Monday, November 15, 2021

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.

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