Once again it's getting late and I have done no writing. I do want to get some work in, though, and since all my creative bones have been numbed by the kind of day that is totally not conducive to creative thought, I believe I will take a look at the Menelaus section. I pulled it over from the graphic novel version of the ms and started switching it over to this new format, and have already rewritten a few bits in some depth as prose. However, the GN scenes have different emphasis from what is needed to carry a prose novel, so I can't go through and just do a straight translation.

For example, I split up the idea of Helen not doing her spinning anymore because her husband says she doesn't have to. First there was a scene where he tells her that and she's happy because she hates spinning. Then I had other scenes with other stuff going on, other story threads being picked up that dealt with other issues--and many pages later Helen decides to take up spinning again because she's bored. That's when she learns: it's not that she doesn't have to spin anymore, it's that she's forbidden to. The choice has been taken from her. Blah blah blah...anyway, the issue now is, would that work better in prose if it was all together; would it build better and make a stronger point if it happened in one chunk rather than being split up? I'm thinking yes. I don't know why I think that, I just do. And since there are many of these threads/ideas that were split up and interwoven with each other for the GN, I would like to look over the whole Menelaus section and take notes and see what major points I am making so that I can consider pulling each one back together into a chunk all its own.

I guess I'm thinking that if I put these "chunks" in the right order, each one will smother Helen a little more and she will become more and more tightly bound and closed in, section by section. Right now it's all very loosey-goosey, and I'm not sure that's the best way to make the story work in this form.

I don't know why it seemed to work better the other way when told visually. It just seemed too obvious, too quick to have chunks with their own little tiny arcs, like I was shooting a nail gun into the reader's face and the nails were ideas: bam-bam-bam-bam! For some reason, it felt to me that the ideas couldn't be absorbed if they were presented in very short separate vignettes (because they would be very short if presented that way). It felt to me as if they needed to unfold more gently. Hmm. Maybe sometime when my creative bones are not numb, I might be able to figure out why. There could be some important principle of storytelling in here that I need to understand.

Or it could be that I just didn't know what the f*ck I was doing and it was all wrong! Ha ha! Anyhoo, off to Menelaus.