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?
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