Some Thoughts on Ancient Burial Practices

             So, lately (when I’m not working on my visual novel), I’ve been reading a book about the royal tombs at Ur.  Specifically, it’s an out-of-print book I found at the antique mall near my house; the book was the one that was published to accompany the national tour of the artifacts from said tombs when their home museum was being renovated about twenty years ago now.  (Ugh, I feel old.  I remember being awed by the artifacts when that tour came to town here…after I had moved back home after dropping out of my first attempt at getting a Master’s Degree.)

            Anyway, while the book has me pondering a lot of different things—mostly regarding the appropriateness (or rather lack thereof) of a bunch of European and American archaeologists going around digging up everyone else’s ancient kings and then toting (many/most of) the grave goods back home (as Hergé pointed out in The Seven Crystal Balls, how would the people of Europe feel if a bunch of Egyptians came and started digging up all their kings?), also wondering just what those ancient dead would actually think about the matter if you could travel back in time and tell them what would happen to their graves a few thousand years later—what I just read last night has put me on a more precise and yet also highly speculative train of thought.

            Specifically, what I read late last night was about Ur’s excavator, Sir Laurence Woolley, trying rather futilely to explain why one of the “Royal Tombs” had more than seventy other bodies in it, apparently the bodies of retainers sacrificed at the time of the king’s burial.  This was accompanied by various more modern scholars trying to explain it—with a four page sub-essay on some literary examples from recovered Mesopotamian texts (a sub-essay that was not marked out in any way as different from the rest of the text, so it looked like a page was simply deleted from the file pre-printing)—and ultimately the only answer anyone could come up with was “well, we don’t really know why so many people were sacrificed, but it’s not like other cultures didn’t do the same thing, even if 70+ is a lot more than the usual number.

            It got me to thinking, though, about just how such a practice could have gotten started in the first place.  Because, if you think about it, funerary human sacrifice is typically found in the cultures whose technological level is still pretty low.  They’re stratified—obviously!—and certainly highly sedentary and agrarian, but it’s not the sort of thing you normally find in a culture that has, say, developed the steam engine.  The kinds of cultures that usually practiced funerary human sacrifice were typically also cultures where you would expect human life would be pretty highly valued, since life was so hard; why throw away a strong, healthy young person who could help the civilization survive?  (It would be another matter entirely if the extra bodies in these tombs typically belonged to old, sickly people!)  Now, yes, of course they’re more valuable as sacrifices for exactly that reason, because of their value to the society, and yet if you think about the typical items buried with regal dead, they’re things with artificial value, rather than true value.  All the gorgeous gold jewelry in the world has very little true value in a survival sense:  its value is based entirely on aesthetic reasons, nothing utilitarian.  (And, now, educational value when the jewelry in question is ancient, of course.  But that’s our civilization, not theirs.)  Sure, the dead were often buried with weapons, but they were often elaborate ones that were decorative more than functional.  It’s not a perfect point for a great many reasons (even when you only look at cultures and funerary human sacrifices that fit my basic point) but I hope the core of my logic at least makes sense:  I’m more trying to set up the reason that the entire practice, world-wide, feels like it’s a bit off and could do with some theoretical explanations that come from outside the box.

            Most of the modern scholars trying to explain the phenomenon, in terms of the particular examples at Ur, were really bogged down in typical archaeological theory.  One even structured it as a change in the nature of kingship, etc.  The kinds of reasons that are only applied by scholars at great remove from the subject in question.

            I want to look at the notion from a more human, more “in-world” view, even if it’s also far more speculative and entirely unscholarly.  Though what I’m about to go into is purely in the case of those cultures that didn’t also practice non­-funerary human sacrifice:  when human sacrifice is already part of the culture’s everyday operating parameters, applying it in a funerary context is going to seem far more normal.  (And it is, of course, extremely possible that some of these ancient cultures did, in fact, practice non-funerary human sacrifice, but only in a way that left no material traces, or at least none that archaeologists have so far discovered.  Or that they practiced such sacrifice at a time in their even more remote past, and it was that which shaped the funerary version, which remained part of the culture long after the non-funerary version ceased.)

            So the question is, what would make a culture decide to kill the healthy in order to bury them with the dead?

            The typical scholarly answer is usually “so that they may attend on the deceased in death as they did in life” in one form or another.  The form of service varies—household servants, concubines, guards, etc.—but that’s the basic motivation that’s usually used as an explanation for the sacrificial practice.

            And I’m not saying it’s wrong.  It’s probably right…but that’s after the practice was established.  How did the practice get started?

            Like so many questions, it’s one that can’t be answered (without a time machine).  But I feel like I’ve hit on some possible explanations.

            Take a culture where the king (or other powerful/wealthy male) was often buried with his concubines, lesser wives, maybe even his primary wife.  How did that get started?

            There are a couple of possible explanations, or rather two major pools from which many possible explanations can be derived.  The most charitable one would be to assume that the first king (or whatever) who was buried with one or more of his concubines/wives/etc. was buried with concubines/wives/etc. who had loved him so much they took their own lives in mourning at his death; their suicides might have been covered up and called a sacrifice, particularly if suicide was viewed as shameful for the culture.  A less charitable (and more likely, in my opinion) explanation would be along these lines:  king (or whatever) dies without issue, but a handful of concubines/wives, with whom he was known to have been intimate not long before he died.  His successor does not feel secure in his position, and worries that if one of the dead man’s concubines/wives turns out to be pregnant, then the baby would be a threat to his position.  The solution?  Sacrifice all the concubines/wives before they have time to figure out if they’re pregnant, and then the dead man’s potential children die with him, and the successor’s position is secure (at least from that particular threat).

            How about a culture where the king (etc.) is buried with his household staff.  What might explain that?

            There are a lot of possible explanations for the start of that one.  Maybe he was assassinated, and his household staff needed to be silenced quickly lest news get out…or the assassin-turned-heir be fingered as the responsible party.  Or maybe he was assassinated and it seemed to be an inside job, but no one was quite sure which member of the household staff was responsible.  Or maybe he died of a particularly nasty illness and it was worried that it might be a plague (or it just plain was a plague) and his household staff was judged likely to be contaminated—or maybe they were in fact visibly suffering the same illness—and needed to be put to death to keep the disease from spreading.

            And one where the king was buried with some of his soldiers?

            The easiest explanation is that the soldiers in question were deemed too loyal to the old king, and likely to turn on the new king, particularly if the new king was not the old king’s son.  Or maybe the old king died in battle, and the soldiers in question were those who failed to save him (though depending on the culture, it might seem like rewarding them for their failure).  The assassination possibilities from the household staff bit above could also easily apply here, too.

            Of course, all of these describe individual incidents, not an entire cultural tradition.

            But see, that’s the kicker.  All of these also involve secrecy, right?  The new king doesn’t want anyone knowing he’s killing the old king’s concubines in fear that they might be pregnant, so he says he’s “sacrificing them so they can continue to serve his late majesty in the next world” or whatnot.  So what happens when he dies?  His own heirs, remembering what he had done for the previous king’s funeral, decide they should emulate it, because surely he knew what he was doing, since he was king and all.  Then the heirs’ heirs do the same thing, and it becomes tradition, accepted into the culture’s basic beliefs.

 

            Obviously, I’m not saying “yes, this is what happened!”

            I’m saying “this makes sense to me as how this sort of thing may have gotten started.”

            I could be so totally wrong that no civilization ever went through any of these steps.  Or maybe it happened once or twice, but most of them came to their funerary human sacrifice in radically different ways.  (Maybe those cultures originally had non-funerary human sacrifice practices that we just don’t know about because they were just too old.)

            But I thought it was an interesting “what-if” kind of theory.

            Also the kind of thing I might use in some piece of fiction at some point.  If I ever have a situation where it might apply.  (Probably more as world-building than as a direct incident in a story...or maybe not.  Who knows?)

            And I thought I’d post it to the blog because…hey, I need to start posting things that aren’t just the monthly Insecure Writers’ Support Group stuff, right?

IWSG: July

     Love that creative title post, right?

    *sigh*

    Yeah.  That pretty much sums up where I am right now.  The game jam started on June 30th, so I've been working on my visual novel script for a week now, and I'm making pretty good progress...except that the early scenes are much better than the later ones.  Like, as soon as the conflict started, it all just went out the window.  :(  I just can't write arguments to save my life, evidently.

    Which makes me wonder why I chose to write a visual novel about a guy having an extended temper tantrum over an argument.

    *cough*

    To start over at the beginning, since I don't think I ever outlined this on the blog, the idea for this visual novel is that I am adapting parts of the Iliad through a 1980s rock'n'roll filter:  instead of being warriors on the fields of Troy, Achilles and Hector are rock performers, and Agamemnon and Priam are their managers (though Priam is also still Hector's father).  The fight between Achilles and Agamemnon is pretty weird and artificial:  Achilles and Hector are up for the same award, it's given to Achilles, but then Agamemnon is informed that the announcer lied about whose name was on the card, and that it was supposed to go to Hector.  Not wanting the bad press of refusing to return the award, Agamemnon sends it back, and Achilles has a conniption fit, but he's blaming everything on Agamemnon instead of on the people who run the award or on Hector.  (As to the reason it's set in the 1980s, it's complicated, but stems out of its origin as the capsule description of a movie in a Velvet Goldmine fanfiction I wrote a while back.)

    It was going great until I got to writing him blaming everything on Agamemnon's willingness to capitulate.  Suddenly he makes no sense and is acting like a sullen twelve year old.  (Which, admittedly, Achilles always did.  Only, you know, a dangerous one with a spear and divine blood to make him stronger than normal men.)  His immaturity is made rather more awkward since he and Patroclos have had sex like three times already at this point in the game.  (Never on screen, though.  One of the two game jams I'm submitting this to doesn't accept 18+ material, and I would never be able to write a convincing sex scene even if it did.)

    The worst part, to me, is that I'm part of a team here.  Admittedly, since the whole thing was my idea, I kind of ended up in the lead of the team, but that doesn't change the "team" thing in its most important respect:  if my writing ends up being utter trash, then everyone else will have wasted their time and effort.  :(  I did at least give them all a link to my writing on AO3 before the jam started so they would have the chance to back out if they thought my script would be garbage, but that doesn't make me feel any less nervous about potentially wasting everyone's effort.

    Especially since our composer has already produced a number of pieces (none polished and perfected yet, but still), and they make me feel all the more incompetent as a writer, because they're just so good!  It's like, how can my mediocre-to-awful words be on screen while that awesome music is playing?

    So far, our artists have only produced sketches, so I can't know for a fact, but I'm pretty sure the art, too, is going to overwhelm the words.  Which I guess is kind of the point, but...bottom line, I feel awkward and uncomfortable about it no matter how you slice it.

    On top of everything else, I'm afraid I'm getting sick.  Just an allergy-induced sinus thing, but still.  (It shouldn't be possible for it to be COVID-related, at least:  I'm fully vaccinated, and although a lot of people in my area aren't and the Delta variant has been making headlines as it tears through the local population, I've been careful about wearing a mask in public, so between the vaccine and the mask, I should be okay on that score.)  If I do end up sick, that could make finishing the game really difficult.  We do have two months, but sometimes my sinus things can hang on for weeks, even a full month if they're really nasty.

    (Also, yesterday morning a chipmunk decided to sit on my front porch and make annoying little chirpy noises that I fear are it trying to attract a mate.  I can hear it totally well through my front door (which is very near my standing desk), and it is super annoying.  It hasn't come back since I went and partially blocked its hole (leading under my front porch) with little rocks from the fill around my yews, but I'm sure it'll be back soon.  That is not going to help me concentrate on my writing.)

IWSG: Unease

     This isn't going to be much of a post.  My glasses problems still aren't fully resolved (I have new glasses en route that are more or less the same prescription as my old glasses, which should let me work on a computer without eye pain and without looking through the fog of scratches on the old lenses) so I haven't been able to do much writing over the last month.  And most of what I've been doing has been preparing for a game jam I'll be participating in during July and August.

    A game jam--for those who don't know, which I kind of expect to be most people seeing this, as they're rather a niche thing--is a lot like NaNoWriMo, except that they have different time limits (this one is two months, but some are only a weekend!) and the goal is to produce a game.  (Typically a video game, but sometimes it's to create a tabletop RPG.)  I'm going to be writing a visual novel, and have gotten together with a programmer, two artists (one for characters and one for backgrounds) and a composer, so I'm actually going to be under huge pressure not only to get it written but to do it well, because these four other people's entry into that game jam is dependent on what I write.  And I'm beginning to wonder if I'm capable of writing anything good enough. :(  But I'll probably devote next month's IWSG post to talking about the game (and likely August's to talking about how it's going), so that's not actually what I want to talk about here.

    So, I've been posting both fan fiction and some mythology-based fiction to AO3, a major site that hosts such works.  And I've been reading some of what others write, which is often a frustrating experience, since so many people don't have a very good grasp on how English works.  (Sometimes this is because it's not their native language.  Unfortunately, in just as many--possibly in more--cases, they don't have that excuse.  But it would seem rude to point it out either way, so I just have to suffer in silence.  Or more accurately, rant about it to the empty room I'm sitting in and then not post anything online about it.)  And in the case of mythology-related works, a lot of people have some bizarre and frustrating misunderstandings about various aspects of Greek mythology and/or ancient Greek culture, particularly where the Trojan War is concerned.  And again, most of the time I feel like I can't say anything about it, and often it doesn't seem worth it, because there's not much to the work in question.

    But then there was a work-in-progress that was really good, except for the grammar and mythological confusion.  I didn't say anything about the grammar, because I got the feeling from it that English was not their native tongue, but I did mention some of the mythological problems, accompanied by compliments on various aspects of the work that I enjoyed.

    The compliments were not enough.  The author replied, having taken considerable offense.  (And based on the grammar on display in their reply, English is their native language.)  And yes, my phrasing was not good, which made the situation worse.  I have a terrible tendency to get too comfortable in a place--real or digital--which makes me relax and then causes me to say or do something thoughtless and inappropriate.  This was that moment for AO3, so I am suddenly feeling very uncomfortable about being there, and have neither read anything else there nor posted anything (despite that I had a work in the process of going up at the time) since then.

    What bothers me most about the author's reply is the formulaic nature of it.  It was exactly what I had heard people on the "pet peeves" threads in the fanfic forums on the NaNoWriMo site complaining about before the site was ruined and I abandoned NaNo in disgust.  The author first said how not all fanfic authors want criticism, and then said that they didn't need to improve their work because they were doing it "out of love."  It's one of those things that I wanted to think was made up just to complain about it.  How can someone claim that being motivated by love is license to create a shoddy product?  When something is a labor of love, you're supposed to work extra hard on it, because you want it to be perfect, because it's something you love.  Using love as an excuse for laziness and unwillingness to improve...has the meaning of love changed, or am I just such an old fogey (at 45) that I cling to ancient and abandoned practices?

    Whatever the explanation, I am left feeling like I don't belong on AO3, like it's the home of the "I don't want to improve my craft because it doesn't matter to me even though I claim to love it" tribe, a tribe which is necessarily hostile to me, an inveterate over-proofreader of and eternal fiddler with my own work.  I mean, is that secretly the reason my fics don't do well, because I actually go in and fix 99% of my grammatical errors before I post the piece?  (I know it's not:  the reason they don't do well is because I suck as a writer.)

    The bigger question, though, is what do I do with my writing if I don't post it there?  I've kind of gotten to liking sharing it with the internet, even though the 'net is entirely uninterested in it.  Maybe I should start a third Blogger blog and post my novels there instead of on AO3?  (Or just post it to this one since I'm barely even using it anyway?)  I've seen people on Kickstarter trying to fund print editions of their novels who have said that the full text of the novel is posted on their website already, so maybe posting a novel to a blog isn't that strange a practice.  I don't know, though; it feels like a weird thing to do somehow.  Fortunately, it doesn't matter yet, since I haven't finished the rewrite of book two anyway.

    In sum, I'm just generally feeling weird and off.  Hopefully, my mental situation will improve once my new glasses arrive and I can start writing again.

IWSG: "Progressive" Bifocals

 

    Ugh.

    I've actually had these new glasses for over a month, but I stopped wearing them entirely within a few days...only it took me a month to get up the nerve to call the optician's to see if I could get some other arrangement going to allow me to see properly.

    I kinda got a serious lecture out of it. :(  And I sorta promised I'd wear them for a week without switching back to my old glasses to try and get used to them.

    Which means I basically can't write now, because I can't read the computer screen.  I mean, I can kind of read it, but I keep having to shift my head around up and down because the "sweet spot" moves every time I blink.  And even when it's lined up right, it's still...it's hard to describe the problem, but do you know how it is when you're at the eye doctor and they're doing the "better 1 or better 2" thing and one of them is just off even though you can't quite pin down what's wrong with it?  It's like that.  Only it's what I've got.  And just looking at the screen long enough to write this far has already made my eyes hurt a lot.

    So although my writing had been doing a little bit okay, it's now about to drop off a freaking cliff until I can get these glasses sorted out.

    I want smart glasses that change the prescription on the whole lens to suit the distance of what you're looking at, darn it!  Or at least ones that have three settings which you can change at the touch of a button.  It shouldn't be that hard to do, should it?   (I'd settle for having my magnetic sunglasses' lenses replaced with reading or intermediate level lenses, too.  That wouldn't be as easy, but it would work better than this catastrophe!)

    Anyway, due to the stupid glasses thing, I'm posting this about six hours early.  Sorry.  I don't want to have to deal with this again so soon.

IWSG - Screaming into the Void

 

    As you can probably guess from the title of the post, I am not in a good headspace right now where my writing is concerned.  I feel like everything I do is just so much wasted time, especially concerning getting anyone to actually read what I've written.

    Last month, while I was trying to get the interactive version of my novel ready to post, I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly confronted with a question from my mother regarding how I was spending my time since losing my job.  (Normally, this does not come up, because she's much too busy telling me about her latest health problems to ask anything about my life.)  Without any backup plan, I ended up telling the truth, that I'd been working on a rewrite of an old novel.  Then, to my horror, she prompted that of course I was going to try to submit it to a publisher.  I was not being pushed back down that road again (bad, bad, terrible story, that), so I went ahead and told her the truth that I had added some interactivity and was releasing it as a game.

    Her response?  "Oh, you should send it to your father so he can see it!"  (My father did not echo the sentiment in the slightest, and in fact remained silent for the entire conversation.)  Then she turns to my brother and says that of course I must have shown it to him already.  His response?  "Yes, it...contains words."

    Seriously, the only thing he could say about it was that it "contains words."  (Admittedly, it's not as though he's read the current draft, because he hated the first one so much because of one incident (that I repeatedly assured him was no longer there) that as far as I can tell he never even opened the file containing the new version, despite claims that he was going to beta read it for me.)

    I was reeling from that, so I tried to defend myself a little by telling her--the honest truth!--that I had already posted the first chapter as a demo of sorts, and that a few people had shown interest in it, and in possibly reading the rest.  (As the number of my "followers" on itch.io leapt up by six after the first chapter came out, I feel that to be an entirely honest statement.)  Her response?  To repeat the story of a character in a comic strip who was distraught when the number of his Twitter followers dropped in half over a single day, because his wife stopped following him.  Because evidently she assumed that my "few" had to be "one" and could only be my brother.

    With my supposedly supportive family being like that, it should of course come as no surprise that I could use some actual response--preferably at least mildly positive, but I'd settle for honest and insightful--from someone who has actually read what I wrote.  Of course, I have no way of getting that, except just putting it out there on the 'net and hoping.

    I released the game, and it is an abject and undeniable, catastrophic failure.

    Almost no one has even looked at the game's page, and less than a third of the people who have looked at the page have hit the "play" button to try it out.  I have no way of knowing if any of the few people who did play any part of it actually read it all the way through, but I suspect the maximum number of people who actually bothered is 1.  (And, in all honesty, I doubt that any of the few people who have clicked "play" bothered to come back and read the rest.  And as it's about 145k words long, it's pretty much impossible to read it all in one sitting unless one is a massive speed-reader.)

    Blogging is no different, really.  I post things, and almost no one reads them.  Even these IWSG posts don't get that many views.  That's okay, of course; I do nothing but complain about what a loser I am or about how much trouble I'm having with whatever project I'm working on.  If I was everyone else, I wouldn't want to read my posts, either.

    I know a lot of people turn to social media in times like these--both my general mindset and the current lockdown situation--but I know it would only be the same thing if I did.  If I took to a social media platform (beyond blogging, which is technically a social media), I would post whatever random content came to my mind, and maybe a few people would look at it, maybe a tiny percentage of those would even half-heartedly hit a "like" button, but mostly no one would even see it.  Because sometimes it feels like I'm invisible.  No, actually, it feels like the lyrics to this one song from the soundtrack to Reality Bites:  "I only exist in negative, no, no, no, bad!"  (Sorry, I forget the name of the song, or even the singer.  As soon as I realized I could use a flash drive to listen to music in my car, I ripped every CD I had into .mp3s and stuck them on a really big flash drive to listen to, which leaves me a little less clear on things like song titles and artists from mixed projects.)  I know that reference both marks my age and makes me sound appallingly shallow, but...well, if it makes me sound any less pitiful, I don't think I've actually watched the movie in this century, just listened to (about half of) the soundtrack album from time to time.

    Once upon a time, I would have tried "retail therapy" to help me get out of this funk, but with no income at the moment (and for whatever reason I was deemed ineligible for the last two rounds of stimulus checks, so I don't even have that money coming in) not to mention that I won't be getting my first COVID vaccination shot until two weeks from now (and as I both have asthma and am seriously obese, contracting COVID would be my death warrant), I can't really just go out shopping and buy something fun to cheer myself up.  Though I don't think it would really help even if I did, at this point.  (And online shopping just doesn't have the same effect.)

    At times, writing has helped me get through things like this, but I don't feel like it's helping right now.  It's hard to concentrate on it, in fact.  Though I am trying to get moving on the rewrite of the second book in the series.  (I've decided I'm going to post the first one's text onto AO3, so I can at least feel like maybe someone might read it.  Or at least get a better idea if anyone reads it.)

Released!

    So, this morning I finally released the lightly interactive version of the first of my kinda-YA Greek mythology novels.

    I ended up going with the title Scions of Troy, which was my original idea for the series title.  I had discarded it as a series title because it didn't do a very good job of representing the series (especially since it made it sound like they were the children of Trojans, not of the Greeks who had fought in the Trojan War), but as a title for this first novel...well, it's still not great, but I think it has a bit more pop than any of my earlier attempts to title this, and there is at least one character in the novel who is the son of one of the Trojans from the Trojan War, so...

    Yeah.

    Best I could do, I guess.

    Here's hoping at least a few people will read it.

    I'd hope that some people will enjoy it, but that's probably asking too much.

    (It can be found at this url if you're curious about just how bad it is.)

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?)