Drrrsday: Writing is Haaard Edition

Normally, today Cal would go to his music lesson, but his teacher begged off for three weeks. I think this is maybe Week Three now...please, God, please, because he has been soooo insane recently, and I really have no idea why. Like "up every night 'til eleven" and "saying he doesn't need the toilet, then peeing his pants"-type insane.

Mom says we need to get him into some sort of physical program ASAP. Mom doesn't have a damn book to write, but I try not to point this fact out.

Meanwhile, A Rope...: The good part is that I finished Chapter Sixteen, finally. The bad part is that I did so by basically going oh shit, this is already almost 10,000 words, and chopping it in half. So now I'm still two chapters away from the end of the book, but at least I'm already halfway through one of them.;)

OTOH, we have now been in the realm of near-continual action for--three chapters, I think, with me having to juggle an ever-expanding roster of combatants, switch perspective between sections and try to make emotional and fight choreography go together consistently, ie this person thinks/feels this and therefore does this action, resulting in this equal and opposite reaction. It both helps and hinders that several of the people involved are hexes or something similar, which means they can talk to each other telepathically and eavesdrop on each other empathically; you'd think it would only do the former, but you'd be wrong, because every time it happens you have to stop to register it, then figure out what happens next.

So yeah, it's starting to grind (frankly), because my usual problem with action scenes is just magnified tenfold--things need to move faster, move faster, move motherfucking faster. And I probably shouldn't be feeling this way about everything from sex scenes to dinosaur zombie attacks, should I? If this is, indeed, what I intend to be doing for the rest of my life...

Still, the research angle is always fun. I tripped across a site of Nahuatl poetry, here (http://www.plu.edu/~friesjj/poems/home.html), which I plundered shamefully for one particular scene in Sixteen. Like most remaining Aztec/Mexica verse, they all serve double-duty as story-songs and prayers/spells, which is why they have titles like "For Unruly Ants", "Acupuncture for the Back", "Finding Affection" and "Against Anger" (interestingly, the symbolic colours of anger here are green and yellow, not red). The one exception is the last poem, which is a myth--"The Story of Yappan"--and goes a li'l something like this:

Xochiquetzal:
"dear brother
Yappan
I am here
I, your elder sister
Xochiquetzal
have come to greet you
have come to meet you"

Yappan:
"welcome
dear sister
Xochiquetzal"

Xochiquetzal:
"I am down here
where can I climb up?"

Yappan:
"wait
I'm going down for you"...

(Missing section here, so obviously something screws up)

Yaotl:
"aren't you ashamed
priest Yappan
of messing up?

however long
you live on earth

you shall do nothing well
you shall achieve nothing

common folks
will call you 'Scorpion'

for here I call you
I name you 'Scorpion'

come forth
for you shall be this way"

Narrator:
"he beheaded him
he carried on his shoulders
his head

because of this he is called
'Head-Carrier'"

Okay, got it! Excellent.;))

Anyways. I need to go get myself some breakfast...