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San Demetrio
A possible solution to the geographical problem: they do a San Demetrio. The initial explosion/fire/panic/whatever kills off the senior officers and forces the survivors into the lifeboats, but after a couple of days of misery in the open boats they discover that the Requin, although wrecked, is still afloat, and offers a better chance of survival than trying to row back to shore against the wind. (N.B. prevailing winds off north coast of Norway are south-westerly at this time of year, which would tend to push them back towards coast; but we can specify an unseasonable gale... once they get far enough north, prevailing winds will push them over the top of Finland.)
The engines are wrecked (boilers would explode if flooded by cold water while still in steam?) and rigging gone, so they can't sail effectively -- try to care for injured men while salvaging food/equipment from hulk, and end up drifting further and further north. Finally 'wrecked' again on pack ice and take to small boats, spotting smoke and heading for d'Artois' camp as before.
This at least explains the 'unconscionable delay' before d'Artois decides to evacuate using Raoul's newly-arrived boats; Raoul does spend months heading northwards by accident!
It means that Christine needs to spend a lot of time in captivity with Erik, but that was pretty much in the plan anyway. (I was worried about the reindeer migration not taking place until the end of April, for one thing.)
I'm still entirely uncertain as to whether I switch timelines or not -- Raoul now has a vast amount of extra stuff happening to him (I'm slightly worried that this may overbalance Christine, who is basically having a great deal of nothing happening to her) and it needs to go on happening over a long period, rather than being dealt with as one or two major episodes (shipwreck/landfall) alongside Christine's story. That makes it rather harder to cover the whole thing in a flashback account; on the other hand, I really can't write a month's drifting in 'real time' -- I'm going to have enough trouble with Christine's captivity, which I've been doing more or less minute by minute so far and will have to find a way to start summarising soon!
One argument against going back and filling in Raoul's story later on is that I've scrupulously kept my timelines running in parallel so far; we return to Christine remembering having written and posted the letter that we see Raoul receiving in the previous chapter, for example, rather than getting an account of her writing it. So it might seem a bit odd to change this convention halfway (again, apparently with the aim of deliberately hoodwinking the readers over Raoul's fate...) On the other hand, if that aspect really bothered me so much I could always just rewrite the earlier chapters :-p
The engines are wrecked (boilers would explode if flooded by cold water while still in steam?) and rigging gone, so they can't sail effectively -- try to care for injured men while salvaging food/equipment from hulk, and end up drifting further and further north. Finally 'wrecked' again on pack ice and take to small boats, spotting smoke and heading for d'Artois' camp as before.
This at least explains the 'unconscionable delay' before d'Artois decides to evacuate using Raoul's newly-arrived boats; Raoul does spend months heading northwards by accident!
It means that Christine needs to spend a lot of time in captivity with Erik, but that was pretty much in the plan anyway. (I was worried about the reindeer migration not taking place until the end of April, for one thing.)
I'm still entirely uncertain as to whether I switch timelines or not -- Raoul now has a vast amount of extra stuff happening to him (I'm slightly worried that this may overbalance Christine, who is basically having a great deal of nothing happening to her) and it needs to go on happening over a long period, rather than being dealt with as one or two major episodes (shipwreck/landfall) alongside Christine's story. That makes it rather harder to cover the whole thing in a flashback account; on the other hand, I really can't write a month's drifting in 'real time' -- I'm going to have enough trouble with Christine's captivity, which I've been doing more or less minute by minute so far and will have to find a way to start summarising soon!
One argument against going back and filling in Raoul's story later on is that I've scrupulously kept my timelines running in parallel so far; we return to Christine remembering having written and posted the letter that we see Raoul receiving in the previous chapter, for example, rather than getting an account of her writing it. So it might seem a bit odd to change this convention halfway (again, apparently with the aim of deliberately hoodwinking the readers over Raoul's fate...) On the other hand, if that aspect really bothered me so much I could always just rewrite the earlier chapters :-p