On the nose

I was just posting this morning that experience is the best tool for writing a scene. Walk in actual woods, feel the heft of a sword in your own hands.

I'm hoping to finish the Athens demonstration scene today. And at the very moment I type this, protesters are marching past my building banging drums and shouting slogans. It's animal liberation, as it happens. There's no sign of Molotovs and teargas, thankfully.

But I'm at a sticky place on this scene. In real history, nothing happened on my selected weekend. Well, nothing major. There were major demonstrations and riots that year, however. Thing is, there are patterns to these things.

I've been setting up the Prespa agreement as a way to talk about "What is the problem with misreading history?" The problem is people will use it to justify action. North Macedonian's in-your-face Hellenism isn't just that they admire and want to borrow Greek culture and pretend it is their own. It is that their politicians have stated on multiple times they want to rebuild historical Macedon -- and that means taking "back" several Greek provinces.

However, the last big Prespa demonstration was in February and was a mostly peaceful affair, consisting largely of a really huge crowd waving an amazing number of Greek flags.

What I want for the scene I'm writing is what I've seen on several videos; police formed up phalanx-style behind riot shields, tossing tear gas grenades ahead of them, whilst protestors often in masks hurl petrol bombs to try to slow them down.

But this acts out mostly in the district around the Polytechnic, where students revolted against the Junta in 1973 (yes, they have regular marches to commemorate that and they often turn violent) and the shooting of a young man by cops in 2008. You could almost see these as a territorial dispute between the authorities -- who at this point are a purported left-wing party that turned out to be way more centrist, indeed accommodating, than expected -- against the surprisingly organized Anarchists.

I'm fine with moving dates a little, but it strikes me as dishonest to have this kind of street violence erupt around the wrong demonstration and not quite in the right part of town.

Okay, and there was a sort of counter-nazi demonstration that happened at about this time. But with all the delays in getting to this scene, a bunch of detours into the decorations on the gates of Schliemann's house and other research, and a crazy work schedule for the next few weeks, I unwisely closed those tabs without saving links. So now I have to track that down again from scratch.

And oops, I just found it. Mid-late September, violence, antifa and Golden Dawn all in one bundle. No Macedonian/FYROM stuff but I can't have everything. Oh, and my subconscious was running it's mouth; I have two characters that need new names now. Minor characters, fortunately, and one of them has been going by a nickname for most of the scenes he's in anyhow.