Around the World in 80 Days

Actually, just to Germany and back to Greece via a bit of Italy.

If I can do a thousand words a day I can complete a first draft in a months and a half...which is less time than I have before the next show starts. (It's a school tour thing. Be, what, the fourth time I've done this one?)

Nanowrimo participants aim for the magic 1,667. I'm finding I'm not a terribly rough draft kind of guy, though. I feel better doing the substantial revision as I go.

Which is also why I haven't moved past the first 1,500 words. But I'm not too concerned yet. These are the opening scenes. Scenes where I have to introduce the protagonist, find the narrative voice, describe the background, and set the plot in motion. Penny's lecture about the Acropolis is on the fourth or fifth draft by now.

And, yeah, I'm already having trouble with wanting to put too much in. I need to throw in some fun stuff because I need to sell that her lectures are clever and entertaining. But at the same time I have to keep remembering that she's had less time to cram than I have. I can riff about the way Pericles manipulated a political opponent into an ostracism, with all the side alleys like the ostracon themselves (pottery sherds) and Sparta's bizarre two-ruler system.

But even more than not wanting to show Penny being too knowledgeable (a big part of the plot is, after all, her figuring out stuff), and of course not wanting to overwhelm the audience, there are also specific omissions I want to make. Even, to be obvious I'm making them.

Penny dips briefly into the earlier Parthenon (burned by Xerxes) and certainly notices the restoration going on, but part of what I'm demonstrating in her lecture is a trapped-in-amber vision of Greek Antiquity; Pericles caused these great buildings to be raised. And here they are.

Nothing about the fact that the Parthenon spent longer as either a Greek Orthodox church or a Mosque (or a storage depot) than it did as a symbol of Athens, much less as a symbol of a Greek nation (a concept the Athenians would have struggled with, Delian League notwithstanding). Or the sheer artificiality in picking THIS Parthenon as the one to restore, when one can argue there's equal history in later...and earlier...parts of history. Or the welding of a connection when there is so much history between the time of Pericles and the time of Tsipras it is difficult to call them the same people.

So I want to stay away from the later history in this scene, from Lord Elgin and Venetian cannonballs and the two brave boys who struck the Nazi flag from the flagpole and so on. It is tough in all sorts of ways; the best place for her to stand when giving her introductory talk is on the belvedere, which is medieval.

And of course I'm sick today. And yesterday was at the pub getting an ear full about Doric vs Ionic verb forms from my classics pal. I'm not worried yet but I won't be happy if I hit the weekend and that opening scene still isn't done.