The Chickens Have ... Hatched?

All four parts of 'Peryton' - the saga of Bronze Age Greece as it teetered on the edge of collapse - are safely in that massive electron universe we call Amazon. Both paperbacks and ebooks are either available now or will be within 24 hours, and I was able to keep the pricing even, even though the books are of different lengths. Ta da! Now the rain is gone, the sun is shining on Panonas, and I'm going out to breathe some lovely Greek air!

https://www.amazon.com/Kathryn-Berck/e/B076N9XQ5C/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1511940147&sr=8-1

On-The-Ground Research

  
Spent a couple of hours Saturday and all the gorgeous Sunday driving around Lakonia, deciding where and how Paris would have come ashore to perform his fateful wife-napping of Helen, how he would have found her, how long all that would have taken, etc.

And then there are the more important issues that are still rumbling around in my head:

Have already dismissed with the scorn it deserves the idea that they 'fell in love with each other' but the essential "WHY?" still looms large. Did he know about the Tyndareos Oath? If so, what did he mean to start by provoking it? If he didn't know about it, why bother to cross the Aegean and walk for a couple of days to snatch/lure/seduce/whatever a foreign woman who already belonged to somebody else? Why he would have wanted to do that? I've worked through all the complicated reasoning, so today will think about more straightforward reasons - if I can think of any.

And all of this work for a book that's supposed to be about someone else!!

A Role for a Mountain Range?

I am staying in my apartment in Mystras, making casual day trips to visit old friends, new excavations,and generally renewing knowledge of the area's geography and overall feeling for the section of the new book that is told from Helen's point of view. Don't know now how these two disparate sections will fit together, especially since Aias and Helen had nothing to do with each other. beyond him being one of the crowd of suitors for her hand and property years before. But they seem to want to and, as long as we are all still moving toward the same ending (a rule: always write a book's ending first!), I'll let them for now. It might end up being two separate books, although so much has been written about Helen that yet another book about her would have to be extremely different from the general run... This day's travel in the Taygetos gave me some ideas, only half-formed or less for now.

One thing I know for sure: my love for the Taygetos has not diminished. That first sight of them as I drove over the last ridge and there they stood, immovable, implacable as always, asking nothing, offering nothing but simply themselves, was, as always, incredibly moving.

But Why, You Might Ask...

... did the Trojans build their city wall to slant inward?  Any enemy could easily climb it.

But when you stand beside it, you understand. This, like Greece, is a land of earthquakes. A purely vertical wall can easily be shaken askew and broken under the force of those tremors, while a wall that leans against the earth will only settle and become stronger. The outer walls of Mycenae show multiple repairs, while this wall still stands solid.

And besides, you can't easily climb it. not only is it quite steep, but it was topped with a vertical addition several meters tall, at least.

In my book "Warrior" which is currently in process, Ajax encourages the damos - senior village heads - of Salamina to send a force with him to Troy, arguing that the Trojans are so foolish and lazy that they build their walls to lean inward, as if they are already surrendering. So how hard will it be to overrun the place?

Then he sees the wall himself, and understands.