Being sick really threw me off. Maybe because my two anchors are writing and exercise, and I couldn't do either one, and that makes me get whisked into the ever-present downward spiral. So. Must get back on top of things.

This afternoon: Finally worked out, and it was a half@ss session, but at least it was a session.

Now: I need to get a grip on this Menelaus section. I need to get a clear sense of it as a series of steps--downward steps, ha! Then at some point I'll have to go back and rethink everything before that, because the two pieces don't match. Now, the Menelaus section has to be different, because it's smaller and tighter on the page. There's no room for anything but the very, very basics. But the writing styles of the two sections are so terribly different--one is more literary and lyrical and the other is more snarky and personal. Not sure what to do about it. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for the ms to pick up right in the middle and take off, but that makes the first section false advertising, and wouldn't it be better if the ms picked up and took off from the very beginning? However, I don't know that it can.

Was thinking that it's no wonder all the stories are about men, because the men actually did things. The women sat around waiting for the victors to come home, or to be taken into slavery. The only ones who didn't are the ones who got written about, but their stories are still told in terms of the deeds of men.

Was also looking at some of the lists of women working as slaves. Okay, must stop and explain, because this doesn't make sense without explanation. The Greeks--or whoever; Greek is not the exact right word but it'll have to do for now--went on raids, burnt/sacked the cities, killed all the men, and brought home the women and loot. So in Bronze-age inventory-type lists, women show up as wool-workers from other areas of the world--they were taken home to serve in the wool industry and as bed-warmers for whoever they were given to. BUT the women always have kids listed with them--only it doesn't say if the kids were children of the raiding Greeks, or from the fathers the Greeks killed. I was thinking that when the raiders swept in and took the women home with them, they surely took the women's children, too, if it wasn't a pain. Because if they killed all the husbands and destroyed all the homes, AND killed the children, the women wouldn't have a heck of a lot left to live for. Seems like at least some of them would have been suicidally p*ssed and caused trouble for their captors. The raiders needed the women to accept their fate. So it would have just been good business to keep their children alive and with them, if doing so wasn't terribly difficult.

OTOH, wouldn't that raise a generation of captor-hating little kids? Not sure. Not sure how to find out, either. I guess it's not really pertinent to my actual ms, but I feel I need to understand.