NaNoWriMo and the Persephone Novella

I'm doing NaNoWriMo, for real this year.

I joined the website and I'm keeping a word count and everything. I started a brand new novel on November 1 and I'm still racing to finish by November 30 in just 3? 4? days?

But for real. It's going pretty well. There have been days that I haven't written anything (bust) but there have been many more that I wrote even just 500 words. Just something on the page so that I'm working every day.

I have learned a lot. For instance, I am excellent at writing sprints. What's that? I hear you ask.
That's when you set a time limit and type/write as many words in that time as you possibly can. No filter, no judging, just get them out of you. Sprint them out until your fingers bleed!

Ok, maybe not bleed. But I found out that I can write 950 words in 15 minutes.  I can crank it out! This means so much for my work methods and structure. If I can set that kind of time and work through sprints like that, it means that I can spend 15 minutes a day and write something, anything. I can produce material and, if I can produce material, I can make more art than I thought I could.

It means we call can! Sí, se puede!

So I've been writing about Persephone. I've loved her for a long time, but I have had a huge problem, especially in the last 5 or 6 years with the general kidnappy narrative about how Hades violently ripped her from the world--a naive virgin and tricked her into marriage.

Like this.

I look her up and realize that she is a Chthonic deity. She is goddess of the underworld in her own right and I wonder how a flower goddess ends up as a goddess of mysteries and the dead as well.  I begin to come up with some interesting ideas.

1. Persephone is not an unwilling and naive victim
2. Persephone understands something about death because of compost making pretty flowers
3. Persephone is an agent in her own life
4. Persephone is a threshold goddess--she moves between life and death, this is inherent to her as a goddess
5. Persephone was wooed by Apollo and Hermes too.
6. Persephone has a much bigger existence than her wedding to Hades
7. Persephone is a badass
8. Persephone is a POWERFUL goddess

These things start coming to me and I start grappling with what that means to a goddess describing her life. Somehow this is a novella about innocence and not innocence. About life and death, about me and about the world I see, about myths and the way they shape our reality. This novella is rapidly becoming a favorite even as I struggle to get stuff out. Some of it I really hate, but the more I get out via the sprinting process, the more that I want to get it right and the more I want to right. Fits and starts, but steady work happening. 

Selection? Why I thought you'd never ask.

From Persephone Draft 1--Persephone meets Antigone

Antigone was brought to a cave and sealed inside to die. She was buried alive. And She raved begging to be taken. She prayed to Hades and to Zeus. She begged us to reward her righteousness and take the burden of life from her. Her suffering was great. Her family was cursed in a way that few are. It’s another thing that makes me wonder about Fate. I came to her fairly quickly, and looked at her as through a glass darkly. She was close to us. How could she not be, sealed there to die as she had been.

Hades came to me and asked me to see her. He didn’t know what to do with her--it would be theft to take her before it was her time, but she had been thrust from her time by a willful king. Her uncle I recall. He was soon to experience deepest grief for his refusal to perform funeral rites for a nephew. Hades had raged about it for a week.

I visited her in the cave and I had never seen a girl so full of life and full of pain. She was beautiful in a way I hadn’t thought that mortals could be beautiful. Her hair was long and straight like a knife blade and her eyes were green like the the ocean that raged behind her lips. She was violent with righteous anger and salt water boiled beneath her skin.

I understood what the Others saw in mortals for the first time. I moved around her to better see. She creaked with pain in every movement. She had punched the rocks piled in upon her until her knuckles bled and she let them bleed. She prayed and she did not know that it was to me she prayed. She could not see through the mystery, but she looked up and she saw me and I felt the inadequacy of godhood for the first time. In my existence. 

I had always felt so large, pressed against the edges of reality. Looking at Antigone, listening to her repeat her story, I felt the smallness of my purview and I knew that while I contained one of the biggest mysteries in the universe, that I would never understand the depths of the rage and vitality that pulse in this woman. That the pain that would not kill her, led her to do the right thing instead of the smart thing. That lead her to seek no happiness for herself while seeking all happiness. I use the word ocean over and over because I am sure she was a daughter of Poseidon in some sense--though I knew very well that the source of her over abundance of vitality and pain was of course from her lineage. But she was--no she was like a volcano in the ocean. She had so much life and she wanted to die.