A to Z: Teukros and Tekmessa

 

    Technically, I was also considering Thetis, but I decided I had slightly more interesting content for Teukros.  So, starting from the top:  Teukros (better known by his Roman name, Teucer) is the son of Telamon by a concubine.  In the Iliad, the identity of that concubine is not specified, nor are her Trojan origins mentioned (though they can still be surmised even there), but in all later works his mother is specifically Hesione, elder sister of King Priam.  (Which actually makes for one of the spots in the mythic chronology of Troy that feels off.  But that would take several posts to go into in any depth, so I'll leave it for some other time.)   The name Teukros proves his Trojan ancestry pretty efficiently, because Teukros was also the name of one of the mythic founders of Troy, hence that "Teucrian" is one of the words used to describe people or things as being in some manner Trojan.

    Although Teukros features prominently in Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, there's also nothing particularly exceptional about him there; he pretty much just follows the standard "devoted brother of Aias" routine that's set out in the original myths.  Which is not to say that he deviates from that in the Atalanta and Ariadne books!  Far from it!  It's just that being set almost twenty years after the war's end, I get to portray an older Teukros, king of a prosperous realm (and particularly wealthy and powerful because he controls copper mines that were so important to making bronze for weapons and armor!), father of a teenage daughter, and proud uncle who had raised Eurysakes to be his father's equal in just about every way.  (Which is only deviating from the myths in that there he would not have gotten to raise his nephew in the original version.)

            “Certainly, [the events in Egypt that were just under discussion] happened long enough ago that the princess wouldn’t know anything about it,” the king added, with a chuckle that made his nephew blush.
            “What, another fiancée?” Atalanta asked, laughing.
            “Of course not,” Eurysakes answered instantly.  It was quite possibly the fastest speech that Ariadne had ever heard from him.  “Egyptian royalty can only marry Egyptian royalty.”
            “That’s the only thing stopping her, from what I’ve heard,” King Teukros confided in the girls, making Eurysakes’ blush grow deeper.
            “I’d never have guessed you were so popular with women,” Ariadne teased him.
            “It’s not that,” he insisted, somewhat weakly.
            “I fail to see what else it could be,” the king laughed.  “You have a gift with the ladies that your father lacked.  Probably because your face looks so like your mother’s.”
            At the moment, Eurysakes’ face looked more like a pomegranate, it had turned so dark.  Ariadne actually started to feel a little sorry for him, so she decided to change the subject.

    Just being devoted and loving doesn't mean he can't do a little teasing. 😉  However, there's actually not much I can quote about Teukros in the present of the novels, because his sole appearance is so deeply mired in the overarching plot of the series that his scenes wouldn't make any sense out of context. 😅  So I'll just talk about the prologue to book five, since I omitted it from the post on Patroclos.

A to Z: Randomly, Ramses II

 

    Okay, not exactly "random," but...I admit that it's a pretty weird choice.  Only strangely enough I don't have very many characters of any note whose names start with R.

    He's also a weird choice in that most people would not put the Trojan War as during the reign of Ramses II, but I do.  Or rather, I did for the Atalanta and Ariadne books, which then bled over into Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, albeit only slightly.  (He sends troops to aid the Trojans in year...seven or eight I think, though he's only identified as "Ramses" so it could be Ramses III, who's more in the time frame typically associated with the Trojan War.  In any case, it's a one-time event with minimal repercussions no matter what you do...unless the feud between Odysseus and Palamedes is still going on at the time...)  There are reasons for my placing the date of the Trojan War when I did, and as I'm trying to be more relaxed about these posts now, I'm just going to quote what I had to say on the subject in the timeline section available at the end of the interactive version of Scions of Troy:

         So, there’s a lot to say here, and much of it could be spoilers for later books in the series, meaning I can’t say a lot of what I would ideally want to. There is a “traditional” date for the Trojan War: 1184 BCE. This would have the war either beginning or ending (depending on whether you see that as the start date or finish date!) less than a decade before the Bronze Age Collapse.
         I couldn’t use that for obvious reasons! Even more so than the “having the girls travel through what would be their equivalent of a post-apocalyptic wasteland is not what I wanted” reason, there’s also the fact that the myths firmly establish that a good deal of time passes between the fall of Troy and the fall of the other citadels. (Though the ancient texts are not consistent about just how much time, to be honest. And of course they had them all fall to Dorian invaders when most of them seem to have fallen more to earthquakes than to warfare.)

    My original drafts had assumed "about 1250" for the fall of Troy, but that meant that the girls were going to arrive in one of the locations for the later books at a time of great upheaval, and I preferred to avoid that.  So I shifted things around a little more, and put the start of the Trojan War at around 1267 BCE...which is about the same time that the Hittite Empire was going through upheavals as Hattusili III was overthrowing his nephew, Mursili III.  Meaning that the Hittites would have been much too busy to send aid to Troy!  I was so pleased by that coincidence that I decided that, as far as my personal headcanon is concerned, that simply was the date of the Trojan War.  (The deposed Mursili III fled to Egypt, btw, and the political wrangling and threats of war as Hattusili III demanded he be returned lasted for nine years, thus handily both proving that the Hittites had too much else on their minds and that Ramses would have been unlikely to get involved.)

    Even better than the upheaval among the Hittites was the earthquake that struck around Mycenae in about 1250.  This earthquake forced the rebuilding of the citadel walls and was when the grave circles famously looted excavated by Schliemann were brought inside the walls.  Which made for a perfect time for, say, Orestes to carry out his act of vengeance for his father's murder.  And more importantly made an excellent opportunity for Korythos to oust Aineias as the post-war king of Troy.

    In other words, I ended up with a time that fits the larger picture of the war's place in the Late Bronze Age world really well (aside from making the Dorian invasion take place several decades before the Bronze Age Collapse 😰), so I was extremely pleased with it.

    Corollary to all this, because Ramses II had an incredibly long reign (1279-1213 BCE), that means he's still seated on the Egyptian throne when Atalanta and Ariadne first escape slavery around 1239 BCE.  And that means if I wanted them to visit Egypt--and of course I wanted them to visit Egypt!--then he's the man in charge when they get there.

    And when they get there is in book five, so it'll be a while before it's been rewritten...and it's probably going to change a lot in the rewrite.  (Partially because I didn't put in as much research as I should have at the time. 😅)

    That's not the only reason, but I'm going to talk about that after I address how I characterized Ramses in the original draft.  (Which will probably not change too much in the final draft...)  Obviously, it's a tricky thing, trying to write fiction involving a real historical personage.  Even more so considering that the ancient Egyptians did not keep the kind of records that tell us much about what their rulers were actually like as people.

A to Z: Perfect Patroclos

 

    Today's choice is going to be particularly obvious to anyone who knows me well, as I am a self-described Patroclos fangirl.  I actually have a surprisingly varied selection of works I could talk about, too.

    On top of the prologues of the Atalanta and Ariadne books (the prologues are always set in and around the war), there's Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, the failed yandere visual novel I talked about with Deidameia, the play "Pyrrha," the visual novel set in the 1980s I talked about as the origin of Grant Nemo, the failed sci-fi novel I talked about (in the same post about Grant), and all its incomplete spin-offs.  There's also Ilios, my 2011 NaNoWriMo project, but...it's problematic.  😅  In the interests of not stressing myself out, gonna limit myself to just a few sources.

    One of my favorite parts of Better General is that Achilles has a madness meter (though it's a hidden stat), and for the most part the way you increase his madness meter is to separate him from Patroclos.  This can lead to him butchering you, or even the whole camp if the final blow to his sanity is Patroclos' death.  So there is actually a lot of material in there about them (though it's never enough!) and they can have some pretty romantic endings if they both survive the war...

Enraged at having had his concubine taken away, Achilleus left the war in the ninth year.  By the time the Achaian fleet returned to Hellas, Achilleus and his Myrmidons had unified the Hellenic people by conquering them all while the majority of their warriors and kings were still at Troy.  (This saved his descendent the trouble of having to do so nearly a thousand years later.)  Though Achilleus took several wives over the course of his long reign as King of Hellas, he had no children other than Pyrrhos, the boy he had fathered while he was hiding in disguise as a woman on Scyros; it was often said that his wives never conceived because he so rarely went in to them, preferring to spend his nights--like his days--with his faithful Patroclos.  The only serious threat to Achilleus' reign was the arrival of the Heracleidai, who attempted to take Hellas for themselves, but he was able to muster the survivors, sons and grandsons of his allies from Troy (even those who had initially fought against him) to work together to fight them off.  When he eventually died, his bones were enshrined in the same vessel as those of Patroclos.  Pyrrhos inherited his throne.

    ...or...

Outraged that you felt he was ruled by his desires, Achilleus returned to Phthia in a fit of anger, along with Patroclos, who had to spend days of intimate private time to convince Achilleus to spend even one evening in the company of other people, leading the gossip all throughout Thessaly to speculate that Achilleus had no use for anything other than his lover's bed.  Peleus was greatly distressed to see his son behave in such a childish manner, and swore he would not permit Achilleus to inherit Phthia if he did not begin to behave more appropriately, so Achilleus set off to the north with Patroclos to prove himself by conquering Hyperborea.  He never returned.

    ...or...

Achilleus returned to Phthia after the war's end, with many ordinary slaves, but no concubine to keep his bed warm.  Peleus set about trying to find a bride for his son, but Achilleus consistently rejected them all, and by the time Peleus died of old age, it was clear even to him that his son refused to take a wife because he wanted no one who could come between him and Patroclos.  Once his father was gone, Achilleus sent to Scyros for the son he had fathered there, and made him his heir.  When they eventually died, Achilleus and Patroclos were buried in the same grave.

    ...and a fairly romantic one if Achilles dies and Patroclos lives...

Patroclos remained behind when the rest of the Achaian army sailed back to Hellas.  He continued to tend to Achilleus' tomb until his own death, at which time a friendly local obeyed his wishes and placed his bones inside the tomb along with Achilleus'.

    But maybe what's most interesting is what can happen when the Trojan army is rampaging through the Achaian camp in the ninth year if you forced Achilles to be the first to disembark on the Trojan shores, and thus got him killed on day one.

A to Z: Odysseus, Obviously

 

    Honestly, who else, right?  I mean, he's already come up quite a bit as-is.  And I actually have a whole lot more to say about how I've written him, despite that I actually don't like the character.  (What with him being a serial adulterer who claims to be a devoted husband, etc.)

    So, there are three main works I can go to for talking about how I've written Odysseus.  (Unless I want to also talk about the version of Odysseus that is Grant, lol.)  But I can't really go all-out anymore on any of these posts, because it turned out that there was enough "timed pressure" element to April A-to-Z to trigger my heart palpitations.  😭  So, gonna be lighter from here on out.  (Also doing the bulk on my phone and only grabbing the quotes on PC.  Somehow my heart doesn't flip out as much when I'm on the phone.)

    So, those three works are Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, The Martial Maenads (which I had hoped would be released by now, but it turned out that I got so involved in writing these posts that I've barely worked on finalizing it for release 😰), and book six of the Atalanta and Ariadne series.

    Going in that order, Odysseus naturally gets a lot of unique text in Better General, for example the bit I mentioned about Aineias when I was talking about Idomeneus.  But perhaps the most unusual and truly unique sequence is his feud with Palamedes.

    In the actual myths, as is well-known, Odysseus was in some respects responsible for the Trojan War, because it was his idea that all of Helen's suitors should swear an oath to fight to reclaim her for her husband should anyone steal her away.  Also generally pretty well known is that when the time came, Odysseus did not want to obey the oath that had been his own idea, and tried to get out of it by feigning madness, hitching up a horse and an ox to a plow and then plowing his own garden, only to have the person who came to get him prove that he was faking it by placing Odysseus' infant son in front of the plow.  The man who thus exposed Odysseus' act and forced him to join the Trojan War was Palamedes, and naturally enough the traditional myths established that Odysseus took lethal revenge on Palamedes during the long war.  (Though other traditions held that Palamedes survived, and some even claimed the Trojan Horse was his idea, rather than Odysseus'.)

    The thing is, there are actually a few couple ways that Odysseus was said to have done away with Palamedes....so, since I was working in an interactive medium, I figured "why not do both?"

A to Z: Korythos

 

    I know I've already presented some Greek mythological characters as being quite obscure, but no one takes the cake for being an obscure mythological figure more than Korythos, son of Alexander and Oinone.

    Alexander (better known as Paris) of Troy, son of King Priam and Queen Hecabe, actually already had a wife before he went off to make Helen of Sparta his own.  Her name was Oinone (also spelled Oenone), and she was a nymph, daughter of the River Cebren.  Oinone comes up periodically in the ancient literature--Ovid wrote about her a couple of times--but their son Korythos is a particularly infrequently mentioned figure.  (He is so obscure he doesn't even have his own Wikipedia page, instead being on one of those list pages that talks about multiple minor characters who share a name.)

    His limited mentions in myth are rare, and follow a basic formula:  he's sent to Troy during the war by his mother (either to help his father or to break up his relationship with Helen) where he falls in love with Helen (or she with him) and is killed by his jealous father, who doesn't even know who he is.  That's the extent of it.  No impact on anything else, he just goes to town and dies, ceasing to be relevant.  (Or rather, he was never relevant to begin with.)

    What that means, of course, is that if you take a version of the myth where he didn't show up in Troy to be killed by his own father, then he's still out there somewhere when the war is over!  (Or that he never existed, but that's boring.)

    So, when I was writing the first draft of what is now titled Scions of Troy, I decided who better to put on the Trojan throne than Korythos?  He's a blank slate for me to work with!  😆

A to Z: Idomeneus

 

    Hmm.  You know, I bet I did an earlier April A-to-Z entry on Idomeneus.  (It's hard to come up with I-names, after all!)  Oh well.  This one is categorically different, as a good chunk of it will be talking about something I hadn't written yet the last time I took part in this challenge!  😆

    So.  Basics.  Idomeneus is the king of Crete at the time of the Trojan War.  He's a grandson of King Minos, and a cousin of Agamemnon and Menelaos.  He's a pretty tough warrior, but not quite in the top tier.  Frequently accompanied into battle by his nephew Meriones, who is particularly accomplished as an archer as well as with a spear.

    The main place he stands out in the Iliad is during the battle when the Trojans are burning the Achaian camp, when he pretty much stomps all over Deiphobos (who is both frightened of him and trying to dismiss him as irrelevant at the same time), only to be wounded by Aineias, who at least respected him as an opponent.

    As to what happened to him after the war, let's go straight to the quotes for that, because today I want to focus on my interactive fiction game Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon? in which you play a random, generic king no one's ever heard of, who is for who-knows-what-reason offered the reins of the Achaian army when Agamemnon suddenly drops out right as the fleet is about to sail from Aulis.  There are ten decision points for each of the ten years (though some of them lead to further decisions within the decision point), and I'm sorry to say a lot of them actually don't matter in the least.  😰  (Even sorrier to say that by the time you get to the last two or three years, the game is buggy as heck.  It was doing all sorts of strange stuff like forgetting Achilles was alive and sending Odysseus on missions when he'd been sent back to Ithaca in disgrace. 😰  I had to replay the whole game to get quotes for this post, 'cause trying to extract them from the Twine program files is really awkward considering how much code some of the text is buried under.)  Anyway!  I tried my best, back when I was making the game, to give a lot of alternate possibilities for individual events, leading to some very different outcomes...meaning that when the war is successfully won, the game gives you a long scroll telling you what happened to each character in your playthrough, and what happened to them when Agamemnon was running the show.  And this is what that said about Idomeneus' original fate:

         Under Agamemnon, Idomeneus returned home safely, but traditions vary as to what happened next: some say he made a foolish promise to sacrifice whatever first greeted him (which ended up, of course, being his child), others say that his wife betrayed him and he had to flee, and others say he ruled on in peace. Whatever the truth of his fate was, more than a thousand years later, the locals would point out a building they said was his tomb at Knossos.

    Yeah, not terribly exciting.  (Strange side note:  those same locals also claimed his nephew Meriones was buried in the same tomb.  I'm not sure why.)  That level of variation in post-war fates is strangely not unusual.  A lot of the others who fought in the Trojan War had both "happily ever after" and "ran fleeing from an adulterous wife" endings.  Large numbers of the latter ended up in Italy, for whatever reason. 🤷🏻‍♀️

    Anyway, the difficulty of writing about someone like Idomeneus is that he hasn't got all that much personality in the original work.  (By which I mean the Iliad, of course.  Most other ancient works that mention Idomeneus are mythographic works that don't go into detail about anyone's personality.)  Still, since he's one of the bigger players, he comes up pretty frequently in the game.

    The first major event involving him is almost immediately after the Achaian fleet lands on the Trojan shore.  At that time, in the original myth, Menelaos and Odysseus went to the city to make one last try at diplomacy.  It, needless to say, did not work.  😅  Anyway, in the game, you choose who accompanies Menelaos on the expedition, and Idomeneus is one of the options.  This is the first part of what happens if you select him...

        As Menelaos and Idomeneus prepare to depart, you call Agamemnon's herald Talthybios over and instruct him to attend upon them in their errand. He swears to report to you immediately upon his return to the camp and faithfully relate everything that should happen in the city.
         They are gone overnight--as you were expecting, given how long it would take them to reach Ilios on foot from camp--and it is late in the day when Talthybios finally returns to your tent.
         "We have returned from the city, Lord Creon," the herald informs you.
         "So I can see. I do not hear any jubilation in the camp, so I assume the mission did not succeed?"
         "Indeed not, my lord. We arrived at the city gates shortly before nightfall, and were admitted into the home of Antenor, one of King Priam's trusted advisors. First thing in the morning, he accompanied us to see the king, and Menelaos stated his case, requesting the return of his wife, and promising to do without the gold that was stolen along with her, in recompense for the lives taken on the beach. Idomeneus also spoke, as Menelaos' kinsman, and [as] he who had been host to the funeral games that had given Alexandros the opportunity to thus rob Menelaos of gold and wife. His words were measured, just and wise, and I was certain they would sway the Trojan court to agree to Menelaos' requests." He sighs sadly. "We were sent back to the home of Antenor to await Priam's decision. Much time later, Antenor returned, full of worry. He reported to us that Alexandros arrived in the council chamber with Helen at his side, and that the prince's honeyed words convinced the Trojan elders to turn on us with a murderous attack. Antenor came to warn us and help us escape the city alive."
         "And?" you prompt, when he does not seem to want to continue.

    Thus far, aside from Idomeneus' contribution, this follows what happened in the actual myth.  But--even though this is still super early in the game--there are actually two possible outcomes to these events.  In most cases, this would be the result of sending Idomeneus along with Menelaos:

         "Idomeneus said that he felt a measure of blame for what Alexandros had done. If he had followed what his deceased uncle would likely have desired, and not invited the sons of Aerope to his funeral games, then Helen could not have been stolen away. So he did not wish to run, but to stay and fight. Menelaos did not want to see his kinsman risk his life, and they argued long enough that we could hear the approaching princes in the street. Antenor urged us to flee at once, and Idomeneus insisted that Menelaos and I leave, while he remained to delay the enemy, promising he would escape on his own as soon as he was able. Alas, though we waited long in hiding outside the city walls, he did not emerge. Antenor sent word by one of his children that Prince Hector, though grievously wounded by Idomeneus, succeeded in killing the Cretan king."

    However!  The first (proper) decision you make in the game is who to have be the first man to disembark when the fleet arrives.  (Due to the fact that Thetis had warned/commanded Achilles not to disembark first, as the first to disembark would be the first to die.)  If you order Achilles or Aias of Salamis to disembark first, they're still the first to die, but they take Hector with them!  In which case, the result of sending Idomeneus with Menelaos is drastically altered...

         "Idomeneus said that he felt a measure of blame for what Alexandros had done. If he had followed what his deceased uncle would likely have desired, and not invited the sons of Aerope to his funeral games, then Helen could not have been stolen away. So he did not wish to run, but to stay and fight. Menelaos did not want to see his kinsman risk his life, and they argued long enough that we could hear the approaching princes in the street. Antenor urged us to flee at once, and Idomeneus insisted that Menelaos and I leave, while he remained to delay the enemy, promising he would escape on his own as soon as he was able. After we waited in hiding quite a long while, Idomeneus finally emerged from the city, supported by one of Antenor's sons. He is badly wounded, but he proudly reported that he had killed Deiphobos, the second most powerful of Priam's sons."

    To be honest, until I replayed it to get these quotes, I had forgotten just how much variation I had managed to put in this game.  I really need to give it a proper glow-up at some point.  (And make it actually keep track of troop numbers and rations and such so that the smaller decisions will actually matter...)

A to Z: Hermione and Her Household

    So, today I'll be talking about my take on yet another traditional Greek mythological figure:  Hermione, daughter of Helen and Menelaos of Sparta.  Also her husband, her son and a bit about her mother.  (Technically, I toyed with choosing Helen for today, but...the two most unique and interesting things I've done with her are in the unfinished reincarnation-and-giant-robots piece that I mentioned in talking about Grant, and some of the late spoilers in book six of The God Killers, which definitely won't be out for a couple years (possibly more than a couple at the rate I'm going) so...talking about those two would be awkward at best.  Though it's still awkward since Hermione is also only in book six.  But at least her material isn't a spoiler.)

    Anyway.  Hermione is probably not numbered among the best-known women in Greek myths.  (More likely the opposite, in fact...)  However, the antiquity of her character is undeniable:  in the Odyssey, Telemachos arrives in Sparta just at the end of the wedding feast as Hermione is on her way to Phthia to marry Neoptolemos, son of Achilles, so she's mentioned in one of the oldest of the Greek texts.

    Some basic backstory on Hermione in the original myths:  she was just a small child when her mother was taken to Troy.  (I've seen six and nine given as her exact age, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️)  Like Sparta itself, she was left in the care of her not-actually-grandfather Tyndareos, the previous king of Sparta, during the war.  (Since Helen's father was actually Zeus, not her mother's husband...)  That much is always the case.  As is that she had two husbands, one of whom is Neoptolemos, to whom she was promised in the final days of the war, to reward the boy for coming to finish the fight his father had started.  But how that second marriage came about varies wildly in ancient sources, sometimes from the same author.  (Euripides has some enormous variations in his plays touching on Hermione.  Also those touching on Helen, for that matter...)

    Her other husband, you see, is her double-cousin Orestes.  (He being the son of her father's brother Agamemnon and her mother's sister Clytemnestra.)  Why anyone would think that was a good pairing is beyond me.  (In fact, I have Menelaos being rather put out that his grandson is technically also his grand-nephew.)

            “We shall finally be able to proceed once my nephew arrives,” Menelaos said, nodding.  Then he winced.  “I mean, son-in-law….”  He let out a wordless cry of aggravation.  “This is why I wanted her to marry Neoptolemos!” the king shouted.  “I don’t know what my brother was thinking, wanting his son to marry my daughter…”

    In the ancient texts, there are two primary versions regarding how, when and why Hermione wound up marrying Orestes.  Either she married him while her father was away at the war (either at the command of Tyndareos or because of a prior engagement her father had set up, or even at the will of one or both of the couple actually getting married (gasp!)) or she marries him after Neoptolemos' death (though even in the former scenario, she still ends up with Orestes even if she was with him before Neoptolemos).  In fact, sometimes competition over her is the reason Neoptolemos is killed.  You see, Orestes is usually said to be the one to have slain Neoptolemos, sometimes acting alone, sometimes acting with the aid of the people of Delphi, and sometimes acting as a vessel for Apollo (in just the way Apollo used Paris/Alexander to kill Achilles).  Though sometimes Neoptolemos is killed without Orestes' involvement, either by Apollo acting alone or by the people of Delphi unaided, or by Apollo aiding the people of Delphi.

    With so much variation in the ancient sources, I obviously had to make some decisions about which would be the case in my own novels!

A to Z: Ganymede and Grant

    This is a weird one.  I was torn between these two characters for today's post, and decided to do both, in part because I don't have a huge amount to say about either of them.  (Also, I like the way their names sound together like that.  🤣)

    So.  Ganymede is not who you're thinking of.  Probably.

    See, the Ganymede I'm talking about today is a very important member of the Trojan court when Atalanta, Ariadne and Eurysakes arrive in Scions of Troy.  He's very handsome, but very mysterious.  He's also quite ambitious, and doesn't seem to get along well with the king.

    He doesn't make a very good first impression on our young trio (or maybe I should say they don't make a very good impression on him?).

         The herald led them across the agora to the palace, where a number of well-dressed Trojan men were waiting for them.  “Are these the visitors from Cypros?” the wealthiest-looking of them asked, addressing the herald.  The man speaking was quite the prettiest man that Atalanta had ever seen, which made her wonder if that meant he was King Korythos himself.  And yet, he didn’t seem to be any better dressed than her former master, even though surely the king of Troy should be wealthier than the king of a little port town like Methymna.  He didn’t even have a diadem, but maybe kings didn’t wear those except for special occasions?  (Atalanta had rarely seen her master outside of major religious ceremonies, after all.)  And yet, how many girlishly pretty men could there be in a single court?
         “Indeed they are, my lord,” the herald replied, with a slight bow.
         “Hmm.  Well, one of them certainly matches expectations,” he commented, his critical gaze settling on Eurysakes for a moment, before moving on to Atalanta and Ariadne, prompting a disapproving look on the man’s face.  “As to the other two…”  He frowned, and shook his head.  “It would not be proper to present them in such a begrimed manner to his majesty.”  So he really wasn’t King Korythos, then…
         “You’re quite right, my lord Ganymede,” another man standing near him said in a foul, toadying manner.
         “Ganymede?!” both Atalanta and Ariadne chorused at once in their shock.
         “It’s an old family name,” the man told them, with a smile that struck Atalanta as being rather vain.  “I assure you, I’m not the one you’ve heard of.”
         “I should hope not,” Ariadne chuckled.  “Zeus the thunderer would surely be much aggrieved to be without his cup-bearer.”
         The man called Ganymede laughed, but he seemed angry rather than amused.  “Zelotes!” he snapped.
         “Yes, my lord?” the sycophant at his elbow oozed, bowing deeply, even though his lord wasn’t looking at the gesture.
         “Take these three boys into the palace and see that they’re thoroughly washed before they’re presented to the king.  Washed and perfumed,” he added, waving a hand in front of his face as if in objection to their stink.   Personally, Atalanta thought they didn’t smell badly at all, especially considering that they had walked for two days straight before reaching the campsite last night.

A to Z: Ever-Enduring Eurysakes

    So, Eurysakes is both complicated and pretty simple.

    His character is the simple part;  he speaks slowly like his father did, he's big and tough and dependable like his father was, and he's vulnerable because when he was still a tiny child, his father died in a manner that ruined his formerly perfect reputation.  Where he becomes complicated is the fact that he's an actual character from Greek myth who I have gotten totally wrong. 😰

    You see, Eurysakes is the son of Aias of Salamis (better known by his Roman name, Ajax, which I hate because it sounds like a cleaning product) and his concubine Tekmessa.  Eurysakes is mentioned briefly in the excellent Sophocles tragedy Aias, as Aias leaves his shield with his tiny son (about three or four years old) before his death.  (The name Eurysakes, in fact, means "broad shield."  Because Aias was also known by the epithet "of the towering shield" as his enormous shield was one of his distinguishing features in battle, and helped him earn one of his other epithets, "the bulwark of the Achaians.")  That play is one of the only surviving works that even mentions Eurysakes.  The only other mention of him I'm aware of off-hand is in Plutarch, which I'll get to below.  (Oh, and a passing mention in Pausanias.)

    Now, most of the Greek myths are done by the time the Trojan War ends, but there are still a few stories that take place after the war, and even some after the Odyssey.  These mostly have to do with the fallout from the war in one way or another--the Orestes cycle, for example--though there's also the Heraclidae, the myth of invading Dorians that the Greeks used to explain why the society of the Heroic Age was so different from their own.  One of the tales of the fallout of the war is that of the return of the Salaminian contingent and the reaction of King Telamon to the news that his near-perfect son Aias is dead, and to the ignominious manner of his death.

    (Trigger warning:  to continue discussing this, I have to talk about how Aias died in the myths.  Therefore, I need to put a "read more" tag here for self-harm.)

A to Z: Dejected Deidameia

    So, today I'm talking about a straight-up character from Greek myths:  Deidameia of Scyros.  (Often transliterated as Deidamia.)  The eldest and most beautiful of the daughters of King Lycomedes, Deidameia is the mother of Neoptolemos by Achilles, who of course abandoned her to sail off to the war in Troy.

    And, surprisingly, there's not a huge amount about her in the original material that's constant beyond that.

    But there are some potentially triggering matters discussed in this post--because they're part of some tellings of the original myth--so I'm going to end the main page preview of this post after this paragraph.  I don't go into any details, but do briefly mention sensitive subjects, so if you have any concerns, maybe don't click on the "read more" link.

On the (Mis)Use of Ancient Words in Fiction ~ Or ~ Patroclos is a Warrior, NOT a Healer!!!!!!

     So, part three in my series of textual rants about how people are abusing poor Patroclos in their fanfiction.  (Part one is here, part two is here, if anyone cares.  Though actually part one wasn't as much about Patroclos as about Ancient Greek naming schema...)

    One warning about this post:  I'll be talking about a lot of different works (albeit briefly) and will be changing spellings accordingly.  If I'm talking about a work in Greek or the character in general, I will use my standard spelling of Patroclos, but if I'm talking about a work in Latin or an English-language work that spells it thus, I'll be using the Romanized Patroclus.  (One exception is that there's one work I'm not sure how they spelled it, so I'm using my standard...'cause they might actually have used Patroklos, only I can't remember for certain...)  I apologize if this seems confusing.

    Over the millennia, there have been a lot of changes to Patroclos' role in the story of the Trojan War.  We don't know what the story was like before the Iliad was composed, but from the way the epic never bothers explaining who he is or why he's following Achilles around so devotedly, we can assume that prior to its composition, their relationship was well-established, and the audience would already know that they were friends, comrades-in-arms and lovers.  (Well, given the variations caused by oral tradition, it's actually safer to say that many held them to be lovers, rather than that all did.  But the way the intimacy of their relationship was treated, it was clear that the poet expected people to already be aware of it.)

    In late antiquity, two anti-heroic versions of the Trojan War story were floated about, purporting to be first-hand accounts by Dictys of Crete and Dares of Phrygia; in addition to changing the story to make everyone seem worse, these stories confused or conflated various figures who had similar names (e.g. Atreus and Catreus, Peleus and Pelias), making it clear that not all the changes to the tale were purposeful.  In these, Patroclos played almost no role, and in fact died almost immediately in one of them.  And he's not even mentioned in Vergil's Aeneid (which only makes sense, really).  And why do I bring this up?  Well, because eventually the ancient Greek language was pretty much lost in Europe, so throughout the Middle Ages and most of the Renaissance, these Latin versions of the Trojan War story (which did, admittedly, also include a highly-truncated version of the Iliad, about 1/16th the length of the real thing) became the only ones known.

    So for all the Medieval and Renaissance tales of the Trojan War--Bocaccio, Chaucer, etc.--Patroclos essentially doesn't exist.  Around Shakespeare's time, Ancient Greek was becoming known again, and there was even a translation of the Iliad into English, thus Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, while mostly based on the Medieval version adapted out of Dictys and Dares, was able to reintroduce Patroclus as a major player and Achilles' true love (despite much moaning and groaning about Polyxena).  But Shakespeare made other changes to the character.  His Patroclus was a teenage boy (probably played by the boy who usually played the female leads) and not only didn't fight (being too young) but didn't even want to fight.  (Though he still met his traditional end on Hector's blade, of course.)

    Shakespeare's version of Patroclus--despite that his Troilus and Cressida was ignored for centuries, only reemerging onto stages in the 20th century--at some point became viewed as the dominant version, being called upon by any hack writer who didn't want to deal with the real story as told in the Iliad.  (See, for example, that ghastly movie Troy.  Well, no, don't see it:  just look it up on Wikipedia or something.)

    The Patroclos in the Iliad is radically different from Shakespeare's timid boy:  he is older than Achilles, he's brave, he's kind, and when he's rampaging across the battlefield in Achilles' armor and cutting down Trojans left and right everyone knows exactly who he is and they are still terrified of him.  (In fact, when Apollo disguises himself as a regular Trojan and goes to fetch Hector to have him face Patroclos, he tells him that it's Patroclos who is running rampant, and Hector's reaction is basically "yes, only I can deal with this deadly foe" not any mockery of an insignificant opponent.)

    But what does any of this have to do with the misuse of ancient words in fiction?

    Well, I'm getting to that.

    You see, not all modern authors are willing to work with Shakespeare's teenage boy version.  He'd have been sorely out of place in the video game that was a Canadian-made spin-off of Koei's Dynasty Warriors franchise.  (I think it was called, like, Warriors:  Legends of Troy or something like that.  I'm sure about the first word and the last, just not the ones in the middle... 😅)  I haven't played the game, but I did watch some footage of it years ago (when I was working on a paper on the changing portrayals of the Trojan War heroes over time), and its Patroclos was just as buff and dangerous as any other player character.  (Too buff, honestly; the characters were kind of grotesque, as I recall.  Like, they looked like they'd all overdosed on steroids.)  The version of Patroclus in the very recent game Hades is probably the best, most accurate version of the character I've ever encountered in a modern work.  (Yes, they changed his ethnicity, but there aren't actually any ancient descriptions of him that specify his ethnicity.  No reason his family a few generations back couldn't have moved to Greece from Africa.  I think it happened a lot more back then than people now expect.)

    Literature seems to have been less kind to Patroclos than video games, weirdly enough.  Most of the (unintended) abuse of the character I've encountered on AO3 has been entirely caused by fans of a single modern novel, Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles.

    And why do I call it abuse?

    Because it turned a warrior into a healer.

    Seriously, some of these fanfic works have claimed he never even went onto the battlefield, just waiting in the camp for Achilles to return.

    That is the most appalling nonsense!  (I can only hope that comes from the fic writer and not the novelist, but I fear the opposite is true.)  Every man in the Greek camp--with the possible exception of the priest Calchas--went out to battle.  Even the aged Nestor, who was too old to fight, still went onto the field for every battle!  Let's be real, here:  the Greek army was having too much trouble procuring food for it to have useless hangers-on in the camp who didn't fight.  (Uh...especially in light of all the women they had enslaved, who obviously didn't do any fighting, but still had to eat...and all the children those poor women were being forced to bear...)

    The closest to professional healers that the Greek army had were Machaon and Podaleirios, the sons of Asclepios.  But they still went out and fought.  (Machaon, in fact, died in battle, either to Penthesileia or to Eurypylos of Mysia, depending on the version you're looking at.)

    Now, yes, it's true that Patroclos had some knowledge of field medicine, and in the Iliad he helps a bit with some of the wounded before persuading Achilles to let him join the fight, but they've all been fighting for nine years at that point!  Every soldier would have needed to know a bit about field medicine just to ensure his own survival.  And all the more so for an attendant like Patroclos, who would need to be able to help his lord if the need arose.  (Okay, not so likely given Achilles' natural skills and supernatural armor (his first set of armor was also made by Hephaistos) but still!)  Furthermore, in pretty much all known traditions, Achilles was trained as a child by Cheiron, who was known for his knowledge of healing (he had, in fact, trained Asclepios himself), and who had surely taught the boy at least enough medicine to be able to deal with injuries on the battlefield.  Whether or not Patroclos was trained alongside Achilles (and there is ancient precedent for that being the case), Patroclos would have learned some of the techniques from Achilles if he hadn't learned them with Achilles, because Achilles is going to want to make sure his lover knows how to save his own life if necessary.

    So, where did Miller's healer-only version come from?

    Well, in that we get to the title of this post, and the misuse of ancient words.

    Because the word for Patroclos' position is θεράπων (therapon), a word often used in the fanfictions that have gotten me so worked up about this.  Obviously, someone (presumably Miller?) looked at that and said "well, it looks so much like therapy that it must be related!"

    And yeah, it probably is related, in the sense of it having come from the same root word as θεράπευσις, meaning "treatment, attention."

    But θεράπων does not mean anything related to healing!

    In the Homeric context, it has traditionally been translated as "squire," and its most standard definition is "comrade-in-arms, but of inferior rank."  Other definitions include "attendant," "servant" and even "worshipper."  But not one of its definitions has even the slightest thing to do with healing.  (You can check out the dictionary entries for θεράπων at the Perseus Project:  here, here and here.)

    This is not only just plain wrong, it was also purposefully wrong on Miller's part.  She had to have done enough research to have known that the word did not mean that, and she used it that way anyway.  In consequence, its misuse has been spread like a virus throughout the Trojan War-related fandoms on AO3.

    I cannot express emphatically enough just how much that pisses me off.

    I'm not even going to try (the fact that I've spent this long ranting about it is probably a good indicator of just how angry I am, obviously), as the whole point of this was to try and purge the anger from me, not to wallow in it.

    The worst part is that--whether this comes from Miller's novel or from the people writing derivative works on AO3--by making him a passive healer, they've imposed an artificial heteronormative dynamic on a homosexual relationship:  the Patroclus of those fanfiction works is forced into a feminized position, allowing those writers to essentially write a straight relationship despite that they're writing about two men.  Now, yes, not all of them do that, even when they embrace the "sitting passively in camp" aspect.  (My sample size is small, since I quickly got too fed up to read any more of them, so I can't guess at percentages either way.)  But the fact that any of them do it is already cause for alarm as well as fury.  And yes, Shakespeare's Patroclus was a relatively passive character in a submissive role in the relationship, but he was not so much feminized as not-yet-masculinized, as man/boy relationships were not uncommon in Shakespeare's day.  (Shakespeare himself wrote more than one love sonnet addressed to a boy, which if they were in his own voice (rather than works written on commission for someone else) indicate that he was likely bisexual, but due to the culture in which he lived, that bisexuality would have found expression only with boys, not adult men.)

    Hopefully, this has concluded my series of rants about the ghastly things people are doing to my poor favorite on AO3.  (Aside from my overwhelming fury that they keep putting their fics that are 100% contrary to the Iliad in the Iliad fandom!  Anything that lists Miller's novel as its fandom is automatically not compliant with the Iliad, and therefore shouldn't list it!)

    *ahem*

    Yes, so, as I was saying, hopefully I'm done with this ranting, and will post more positive, interesting things in the future.  (I always have lots of things to say about Greek mythology, after all...)

    In closing, though, I just want to encourage everyone to actually read the Iliad if they're interested in the Trojan War.  Some of the battles can get a bit gruesome (though tame by modern standards, I suppose) and the catalog of ships is pretty dull unless you're into ancient power structures and/or geography, but the characters are fascinating, the dialog is often very entertaining (the snipes at Alexander/Paris esp.), and the pathos of loss is genuinely heart-wrenching.  And Patroclos is just 💓.

On Exiles and Princes

     Well, my attempt to blog daily died a very quick and miserable death, but I am still going to try to purge in (web)print my deep-seated frustrations at the way people on AO3 frequently treat certain subjects in Greek mythology.

    And today my topic is specifically in reaction to the hideous trend (which seems at this point to be present in almost all AO3 works dealing with the character) of claiming that Patroclos was a prince before being exiled for murder as a child.

    This is wrong in every way, except the part about him being exiled.

    Patroclos' father was never a king.  Making him a king reveals multiple very deep errors.

    Firstly, it means mistaking the kingdoms of the Late Bronze Age for the city-states of the Iron Age, in that at some point someone said "Well, gee, we don't know who the king of Opus was, so why not make it Patroclus' father?"  Well, guess what?  There was no king of Opus!  You know why?  Because Opus was the palatial center of Locris.  (There is, in fact, no city named Locris.  It is the name of the region/kingdom only.  Thus making a character into the king of Opus is rather like making someone into the President of Washington DC or the Prime Minister of London.)  The king there was Oileus.  He is a very well established mythic character, and his son, the lesser Aias, was such an important character in the Trojan War that he caused the deaths of more of the Greek army than all the Trojans combined did.

    Second, it misunderstands the role and nature of royalty in the culture.  Exiled princes in the Greek Heroic Age did not become nobodies, mere attendants, as Patroclos did.  Exiled princes typically ended up marrying a daughter of their host and then inheriting his kingdom (or at least part of it).  This is how Peleus, Telamon, Teukros and many others came to their thrones, and how Jason would have become king of Corinth if the city hadn't been burned down, taking his prospective bride and her father along with it.  Royal titles were not simply titles:  royalty were believed to be naturally different and superior to the rest of the population.  An exiled prince remained a prince.  (And if you honestly think people have changed in this regard, look at how people react to the British royal family these days.  I can't remember the last time I went to the grocery store and didn't see at least one article on the magazines at the checkout line about the royal family, esp. Prince Harry.  And this country rejected the monarchy almost 250 years ago!)  To have an exiled prince become nobody special means you don't understand the culture you're using as the setting of your story.  (And if you doubt that Patroclos was considered a nobody among the nobility at the Trojan War, let me remind you that he did not have his own hut.  He had to share with Achilles.  Or rather, Achilles let him stay with him in his hut.  If he had been important--as an exiled prince was by definition--he would have had his own hut.  Teukros had his own hut, even though he was not only the son of an enslaved concubine, but the concubine in question was Trojan!  (In fact, in all post-Homeric sources, she is specified to be King Priam's sister Hesione.))

    The third point is more an assumption on my part regarding why people want to make him a prince, and I'm not sure if it comes from the fanfic authors or their solitary source for this mutant version.  Because even without having read it, I know where they're getting this "Prince of Opus" malarkey from.  They're getting it from Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles, which I once contemplated reading and now I'm very, very glad I didn't, because I can see it would have driven me completely mad very quickly.  (For more reasons than I'll get into in today's post...)  So, I'm not sure if it was Miller or if it's the fanfic authors, but I get the feeling someone at some point is/was thinking "well, he's a better match for Achilles if they're both princes!"  Like that's somehow an improvement.

    It's not.  It weakens their relationship.

    Like, by a lot.  Making a prince--a prince who is all but irresistible, according to some authors, and could therefore have just about anyone he wanted, no matter how high their rank--fall in love with another prince is bland.  It's "safe."  But making him fall in love with a man below his station?  An older man, therefore putting him in a position that is--culturally speaking--subordinate to someone who should be far below him?  That is a sign of a truly powerful love, breaking through the boundaries of what is accepted in his society, and one for which he is risking the one thing he normally protects above everything else:  his reputation.  Making him love an equal is so weak that it's pitiful by comparison.

    Admittedly, the ancient Greeks wanted to make them closer to being equals, so that Achilles wasn't "lowering" himself by loving and being loved by someone so much lesser in status.  That was why many ancient authors (dating all the way back to the Hesiodic Catalog of Women) made Menoitios (Patroclos' father) into a brother of Peleus.  (At least one other ancient author made Menoitios the half-brother of Aiakos, making Patroclos into Peleus' first cousin, which is completely insane, because Patroclos kicks way too much butt to be an old man.  Plus his shade literally has a line to Achilles about how they grew up together, so obviously they can't be more than a few years apart in age.)  But they never went so far as to deny the text of the Iliad, which said very bluntly and directly that Achilles was more important than Patroclos, which would not be the case if Patroclos was also a prince.

    Of course, it also said (in a couple different places) that Patroclos' father moved to Phthia with him when he was exiled, a fact which all those modern authors are steadfastly ignoring, and/or ignorant of.  Because the poet of the Iliad understood the purpose of exiling a murderer, and none of those modern people seem to get it, or if they do, they're ignoring it.

    Exile was not the "punishment" for murder.

    Murderers were exiled for the protection of the community.

    Not because they were expected to kill again (though I'm sure that also played a role in it in many cases!) but because killing someone off the field of battle left the killer polluted.  It was a stain that was actually dangerous to those around him/her.  A murderer was ejected from the community so that they could be purified of that pollution, in order to prevent a plague or other disaster from striking.

    Don't believe me?  Take a look at the first of Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy sometime.  In it, Thebes is suffering from a terrible plague.  Seers are consulted, and it's learned that the reason for the plague is because of an unpurified murderer in the town!  (Worse still, the murderer of their previous king!)  And what does Oedipus promise to do about the murderer?  To banish him from Thebes, of course.

    Because that's what you did with murderers to protect everyone else.

    Then some other king could purify them, and--unless the banishment was specified to be permanent--they could return home and everything would be just fine.  (Y'know, except for the dead person and their family and friends...)  There are a lot of examples of this in surviving myths.  Peleus and Telamon, for example, you know why they were exiled from Aegina?  Because they had murdered their half-brother.  Jason was exiled from Iolcos because of his role in the murder of Pelias.  In Euripides' surviving Hippolytus (he wrote another play about the same subject, which has been lost), the play starts with Theseus in the midst of a one year exile, due to having killed someone.  Queen Penthesileia of the Amazons arrived in Troy in the final year of the war because she had accidentally killed her sister, and was thus in exile to be purified of the death, but she would have gone home again at the end of the war if Achilles hadn't killed her.  Achilles himself, in fact, was briefly exiled from the Achaian camp due to having killed Thersites when the wretch mocked him for mourning the fallen Amazon queen.  (Of course, that was a very carefully arranged exile, as Odysseus accompanied him to the nearest convenient still-standing city to purify him, so they were probably only gone two or three days, tops.  Normally, it wouldn't be quite so heavily planned in advance.)

    So, in other words, there was nothing cruel or unusual about the young Patroclos being exiled from Opus after he accidentally killed a friend in a quarrel.  It was standard procedure, and far from being a heartless father sending his young son out alone in the world, his father uprooted his entire life to accompany the boy.  (Presumably this also meant uprooting the boy's mother and any siblings he might have had, but the subject did not come up in the Iliad.)  The fact that they never returned to Opus likely had nothing to do with being forbidden to do so, but rather to having found a much better situation at Peleus' court than whatever Menoitios' situation was in Opus.  (All known ancient lists of the Argonauts include both Peleus and Menoitios, so even in the versions where they're not brothers, they would at the least be old comrades, so being welcomed with open arms makes complete sense.)

    What bothers me most about the modern authors deciding to turn a devoted father into a cruel one is that I feel like someone (whether Miller or someone in the fanfic community) decided that it was "necessary" in order to give Patroclos' situation more "drama."

    I'm sorry, but if you think his situation needs more drama than it already has, there's something wrong with you.  He's just a child, and he accidentally killed one of his friends.  If you need more drama than that, I suggest you seek therapy.

The Mathematics of Love

     Something I wasn't particularly aware of until reading A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities, selected/edited/translated by J. C. McKeown, was that the Ancient Greeks had a very particular way of expressing numbers with letters.  (No details are given regarding why, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't just for "number games," but was for actual mathematical purposes--much like the Roman system--since numerals as we think of them didn't exist yet, not in Europe, anyway.)

    The numbers 1-9 were represented with the first eight letters of the Greek alphabet, with the archaic digamma (Ϝ, "w") for 7, presumably indicating that its position (before being excised from the language) was in between zeta and eta.  Then you had the tens:  10, 20, 30, etc., with the next nine letters of the Greek alphabet, including the archaic koppa (ϙ, "k") for 90.  And finally the hundreds started with rho and went up past omega to end with the archaic sampi (ͳ, "ts" or "ss") for 900.  (The inclusion of these archaic letters presumably means that this numeric process was not only developed before those letters (and their associated sounds in the case of digamma) were dropped from use , but was so firmly established that changing it just because the letters were no longer used was simply impractical, if not downright unthinkable.)

    However, unlike the Roman letters-as-numbers system, the Greek system meant that every word and phrase had a numerical value.  And evidently they liked to play around with figuring out the values of various words and phrases, and comparing them to the values of others.  (For example, he cites one ancient source that had gone to the trouble of finding two (contiguous) lines of the Iliad that added up to the same number.)  While a number of these equivalencies are listed in the book, one of them particularly gave me a case of the warm fuzzies:

Αχιλλευς φιλει Πατροκλον (no accent marks 'cause I couldn't find some of them)
Achilleus philei Patroklon
Achilles loves Patroclos

    The first word and the second two both add up to 1276.  The number is immaterial, and even the fact that the phrase adds up isn't what makes me smile:  it's the fact that someone first went to the effort of calculating it, and then felt the need to share that with the world by writing it down.  On top of that, their work was then preserved (in the form of one of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, so only barely), so it's just sort of extra exciting.  :D

    I guess I just can't help sort of squeeing when other people are fans of the same ship I am.  :P  (To put it in modern terms that would baffle any ancient mind...)

    (Their story in Hades also makes me squee uncontrollably:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt7FWky4jh0)

 

    But now, in honor of the day, I plan to download and play the number one most appropriate game:  the demo for the anti-dating sim I Just Want to Be Single.  (From what the devs have posted on discord, it's going to be fantastic.  I've been looking forward to it a lot...)

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.

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.

IWSG - Title Woes

 

            Everything about my writing life feels clenched up in knots right now.  From the simplest things—like that I got new glasses last week only to find out that I couldn’t read in them, because while my optician kept saying “bifocals bifocals” he didn’t actually explain that the muscles in the eyes start working differently when you hit mid-forties, so now I’m having to get new lenses with progressive bifocal lenses so I’ll be able to read and see things in the distance with the same pair of glasses—to the much more complicated situation regarding the upcoming release of the lightly interactive version of the first novel in my series about three illegitimate children of the Greek heroes of the Trojan War.

            A few days ago, I posted a question about how to handle one of the behind-the-scenes details of the release (which did not get a useful answer in the least, I’m sorry to say) on one of the forums at itch.io, in which I stupidly said that I was going to be releasing “in a few weeks.”  Now, this was not any kind of formal announcement, and likely no one who saw it is in the slightest bit interested in what I’ll be releasing—and the few people who are interested in it absolutely had no way of seeing that post.

            But I still feel like I’m bound to honor that date if I can.  (Without, you know, going insane.)

            And so long as I don’t have to do too much editing on the current draft, I should be able to, since the programming involved is minimal.  (It would help if my beta reader had actually read the darn thing and given me feedback, but it’s pretty clear at this point that no matter what he claims, he’s not actually going to do so.  And I promised him last time I brought it up that it would in fact be the last time I brought it up, so there’s no helping that.)

            Honestly, at this point, I’m more worried about the title than anything else.  I don’t think there’s too much I can do to improve the text without detailed feedback from a reader, after all.

            But the title!  OMG, it’s terrible.

            I have prepared a title screen for the game:

             So, yeah, you can see how bad that title is.  (The graphic behind the title is fine, of course, being a photo from Wikimedia Commons of a (heavily reconstructed) Mycenaean fresco.)

            I mean, it’s not necessarily a bad title, as such, but it sort of promises a different novel than the reader would get.  And it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the titles in the series:

            Bonds of Blood and Water (formerly The Vessel of Athene, then briefly The Walls of Troy)

            The Golden God of Aiolia (formerly The Golden God of Thessaly, only it turns out that the name Thessaly is anachronistic)

            The Martial Maenads

            The Tablet of Destinies

            Warriors of Pontos

            The Golden Swan (formerly The Goddess of the Cabieri)

            The Awakening (though that’s kind of a spoilery title and should probably be changed)

             Hmm, you know, looking at those titles, I feel like I was trying to pick out titles that would have worked for story titles on the original Doctor Who.  (Well, the novels did start out with the intention of being a YA series, and the original Doctor Who was viewed by the BBC as “children’s programming” so that’s not necessarily a bad metric to use.)  Which only makes the current title for the first one even more wrong.

            I released the first chapter already on itch.io as The Cousins, which actually feels like the best title for the novel so far, but it’s also very underwhelming.  I feel like the title really ought to at least imply the setting (hence the second title I briefly gave it) or do something to indicate that this is not set in the historic Late Bronze Age, but the Greek Heroic Age, in which the gods were very much real and took part in events.

            The plot of the novel can be summed up thus:

            Cousins Atalanta and Ariadne are brought up as slaves on the island of Lesbos (having been fathered during a single night’s visit by Achilles and Odysseus respectively in the final months of the war, probably at most a week before Achilles’ death), and on learning that their master is thinking of separating them, they decide to escape together.  (This makes up the portion already released.)  Following their escape in disguise as boys, they make their way to the remains of the Greek camp outside Troy, where they find a ship has landed for the night; among the men on board was young Eurysakes, the son of Telamonian Aias, first cousin of Achilles, making Eurysakes Atalanta’s second cousin.  Eurysakes was actually waiting at Achilles’ grave, having been told by an oracle that he would there meet companions who would help him repair his father’s honor and help his shade rest in peace.  Atalanta is eager to travel with him and help in his mission, but Ariadne distrusts him in every way; in spite of Ariadne’s misgivings, they do accept a ride on Eurysakes’ ship the rest of the way to the partially-rebuilt Troy, where they are welcomed as guests by the new king, Korythos, the son of Alexander.  (This may sound odd, but guest-friendship was very important in the Late Bronze Age.  Also, in my version (unlike in the original myths), Eurysakes has been raised by his uncle, Teukros, whose mother was Hesione, sister of King Priam.  So Korythos and Teukros are also cousins.  There are a lot of cousins in this book.  Though Teukros is only talked about, never present until many books later in the series.  And Teukros is now a king in Cyprus, which was the major source of copper in the region in the LBA, which made it supremely rich and powerful, since everyone needed copper to make the bronze they needed for their weapons and armor, so that’s also a very large part of why Korythos is so eager to welcome Eurysakes as a guest.)  There’s a little friction at the court between Korythos and one of the other nobles, Ganymede, but mostly their initial time in town just serves to set up the presence of a virtual army of bandits operating on Mt. Ida and terrorizing the region.  The trio decide to set off to fight the bandits, and following their successful return, things become surprisingly weird and fraught with tension.  It’s hard to sum up the rest from there, but they have to stop a plot that threatens the gods themselves.  (Though I’m sorry to say that I really did not do a very good job at setting up that possibility earlier in the text, even in the rewrite.  I did try as best I could, but…the problem with secret cults is that they tend to keep their secrets, well, secret!)

            Aside from the general theme of kinship, there are also themes of descent from watery gods (mostly just the king’s descent from the local river gods, and Atalanta’s being the granddaughter of a Nereid), guest-friendship, and the tension between trust and deceit (particularly deceit in the sense of people claiming to be someone or something they’re not).  The Trojan temple to Athene eventually becomes a very important part of the story, but its importance isn’t revealed until late in the book, hence one of the reasons the first title was something of a spoiler and had to be rejected.

            Unfortunately, I can’t even look to the ancient works as a suggestion of how to title it, because they tended towards very simple titles, often either the name of the lead character or a name adapted from that lead’s name (eg Odyssey from Odysseus).  While I’m currently planning on calling the series “The Adventures of Atalanta and Ariadne” (which isn’t very fair, since Eurysakes is just as big a part of the series) since I can’t come up with anything better, I can’t really name this after its “lead” because there isn’t one:  it’s very much a shared lead for the three of them.  Well, no, in this particular case, it’s more like Atalanta and Ariadne sharing the lead; Eurysakes doesn’t get full shared lead until book two.  (All seven novels were written back in 2014, btw.  These are just rewrites/adaptations.)

            So I am completely and utterly befuddled as to how to proceed in terms of the work’s title. :(

 

            I welcome any and all suggestions…

    (BTW, did you know that Chrome's onboard spell-checker does not recognize the name Atalanta?  It recognizes Ariadne, but not Atalanta.  WTF?)

Not-NaNo Day 25: Behind in my posts

 I'm behind in my posts about my Not-NaNo, but not in my actual writing.  I just haven't been posting because...honestly, because I didn't feel like booting up this computer just to write a blog post.  (That was at least one advantage to staying with Wordpress, in that it had an app and I could just write the post on my phone, but there doesn't seem to be an official app for Blogger.)

Anyway, I've been continuing to work on the rewrite of The Walls of Troy, though I have only found one very minor place to add any interactivity to it.  (Then again, the interactivity in The Cousins was also very minor, so maybe that's all right.)

I'm posting first thing in the morning not because I've already done today's writing (lol, haven't even thought about it yet) but because I had to boot up this computer in order to look up a phone number for someone who would actually fix my basement door before all my pipes freeze, unlike the handyman who's been promising to fix it for two months now, and responded to my text yesterday with a rather dismissive promise to do something that wouldn't even remotely solve the problem, because evidently he'd forgotten what the problem actually was.  Ugh.  So now I'm waiting for an actual company to call me back about fixing it, and hopefully I won't have to turn off my water on Friday before the temperature can drop below freezing.  (Hopefully.)

I'm trying to think if I had anything to say about the way the rewrite is progressing, but I think I said most of it last time, really.  Because although I had gotten to Eurysakes' first appearance, I still had to write their entire first conversation with him, plus several conversations (practically a negotiation, really) with the captain of his ship, an older man who had fought with their fathers in the Trojan War, and followed Teukros into exile after the war ended.

Ooh, that brings up an interesting point, though.  See, I'm writing this novel from a perspective of intimate familiarity with the myth and its various tangential myths, but most people who will  be reading the novel/game are coming from a point lacking in that familiarity.  So, when I mention Teukros going into exile after the war, I know the whole story behind that, but most other people do not, and it's really hard to know when to insert the explanation into the novel.  Some of what needs to be explained (not just about Teukros, but about various portions of the larger Trojan War myth) can be explained in the work, because the girls wouldn't know the deep dark secrets of various royal families, but other things are going to be common knowledge.

Take Teukros, for example.  At the time when this novel is taking place, he is the founder and king of the city of Salamis on the island of Cyprus, and he's the half-brother of Aias of Salamis.  That much is common knowledge in-universe, and the girls cannot possibly feign ignorance of it.  Given his name, they must at least suspect that his mother was Trojan (Teukros was the name of one of the three legendary figures at the origin of the city, the others being Tros and Ilos), but they probably don't realize that his mother was Hesione, one of King Priam's sisters.  Which is important because that means the current king of Troy, the son of Alexander, is actually a cousin of Teukros, which makes it rather awful that he's been refusing to have any official dealings with him, I only just now realized.  (Thankfully, that wouldn't be something that any of Teukros' people would bring up, but the king will sure as heck bring it up, which he had not done in the original version!)  I can't have the girls feign ignorance about who Teukros is or the fact that he's the ruler of Cyprian Salamis, because you know that there would be chatter about him in a royal palace on Lesbos, so they would have heard all about him.  Or at least, that much about him.  (Realistically, at least one of them should probably have heard the rumor that his mother was a sister of King Priam's.  Ariadne, after all, had been singing to entertain at royal feasts for several years, and that's the sort of thing that might come up around the royal dinner table.)

But there's the matter of his exile.  That they don't know about, because it pertains to the death of his brother, which I've already established they don't know about.  What happened, for those who might happen to read this who don't know the Trojan War very well, is that Aias and Odysseus both claimed the armor of Achilles after Achilles finally died.  After much debate and argument on the subject, the armor was awarded to Odysseus, despite that he wasn't as good a warrior and despite that in most post-Homeric versions, Aias and Achilles were first cousins.  This situation was intolerable to Aias, and he kind of snapped, and decided he was going to go kill Odysseus, take the armor, kill Agamemnon and a few others who also made the decision, and then go home.  Athene didn't want anything happening to her boy, so she cast a veil of madness over Aias, and he slaughtered the herds instead of his comrades.  About dawn, her veil was lifted and he saw what he had done, and was horrified by his own actions, throwing himself on his sword as the only way to preserve what little honor he had left.  Sophocles' play on the subject is really brilliant, and I absolutely recommend it.  (Especially since it's a rare example of a version of Odysseus on the Athenian stage who is not the epitome of evil.  He actually shows remorse for having unintentionally caused Aias to do this, and he convinces Agamemnon to allow Aias to be buried.)  As this was all quite scandalous and distressing, the assumption in my take on the immediately post-Trojan War Greek world is that most of Aias' fellow princes did not want to spread the tale, and thus it is still relatively unknown, so the girls know he died about the same time as Achilles, but they don't know how.  (The problem with that is that it's actually important to the plot of the second novel, so I can't put it in the actual text, but I'm not sure if it's important for the readers not to know, so I'm not sure if I should put it in the glossary or not.  Not like my not putting it in the glossary will do jack-all, considering things like Wikipedia and Google exist.)

Anyway, when Teukros returned to Salamis at the end of the war with his brother's concubine and the son that concubine had borne him, and with the tale of his brother's ignominious end, his father Telamon was outraged at Teukros' failure to prevent the tragedy, and banished him.  (Here's where my version diverges from the real myth:  I misunderstood the single sentence that was the entire summary of a lost tragedy (I think also by Sophocles) about Teukros and his nephew following the death of Telamon, and for some reason thought it meant that Telamon had rejected his grandson as well as his son.  So in my version, Telamon wouldn't allow the concubine and her son into Salamis, either, though in the real myth he did.  (Though Plutarch also mentions another son of Aias, without saying where he came from, so I make it that Aias had a pregnant wife when he left for the war, so Eurysakes has an older brother, and that's why Telamon felt he didn't need his legitimate son's illegitimate son.))  In his banishment, Teukros ends up in Cyprus, where he marries the daughter of a local king, and sets up his own kingdom, which he names after his erstwhile homeland, Salamis.  The fact that he named his new home after his old one the girls know, but why he did so instead of just going home, they don't.  And I can't count on my readers knowing that, either.  Admittedly, that's one of the reasons I was liking the idea of going with this as a text-based game (or rather, a lightly interactive piece of fiction), because then I get to have a glossary to explain all this stuff, but...the question is always how much to try to put into the main text (since one cannot count on people looking for this stuff in the glossary) and how much not to bother with.

Though my more immediate concern is how much I want to try to salvage of the original version, and how much I want to just write from scratch.  My first task today (now that I have an appointment with someone to look at the door) is to go over the first version of the novel and see what needs to be kept, what I would like to keep, and what needs to be just tossed right out, and then make up a bit of a plan for the order of events.  I mean, I know I need, for example, the fight against the brigands which in the original version was how they first gained access to the palace, because they were being rewarded for having done so, but I need to keep it because it gave them their first chance to have a major fight scene together as a trio (actually, it's their first major fight scene at all period), and because it let them meet several people who had key knowledge that was going to be important to them later.  But now I need a reason for them to go out and hunt down these bandits, and I can't just have the king ask them to do so, because that's really rude behavior for a host.  And I know I need the scenes in the various temples within Troy itself, but do I also need the scenes in Thymbria, where they meet Chryseis, her husband and her daughter?  I feel like the only major callback to that entire sequence later on is the fact that when they stay the night there, Atalanta has a dream in which Apollo comes to speak to her (and no, she's not just dreaming that Apollo is speaking to her; he actually has entered her dream to speak to her) and that gets referenced a lot in the later books, but Chryseis and her family not so much.  (Obviously, I can remove or rewrite any later references when I get to those books, but I want to see if there's any important character development potential there, that kind of thing.)

I think I just had an idea of how to get them out there to deal with the bandits, but I'm not sure how well it will work out.  I don't know how any of this is going to work.  I have to walk a very dangerous line dealing with Korythos, since he has some secrets which are probably going to be pretty freakin' obvious to the reader no matter how I handle them (one of them being blatant,  because no matter how much I only speak of the instigator of the war as Prince Alexander, everyone already knows him by the name Paris, but I can't reverse those, since Alexander is the name that is historically one that was part of the Trojan royal family), and I feel like if I try too hard to obscure some of those secrets, I'll just be insulting the reader's intelligence.

That's a worry for later, though.  Right now I want to jot down my ideas before I forget them.

Laters! :p