NANOWRIMO!!

It is officially November!! Which means that it’s NANOWRIMO TIME!

For those of you who don’t know (tsk tsk) November is NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth, or Nanowrimo for short. The goal is to try to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November.

Two years ago I started about a week before the end of the month (hadn’t heard of it before) and got 30,000 words in that one week. I was CRAZY. Of course, I was also just rewriting/editing something that I had written years ago, so it wasn’t too hard.

Last year, I wrote a Barbara Cartland novel. I started on time, finished on time, and actually hit 50,000 words. Wow. And my novel was FABULOUS if I do say so myself. I mean, really. I should get it published.

This year, I’m writing the story of Persephone and Hades as a romance novel. It should be fun. I had actually started before, but then last night, once it turned midnight and was officially November, I sat down to write and ended up actually doing research for it. www.theoi.com is a fabulous reference, because it has all of the gods and myths, referenced by the actual classical texts. This way, I can find out all the little details, for example, the names of the nymphs that were friends with Persephone, and then I don’t have to make it all up. (Leukippe and Phaino and Elektra and Ianthe, Melita also and Iakhe with Rhodea and Kallirhoe and Melobosis and Tykhe and Okyrhoe, fair as a flower, Khryseis, Ianeira, Akaste and Admete and Rhodope and Plouto and charming Kalypso; Styx too was there and Ourania and lovely Galaxaura) Of course, as I was doing my research I realized that I needed to change some stuff in the two pages that I had already written, so now I’m going to start over.

Well, first I need to do my homework. I just wrote my commentary, I need to translate a section of Latin and prepare to meet with my professor tomorrow, and then I have a lecture/class tonight. After that my Greek class (sans the slowest reader in the world) is going to meet to read through the Greek as a means of studying for our quiz tomorrow. Then, if I make it home before midnight, I can start actually working on my novel. Maybe. Or I might just fall asleep, we’ll have to see how things turn out.

However, it’s getting to crunch time here, and Nanowrimo is not going to help anything. This will be the month of little to no sleep and barely making deadlines (oh wait, I do that anyway). So I may not be able to post that often on here. On the other hand, I may actually post excerpts from my novel, so it might be worthwhile to check!! Oh, and Dea, I’m gonna have a post especially for you, so just you wait!! 😀



Next myth?

For my senior seminar, since we finished with the section about coins, we are now learning about Philology. So yesterday in class, we spent two and a half hours learning about the alphabet. And we all almost died.

To be fair, it wasn’t just the alphabet. We learned about how the Greek language has evolved and changed throughout history, and we learned how you can use spelling mistakes in manuscripts to learn about the ancient way of pronouncing the words. For example, is a word is spelled with an “ei”, but is often writted just with an “i”, then you know that “ei” and “i” must sound alike.

Which, in theory, is an interesting topic to learn about. But not for two and a half hours when everyone is falling asleep already, and most people in the class don’t know any Greek at all (sadly, I am not one of them).

The project for this section, is to take a poem, in Greek or Latin (mine should be Greek because I know it) and write out a translation and a commentary about it. But we get to pick any poem that we want! That’s kinda exciting, and extremely daunting. There are so many poems to choose from! How do I pick which one?

So I decided that since I like mythology and don’t really know enough of it, I would pick a particular myth, look it up to find a poem that talks about that myth, and then work on that poem. That way, I would be learning the mythology better, and I would hopefully have an interesting poem to write my commentary on.

Now which myth do I chose? I kinda want to pick one that I have vaguely heard of but really know nothing about. Unfortunately, that is a lot of myths. Since I’m going to be likely posting the results of my research on this blog, I’ve decided that if anyone wants to learn about a myth, let me know in the comments, and I can look into it! This goes for in general, as well, because I would like to put more mythology in here.

So let me know if there are any myths that you would be interested in learning about!

The story of Persephone

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Persephone. She was very beautiful, with hair the color of golden wheat, and trim ankles (yes, that’s actually in the ancient literature). Persephone spent her days playing with her friends, the nymphs. One day, they were walking when they came across a field of flowers. The flowers were so beautiful that they decided to make garlands out of them. While they were picking the flowers, Persephone had wandered away from the nymphs, and soon they were out of sight.

Suddenly, the ground began to rumble, and Hades, the lord of the underworld, burst out of the top of Mount Enna in a chariot drawn by four black horses.

Aphrodite, the goddess of love, happened to see Hades, and felt a surge of anger. She had held power over all of the gods and goddesses at one time or another, all except for Hades. She didn’t see why he should be able to evade love, so Aphrodite sent her son, Eros, to shoot him with an arrow and cause him to fall in love. Eros went according to his mother’s wishes, and shot Hades just as he was passing Persephone.

As soon as Hades saw Persephone, he instantly became enamored of her. He decided that he wanted to have Persephone as his bride, so he pulled her into his chariot and started to drive away, ignoring her cries and screams. A water nymph who was inhabiting a nearby pond heard Persephone’s cries, and tried to reason with Hades not to take the girl against her will. She tried to convince Hades to woo her, and make her want to be his bride, but Hades would not listen to her. He pulled out his staff and struck the surface of the pond, causing it to crack open, revealing a path to the underworld. Hades pulled Persephone down with him into the abyss. The water nymph was so upset about Persephone’s fate that she literally dissolved into tears.

Persephone’s mother was Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, and it soon came to her attention that Persephone was missing. She spoke to Persephone’s friends, the nymphs, to see if they knew where she had gone, but no one had seen which way she went or what had befallen her. The nymphs were distraught that something had happened to Persephone while she had been with them, and they begged Demeter to let them help her search for her daughter. Demeter turned them all into harpies, creatures that were half woman and half bird, so that they could fly around in search of the missing girl.

Demeter searched the world for her daughter, all in vain. While she searched, she neglected her duties, and all of the plants began to wither and die without her care. This worried Zeus, because he could not get Demeter to take care of the earth, so he began to look for Persephone as well.

Zeus discovered that Hades had taken Persephone into the underworld, so he sent his messenger, Hermes, to summon Hades and tell Hades to return the girl to her mother. Hades appeared before Zeus, but told him that he could not return Persephone, because she had eaten the food in the underworld, and anyone who eats the food in the underworld is not allowed to leave. Persephone had only eaten six pomegranate seeds, so Zeus declared that she must be returned to her mother for half of the year, and that she must spend six month of the year in the Underworld, one month for each seed that she had eaten.

Every year, when Persephone returns to her husband in the underworld, her mother mourns the loss of her daughter. During this time, no plants grow, and this is why we have winter.

Hades should be pretty!

Lately, I discovered The Webcomic List, which lists all of the webomics that are updated each day. So I’ve been going through and checking them all, to see if there are any that I’m interested in. I’m relatively picky about the drawing style, so I usually only manage to find one or two a day, even though I look at a ton of different sites.

Today I found MYth, (which read right to left). It’s a super cute style, and it’s about Greek mythology! There are three stories so far, and yeah the myths are kinda iffy, but it’s still really really cute. I loved it. The first story is Hades and Persephone, which isn’t quite the true myth … at all … buuuuuuuuuuut I’ll let it go. Read it cause it’s adorable, not cause its correct.

So then later I was on deviantart, and browsing for Hades, trying to see what other people thought he would look like (and ignoring the large number of Disney Hades fanarts) I was surprised to see so many ones that made him look like a demon! He’s a god! He should be pretty!! And by pretty I mean devilishly, devastatingly handsome and sexy. (Apollo, on the other hand, is pretty. Pretty-boy. Like Orlando Bloom as Paris in Troy) After all, Hades is still one of the Greek gods, his brothers are Zeus and Poseidon! And Zeus is a man-whore so he’s gotta at least be attractive. As a swan… um …

Anyway.

Hades should be attractive, not all demon-y looking.

On another note, I was having some troubles at work the other day. I made a scene of a Roman portico using 3DS Max, and then used Vue 8.0 to make trees. Well, Vue automatically decided to make it a sun, and made the sun GINORMOUS, so it looked like a giant blob. Then there was a light in the building that was shining so brightly that it went through the building and made stripes on the ground.

So I rendered it out and saved the image. (Yes, I know the building is awful, just ignore that, thanks)

We managed to fix the sun, and then when I opened the file today the racing stripes were miraculously gone, so I quickly finished it and rendered out a new image, sans-blob so that I could actually use it before the stripes came back. I’m still fairly certain that they will.

The computer has been going SO SLOWLY lately, and we don’t know what’s wrong with it, but whenever I tried to rush it, the whole computer would freeze and the screen would start flashing at me and try to give me a seizure. So I just let it do its thing and looked up webcomics.

I also got put into a new office yesterday, which was STIFLING. My fan broke today, but I think they managed to turn the temperature down, so it wasn’t so bad. In fact, I got kinda chilly, which was much more familiar, considering how cold the rest of the building is.

Anyway, I think that’s enough ramblings for tonight!! My roommates moving in tomorrow, so I should probably clean off her bed … it makes such a nice shelf, though.