NaNo Rebel Day 8; Clash of the Titans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NaNo Rebel 2021, Days 6 and 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

NaNo Rebel 2021, Day 5 - Ancient Greek Terrain

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

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

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

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

    *cough*

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

    

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

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

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

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

NaNo Rebel, Day 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

    Anyway, yesterday's total was 14,092

    and today's total is 15,664,

    meaning I wrote 1,572 words today.

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

IWSG: Where do people post their work?

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

NaNo Rebel, Day 2

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

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

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

*sigh*

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

Yesterday's total was 6,172

Today's total is 8,924

Making today's word count 2,752

NaNo Rebel 2021, Day 1

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

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

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

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

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

    And here's the new version:

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

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

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

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

    So far so good. :)