imaginarycircus

It's really weird when you can't sleep and you're worrying about the ending of your novel and you suddenly realize the answer to your problem is the meat of a paper you wrote your freshman year in college about The Iliad Odyssey, and specifically about how cunning Athena really is. Zeus may have had lightning bolts, but she could control people to a very fine degree.

Case in point. Telemachus. She didn't want Odysseus to return home to a son who wasn't worthy of him so she took the form of Nestor and horrified him with stories about Orestes. Orestes killed his mother, Clytemnestra, because she killed his father, Agamemnon, when he returned home from the war. (He killed Iphegenia for wind when he first set off for Troy and the whole mess was really because there was a curse on the house of Atreide because one of them fed their son to the Gods) but whatever) Athena knew exactly how to push Telemachus' buttons so that he was pissed about all his mother's suitors, but afraid to do too much lest he have to kill his mother to protect his honor.

Hello clarity. Please be here when I sit down to work later today, hopefully after I've had a bit more sleep. Bleh. Maybe I should just get an early start...

eta: David woke up now that it is 7 am and he said, "Why are you wondering around the house at 7 with no pants on reading The Odyssey?"

Well, why not? :/

I just don't even know. I feel so weird and uncertain and worried and so far from being done. It's weird that the fifth draft feels the least finished to me, right? I wish I had the wherewithal to say something here about how much I've learned through all these rewrites, but I have nothing left today.

Aegis draft v-ish:

76076 / 80000 words. 95% done!