient Greek Terrain

     So, it turns out I actually can access Blogger via my phone!  That may make things easier for me later on.  (I got annoyed with other stuff I was doing online and turned off my 'net computer before writing the day's post...)

      Anyway, today's writing featured the first of many modifications to the text based on the last leg of research that I only embarked on very shortly before NaNo began, namely my research into what the parts of Greece where the novel takes place actually look like.  (Okay, using Italics on the phone turns out to be almost impossible, so that's gonna hamper this whole phone post thing...)

     All I can say is "thank goodness for Google Earth!"  Because accurate topographic maps that include Late Bronze Age (or even Classical Era) towns rather than modern ones are pretty thin on the ground, y'know?  And admittedly Google Earth doesn't show any ancient sites, either (except when they're really large, like Delphi), but it does give latitude and longitude, so you can still find where they were.  More importantly, it let me figure out exactly what the terrain would look like where they landed on the shore beside Mt. Pelion (it even had photos of the beach in question!) and measure all the distances they'd be traveling, see just how steep the slopes are, etc.

   Ugh, I hate typing on my phone.  It is so much the absolute worst that I closed the tab in frustration and booted up the computer again.  So...yeah.

    *cough*

    Aaaaaanyway, this way I can at least show you some of what I was researching via Google Earth, yeah?

    

    This was one of the first images I grabbed, where I had to go in and label some stuff.  Specifically, cities no longer listed on the map (technically, Iolcos is listed if you get in close enough), and one where we don't actually know where it was (Phthia) and then I had to go in and mark an important river 'cause you can't really see it on the main map as it was. :P  Plus pick the site of a major plot event that isn't inside a town. ;)

    This one was actually relevant for today; it shows (roughly) the path they followed after landing, with distance measured.  :)  Of course, I was assuming (likely incorrectly) that they could walk that far without meeting anyone else at this particular point in the Late Bronze Age, but...unless there are major LBA archaeological sites along that stream bed that I didn't research enough to find out about, how can any of us even know if there would or wouldn't be people there at that time?  (More importantly, no one is gonna care.  In fact, very few people--if any--are even gonna read this thing.)

    So, this wasn't as good in terms of location research as it would have been to actually go there and see the mountain for myself, but how the heck would I manage to get all the way to Greece?  (Especially in the middle of a freaking pandemic!)  Even if I had the time and money, I couldn't get there because of my health issues, which would prevent me from being able to fly.  (So, technically, if I really had an absurd amount of time and money, I could cross the Atlantic in a boat (which could be an eco-friendly form of travel if it's powered by sails and/or oars) and get to Greece that way, but...yeah, not happening.  All around, just plain not happening.  So unless my condition improves/goes away, I missed my chance of ever getting to see Greece for myself.)

    All told, I have a folder on my hard drive now with two dozen screenshots from Google Earth showing me the terrain where the novel takes place from various angles.  I don't know how much impact a lot of it will have on the final book, since I'm not a very description-heavy writer, but...I feel better about it now that I'm not just randomly guessing what the landscape would look like.

NaNo Rebel, Day 4

     I had other stuff I wanted to post about today, but then I went out to run some errands and now I am exhausted.  :(  I have lost what little stamina I had due to the whole lockdown thing...

    Anyway, today my writing progress was pretty brief.  I added one new scene which it's like it needs to be there but also like it's kind of a spoiler?

    See, Chapter One of the original 2014 draft ended with the ship on which the heroic trio is sailing from Troy to Thessaly being overtaken by a terrible storm.  Then Chapter Two opens on the ship as the storm has passed by, and the ocean has fallen still.  One of the ship's crew climbs up the mast only to discover that suddenly they're inside a bay surrounded by high cliff walls, and when the ship approaches the narrow opening out of the bay, there are Scylla and Charybdis!

   The point of the encounter is to let one of the trio, Ariadne, daughter of Odysseus, surpass her father by getting them out past Scylla and Charybdis without losing a single sailor in the process.  (The other two of the trio also surpass their fathers in this book, though it's much less concrete in the case of Atalanta, the daughter of Achilles.  Because what did he ever accomplish besides feats of arms and random acts of brutality?  She surpasses him every day of her life by being a better person than he was.)  But the thing of it is that this is not where Scylla and Charybdis are located.

    I mean, not that they have one set location, not really.  I know some would say they're located on the strait off the "toe" of Italy, but what the heck would Odysseus have been doing there?  It's not exactly en route from Troy to Ithaca!  And yeah, I know he was blown off course in the storm, but that's even further off course than Menelaos and his entire fleet ending up in Egypt, and kind of in a different direction, too, which makes no sense if they're both being blown off course by the same storm!  (The right off the coast of Italy thing was decided on to make the Aeneid make sense...which is a pretty pitiful thing to do, considering Aeneas just sort of sails past from a distance and doesn't even pass between them.  Though one (or was it both?) of them had been turned to stone anyway for no logical reason.  Hopefully that was one of the passages Vergil would have rewritten had he lived to complete the poem, but...as it stands, it's particularly pathetic.)

    In various drafts between this one and the first one, I had already laid out several bits implying that Scylla and Charybdis can actually be moved around by the gods for whatever reasons the gods might have (petty squabbles, vindictiveness, boredom...), but it occurred to me that I really did need to have a scene absolutely stating that "yes, they were placed specifically in the trio's way by a god" and also to make it clear that the reason for that was not malicious, but actually because Athene wanted to give Ariadne that chance to surpass her father.  (Given the reason the trio are hurrying to Thessaly, no other reason makes sense.)

    So, given that Thetis is watching out for her granddaughter Atalanta, it only seemed to make sense that I put a scene in between the two scenes of the ship in the storm, wherein Thetis goes to get answers from the winds as to why they've raised a storm around the boat her granddaughter is in.  When she gets there, she finds Athene, who explains that she's done it to give Ariadne a chance to shine, so she can prove to her brothers how great Ariadne is.  I feel like it's a good scene, and it gives me a chance to explain one of the biggest wtf moments in Greek myth--why Athene would even want the apple that's proclaimed to be "for the fairest"--and all...but I'm afraid it's something of a spoiler for the scenes that will immediately follow it.  :<

    I mean, it doesn't mention Scylla and Charybdis, just that Athene has placed a challenge before the young trio, because she wants Ariadne to rise above that challenge, but it also ends with Thetis deciding to send someone to keep watch over Atalanta, not trusting that the winds will watch over her as Athene says they will.  Because the scene with Scylla and Charybdis is the first time we meet Atalanta's half-sister, Pyrrha, who was made immortal upon her birth (to Briseis, who died in the process) and became the 51st Nereid, though in said scene she merely calls herself a Nereid, and the only hint we have that she's not one of Thetis' sisters is that she mentions her father being dead, and talks about trying to live up to her grandmother's expectations.  But after the new scene with Thetis and Athene, there's not going to be any surprise or shock to a "friendly" face popping up out of the water to answer a few of Atalanta's many questions.

    So....yeah, the scene may end up being cut again.  :(  Which would mean I would have made no progress at all today, because it's the only thing I wrote today.  (But I'm not about to cut it before NaNo is over, so...)

  

    Anyway, yesterday's total was 14,092

    and today's total is 15,664,

    meaning I wrote 1,572 words today.

    Huh.  I was actually pretty close to the suggested daily total.  How about that?

IWSG: Where do people post their work?

 

    So, I'm wondering where other people post their novels online.  Y'know, among those who--like myself--don't intend trying to publish them in any normal manner.

    I'm working on getting an old series of novels ready for release to the wilds of the Internet.  Book one is already out there in a slightly interactive form as a "game" on itch.io, and also in text-only form on AO3, but I feel like AO3 is actually not the right place for it, being primarily a site for fanfiction, while this novel is an original work.  It's still a derivative work, but as it's only derived from ancient sources (for book one, this is primarily just the Iliad, with bits and bobs from other ancient texts) and doesn't star any of the characters from said sources, it's not the sort of thing that people looking for something to read on AO3 are looking for.  Therefore, I want to find another place to post it online where it might find a more receptive audience.  Not that I think there are very many people that would actually enjoy it, as it's really not very good (I mean, I wrote it, of course it sucks!), but if there are any people who might like it, it'd be nice if they could find it, and AO3 is just not where they'll be looking.

    But I'm not sure where else to put it.

    All I could come up with, in fact, was posting it here on this blog.  But I'm not sure if that would work, either.  I mean, I think it's more search engine friendly than AO3 is, but other than that...

    Well, if I had no doubts, I wouldn't be asking for advice, right?

    Speaking of which, does anyone have any advice to share about where I might more successfully post the novel version?

NaNo Rebel, Day 2

 You ever sit there staring at a blank screen and knowing you had something you wanted to write, but you can't remember what it was?

That's me trying to write this post.  :(

I thought of something last night that I wanted to write about today, and now I don't remember what it was.

*sigh*

Thankfully, I didn't have this problem this morning when I was working on my novel, though I also didn't have much energy to write with because I had a terrible night.  So I only got through a couple of scenes, and didn't get through what had been chapter one in the original draft (which is the next compare word count point).

Yesterday's total was 6,172

Today's total is 8,924

Making today's word count 2,752

NaNo Rebel 2021, Day 1

     So, as I  have every year since NaNoWriMo's official website was replaced with a hideous, non-functional monstrosity that trashed all my past projects, I am unofficially participating in NaNoWriMo this year.  Because I was always much more into the writing part than the "official writing community" part anyway, so why should I force myself to deal with a site that thinks its hideous cover art is more important than my words?

    And, since I'm already rebelling anyway, I'm doubly rebelling by doing a rewrite rather than writing a brand new novel.  This time, I'm rewriting The Golden God of Aiolia, the second novel in a series of kinda-sorta-YA novels I first wrote back in 2014, and which I reread last year during the COVID lockdown (though as I'm still unemployed--aside from online freelance work--I'm basically still in a personal lockdown situation) and decided to polish up and release.  (The first one is currently online in both a minimally interactive "game" format and in a text-only format on AO3, though I'm wanting to post it somewhere else in a text-only format, which is going to be the subject of its own post in a few days...)

    I'm following my standard rewrite process, in which I open the new draft (well, for today, that was just plain starting a new document) and the old draft, then use the "arrange all" function on Word so I have one on top of the screen and the other on the bottom.  Then I just start writing, sometimes simply retyping what's in the old document, other times writing new text to fit the same basic sentiment as what was in the old one, and sometimes just writing something entirely new, depending on what a particular passage needed.  Even in the passages where the plan is just to retype, I typically notice minor things that need fixing in passing, and it ends up having a lot more changes than I was expecting.

    As an example of the kinds of changes I'm making, I wanted to share this partial paragraph from the opening "reminding everyone of the big stuff from book one regarding who the characters are and stuff" sequence (which I never really bothered with in the other five books, but for some reason it just feels right here so I couldn't quite bring myself to remove it).  So, the following paragraph is the original version, and the underlined section is the part I had initially marked as needing revision:

    Eurysakes, son of Telamonian Aias, had  met them at the grave of Atalanta's father, having been sent there by a prophecy to await the ones who would help him allow his father's shade to rest peacefully.  Atalanta still only knew partial details of Aias' death:  Apollo himself had told her that Athene had driven Aias to madness and suicide to protect Odysseus, but that information had left her with just as many questions as she had had before!  And, of course, there was also Aias' long-standing, unsettled rivalry with Achilles.  That also seemed to play some role in Eurysakes' quest,  but Atalanta wasn't quite sure how.

    And here's the new version:

    Though he was also her cousin, Atalanta had only met Eurysakes recently, when she finally got to pay her respects at her father's grave.  He was the son of Telamonian Aias, who had been her father's cousin, and he had been waiting at the grave just to meet her and Ariadne, having been sent there by an oracle to await the ones who would help him relieve the unrest that was plaguing his father's shade.  Eurysakes hadn't gone into much detail about just why his father's shade couldn't rest, though.  It was something to do with the way he had died, she was pretty sure, but she still only knew partial details of Aias' death:  Apollo himself had told her that Athene had driven Aias to madness and suicide to protect Odysseus, but that information had left her with even more questions than she had had before!  But it also seemed like maybe some of Aias' discomfort in death had to do with his long-standing, unsettled rivalry with Atalanta's father, Achilles, but Atalanta wasn't entirely sure what role that rivalry played in Eurysakes' quest to restore his father's honor in the eyes of the world.

    It's maybe not a huge difference, but I feel like the new version did a much better job explaining Eurysakes' situation and quest. (His quest being a huge part of book two, it was especially important to explain it here!  That may actually be why I felt like I had to leave the catch-up sequence in this one, because it's so much more tied into the past events than the others; in book three, they finally learn about the real plot of the series, so from that point on, it's more concerned with the future and their own actions than their fathers.)  As you might have guessed from that passage, this is set less than twenty years after the Trojan War, and all three of the young leads are the children of Greek heroes from said war.  (Ariadne's father is Odysseus, which is surprisingly not a problem for Eurysakes.  It should have been, really, but since book one is already out there, it's too late to make it a problem.)

    I like to write first thing in the morning--well, first thing after Animal Crossing, anyway--so I've already done today's writing (though I could always go back and do more, I suppose).  I'm keeping track--among other things--of how different the lengths of the sections are compared to what they were initially, to have an idea how much I'm adding (or I suppose in theory subtracting?) as I go.  The prologue, which had fairly minimal planned alteration and not that much unplanned either, started out at 1,082 words, and the new draft's version is 1,170 words.  So not a lot different.  I haven't finished rewriting the first chapter (of the 2014 draft) yet, though.

    Today's total word count is 6,172 words.

    So far so good. :)