The Warrior

for it’s written in the stars
and every line in your palm,
we’re fools to make war on our brothers in arms.
- Mark Knopfler

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My father was Telamon: Argonaut, boar hunter, brother of Achilles’ father Peleus, friend of Herakles, sacker of Old Troy, king of Salamis, father of Teucer by a hostage-princess of Troy, father of me by his true wife.

I am Ajax. An ovine assassin. A murderer of sheep.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

And back again to the drawing board

I tried and tried and tried to use an outline like I've studied and studied to do because it's SO much superior to seat-of-the-pants writing that involves waiting for the characters to come to me as they did so well in Peryton. I tried to follow the skeleton of the Iliad like a good little historical fictioneer. But the whole thing kept sliding down under the desk into a dull puddle of boring.

So I went back to Steven James' "Story Trumps Structure" for encouragement, and read the amazingly fabulous "Debt" by David Graeber and "The Gift" by Marcell Mauss for underlying theme ideas as well as several books already in my library on war, killing, and the brotherhood of arms. Recent poetry by contemporary US servicepeople is especially helpful.

The anthropology is mind-bending, and changes everything we thought we knew about Menelaus, Helen, Hesione, Herakles.... Here's a wonderful quote, "A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction" and did you know that, in German, the word for 'debt' and the word for 'guilt' is the same word? I wish that were so in Greek.

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Please tell Ajax what you think. But be nice; he's always armed.