On This, The Third Friday of NaNoWriMo...

First, the ever important and most excellent progress meter:



Because I made it to 50K on the 13th!!! WOO!

And today, I promptly decided that the last 1300 words I wrote yesterday were crap. Since I'm already safely over the 50K hurdle, with room to spare, I thought about just deleting them completely, but it didn't seem right. Not in November. Instead, I may or may not have just used the strikeout option.

And in celebration -- or um, in place of anything super exciting beyond 50K WOO WOOO 50K!!!!! allow me to share with you this strange, gothic, and almost steampunky image of Perseus I found while doing research on Pirithous's half-brother, and his association or lack thereof with the Helm of Hades.



It's so strange to think of these other heroes as siblings and cousins to one another. So often we don't have any understanding of those family bonds in the stories that surround them. Pirithous and Theseus are an exception, of course, since we know from more than one source that they were like brothers. But you never hear about Heracles calling up his half-brothers or sisters, or really forming relationships with his blood-relatives on his divine side. Sure, he might have buddied up with Theseus to hit on the Amazons, and there's that whole Jason and the Argonauts thing, about which we will not speak, but even when Euripides showcases the friendship between Theseus and Heracles, there isn't any mention of their familial bond. They were friends and heroes in arms, but not explicitly spoken of as cousins.

Of course Perseus and Pirithous are different generations of hero, and not at all contemporaries, so in this case, it's a lot less strange that there's no mention of anything, or even that they ever might have crossed paths -- to say nothing of the dearth of stories we have about Pirithous to begin with. But it doesn't stop me from wondering what Pirithous might have thought of his famous brothers...