Worked yesterday on no-longer-GN. I immediately ran into a big problem, the same one the GN had. The story starts too slowly, and it starts misleadingly, as if it's a sweet little historical midgrade. The kind where the spunky but cute girl is suppressed because she is female, and we know she's going to spunkily decide to put on boy clothes and fight just like the boys do. I can't let it stay this way, because a good number of pages in molestation appears out of nowhere and some reader is gonna have a heart attack. Another thing appears around the same time, but I don't know how to put it because I don't want the word on my blog for search engines to find. Suffice to say, the beginning must be revamped to alert readers so they can put the book down right away if this sort of subject matter isn't their thing.

Yesterday I took a page of quotes I had, and strung them out, one per chapter heading. The very first words of the ms right now are a quote from Euripedes, "...Helen was a sl*t...". However, it's still not enough, IMO. So today I'm going to try my idea for reworking the beginning of the GN, which is to take a scene from the destruction of Troy and use that for the very first scene. This puts me smack dab in the middle of the biggest challenge, which is switching up viewpoints and voices and timeframes. The main part of the ms is Helen's pov, first person present. I also want to dip in and out of a folkloric/mythic-retelling third-person-voice, which will usually be followed by "the truth," which is going to have my slant, which is outraged and p*ssed. I had figured out a way to do this visually, but now I've got to figure out how to do it in words. If "the truth" is in my voice, this ms will read like a blog in places. That just doesn't seem right, since Helen's parts are pseudo-historical. OTOH, I think maybe the one thing that has any chance of making this ms connect with any readers is the passion I feel about it.

I'll have to think hard about this.