Fanfic progress

[igenlode]

Well, Adrift in Space did every bit as badly as I expected it to: 17 page views on the new chapter, and the sole review being posted simply to complain about how the story kept switching back and forth between the two categories and ought to be posted as a crossover. Which indeed it ought to be; what I'm doing is an abuse of the system, as I would freely have admitted to the reader in question if she had posted from a signed account instead of hiding behind a 'guest' handle -- but I draw the line at defacing future chapters with author's notes in an attempt to communicate with people who deliberately block any channel of response.

This seems to be an increasing trend on fanfiction.net; if you're going to post a comment that might be interpreted as having even a whiff of criticism in it, you do so anonymously in order to avoid being 'attacked' in return...

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First draft of the Hallowe'en story "Annoyance" done, I think. The fandom really isn't going to like that one, given that it depicts their beloved Erik as a psychopath who fantasises about killing off Christine in order to get rid of the uncomfortable new feelings he is experiencing around her; even I wondered if I'd gone too far, given the way that he subsequently behaves around her when he first kidnaps her in Leroux (filling the room with flowers, telling her he loves her). But the character the daroga interacts with pretty much is a giggling psychopath, and once the idea that he might seek to deal similarly with this 'annoyance' had come into my head, I couldn't resist the thrilling transgression of it ;-p

And of course there always have been Leroux-based dark-fics where Erik ends up killing Christine or she him and/or one of them kills their child... just not at the very start of the relationship, I think. It should fit the 'horror' prompt at any rate, which I'd originally intended to fill simply by having ghosts make an appearance and Erik totally ignoring them.

Anyway, he doesn't kill her, and I hope I've established that he's not actually going to!

I'm not all that happy with it myself; it didn't exactly flow easily, I'm not sure as a result that the style's consistent (a hundred words added here, a hundred words added there), and although I did try to vary things up it seems to consist of far too many lists. The rule of three is fine as a rhetorical device, but not all the time. And large chunks of it are not just backstory but recapitulation of canon -- I didn't actually invent very much backstory this time, save for the shortest of snippets around the ghosts (and they really are the merest hints).

Some of this was deliberate, in an attempt to make the piece comprehensible to a 'fandom-blind' audience for the forum challenge, but by no means all of it. And my last entry was criticised for having too much 'telling' and not enough action in the opening; this one has literally none!