Swedish story progress
13 April 2018 09:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeStill working my way very slowly through plot point 6; I just need the episode with the Lapp (?and his herd?), and then I was going to use the calf-kissing episode as the end of the chapter. I just hope this isn't going to be as laborious to read as it is to write -- it does need to be a pretty soul-draining experience, because it isn't exactly a barrel of laughs for Christine, plus I suspect that the audience appetite for C/E interaction is much greater than mine :-p
However, having decided that I was going to pursue this plotline to the bitter end before branching back to Raoul, I'm now strongly tempted all over again to switch at the end of this chapter, for the sake of my own interest if nothing else -- of course the chapters don't have to be published in the order that they are written, but my gut instinct as to pace and balancing and repetition and foreshadowing is apt to be thrown out by trying to switch things around afterwards, so it's a big decision. I can see it working with Erik's illness as a cliff-hanger, thus circumventing the issue of the 'action' versus 'static' chapters, since that's when the finale action of this storyline really begins... on the other hand, Christine trapped and starving plus the Lapp episode is going to make this chapter rather long, just as I ended up splitting the previous chapter because I didn't think there was going to be room for the Lapp as well as the transition into long-term broad-brush narrative from the first day of captivity.
This always happens; I worry about chapters being too short, and then I end up worrying about them being too long, partly because I'm writing so slowly that I keep inserting extra material and meditations each day just to get myself restarted. I could of course always cut what I've written (shock! horror!) since there's nothing sacred about my text, but I'm very loath to do so unless it's obviously deleterious to the flow of the story, since it's now part of the character evolution. And, more ignobly, because it was jolly hard work to write, which is not a good reason :-(
One thing I realised I hadn't thought of, in my scenario of everyone believing Erik over Christine, is the suspicious effect of his mask -- why would anyone trust the account of the man who won't show his face over that of the maiden in distress, however smooth and plausible he is?
Facts and figures:
Reindeer calves are born in May. Reindeer migrate in April/May, before their calves are born 'in the foothills of the mountains'. Swedish migration patterns seem to be basically towards the Norwegian border all along the mountains -- I'm assuming they went on down to the sea in the days before border control, as other sources talk about reindeer/caribou going to the coast for the summer...
I've very carefully avoided any clear indication of exactly where Erik is holding Christine prisoner, and it looks as if it doesn't actually need to be that far north for reindeer (although I did identify that there is only about one place where she could sensibly travel unprepared by foot across the border and end up in a port town -- and can't remember where it was!)
Northern Sweden is currently (mid-April) still full of snow, although this is apparently exceptional. The birch trees here in England have only really come into leaf in the last week or so.
The Requin left port "on a chilly afternoon at the end of March". Raoul's letter had to reach Christine in backwoods Sweden and then her reply had to reach Stavenger on the coast: a week? Nine days? Then Erik had to reach Torkelby in the other direction -- two or three days, riding hard? Christine's kidnap cannot have taken place until well into April. I've assumed (although nowhere stated) six weeks or so of captivity -- long enough for several provisions trips a fortnight or so apart. But that then makes it a bit late for the Sami to turn up. Still, the data I saw had the calves born between the 5th and 20th of May (but they'd want to be in place before the first births...)
Temperatures in Norway are rising quickly during May: foreshortened spring/summer.
Meanwhile I reckoned Raoul could just about make it from Stavenger up to the Arctic Circle in a month of purposeful drifting; that's pushing it, to put things mildly, but the readership are pretty unlikely to have any better idea of the distances involved than I did :-(
They are wrecked and spend maybe one night in the boats -- maybe two, with an attempt to get back to the coast against wind/current? Then they return to the ship, erect a jury rig, and try to sail her back: another couple of days? I'm guessing this is somewhere around the time when Erik is in Torkelby...
Say they then spend a month drifting northwestwards before finally getting the propellor turning and maybe a couple of days steaming eastwards before the strain on the seams gets them: we're probably a couple of weeks at least before Erik's fever and Christine's starvation crisis (which I was thinking of possibly using to end this chapter in order to provide a cliffhanger -- but then I was also possibly using the calf-kissing to provide a direct bridge to Raoul!)
All this doesn't really add up, although the Sami doesn't have to come with reindeer, as Christine never actually sees them -- maybe they are in the area waiting for the reindeer to finish calving 'in the foothills' and he is just wandering round for some purpose? After all, we never find out what exactly he was looking for when he discovers Christine (since neither of them can speak the other's language).
Assume that we do go for six weeks' captivity. Maybe the food trips are a little more frequent than fortnightly? But we need Erik to have stocked up enough food to survive a couple of months (see later) after Christine's escape, and even if he has just laid in a lot of food for a massive celebration of their 'wedding' and ends up feeding one person instead of two, if he normally needs to go for food every week then managing eight weeks or so will be quite a strain.
In that case Raoul will have spent a couple of weeks in d'Artois' camp doing nothing in particular before the 'start' of his section in flashback, as it were, and we may need to establish that -- without giving away exactly where he is -- at the start of the new section, since I'm finding it hard to visualise how it can be done in chronological order without trailing off as an addendum to the scene where they are 'rescued' by the castaways. Not a problem if we're going straight on to the small-boat voyage, but more of an issue if we're cutting back to Christine again and trying to keep the timelines in parallel.
It's easier than trying to switch over to Raoul at the point when we're specifically still on the first day of Christine's captivity, because the timings are an awful lot more vague -- but a good deal harder than running the whole thing right through and telling the two stories independently, because I do need to think through roughly parallel sets of dates :-(
More date problems: my original plotline called for Erik to injure himself chasing/rescuing Christine, and to be on the point of death from septicaemia when she returned. However, it also calls for Christine to travel first to Paris, then down to Chagny, then back to Sweden to retrieve her papers and visit Madame Valerius, then an unspecified bureaucratic delay before they legally can be married there (?three weeks?), followed by a search across Sweden to locate the hut again.
All of which implies that Christine doesn't get back for a couple of months -- far too long for Erik to survive a bout of septicaemia! While you can live for a long time with gangrene, that's 'dry' gangrene caused by poor circulation, where extremities simply self-mummify and eventually drop off painlessly. Erik's death scene is more akin to 'wet' gangrene, which kills pretty quickly.
So we're going to need some other rationale to keep Erik pinned down in that cabin for eight weeks or so before dying. His injury is going to have to 'go bad' after partially healing, I think -- maybe he reopens the break somehow (spilling bone marrow into the bloodstream and setting up infection...) He's also going to have problems with firewood-- he can't chop wood for the stove effectively with a broken limb -- and with food, which may weaken him. Maybe he just gets pneumonia? But I want his death to be a direct result of his pursuit of Christine and his impulse to save her when he glimpses what he thinks is her body :-(
However, having decided that I was going to pursue this plotline to the bitter end before branching back to Raoul, I'm now strongly tempted all over again to switch at the end of this chapter, for the sake of my own interest if nothing else -- of course the chapters don't have to be published in the order that they are written, but my gut instinct as to pace and balancing and repetition and foreshadowing is apt to be thrown out by trying to switch things around afterwards, so it's a big decision. I can see it working with Erik's illness as a cliff-hanger, thus circumventing the issue of the 'action' versus 'static' chapters, since that's when the finale action of this storyline really begins... on the other hand, Christine trapped and starving plus the Lapp episode is going to make this chapter rather long, just as I ended up splitting the previous chapter because I didn't think there was going to be room for the Lapp as well as the transition into long-term broad-brush narrative from the first day of captivity.
This always happens; I worry about chapters being too short, and then I end up worrying about them being too long, partly because I'm writing so slowly that I keep inserting extra material and meditations each day just to get myself restarted. I could of course always cut what I've written (shock! horror!) since there's nothing sacred about my text, but I'm very loath to do so unless it's obviously deleterious to the flow of the story, since it's now part of the character evolution. And, more ignobly, because it was jolly hard work to write, which is not a good reason :-(
One thing I realised I hadn't thought of, in my scenario of everyone believing Erik over Christine, is the suspicious effect of his mask -- why would anyone trust the account of the man who won't show his face over that of the maiden in distress, however smooth and plausible he is?
Facts and figures:
Reindeer calves are born in May. Reindeer migrate in April/May, before their calves are born 'in the foothills of the mountains'. Swedish migration patterns seem to be basically towards the Norwegian border all along the mountains -- I'm assuming they went on down to the sea in the days before border control, as other sources talk about reindeer/caribou going to the coast for the summer...
I've very carefully avoided any clear indication of exactly where Erik is holding Christine prisoner, and it looks as if it doesn't actually need to be that far north for reindeer (although I did identify that there is only about one place where she could sensibly travel unprepared by foot across the border and end up in a port town -- and can't remember where it was!)
Northern Sweden is currently (mid-April) still full of snow, although this is apparently exceptional. The birch trees here in England have only really come into leaf in the last week or so.
The Requin left port "on a chilly afternoon at the end of March". Raoul's letter had to reach Christine in backwoods Sweden and then her reply had to reach Stavenger on the coast: a week? Nine days? Then Erik had to reach Torkelby in the other direction -- two or three days, riding hard? Christine's kidnap cannot have taken place until well into April. I've assumed (although nowhere stated) six weeks or so of captivity -- long enough for several provisions trips a fortnight or so apart. But that then makes it a bit late for the Sami to turn up. Still, the data I saw had the calves born between the 5th and 20th of May (but they'd want to be in place before the first births...)
Temperatures in Norway are rising quickly during May: foreshortened spring/summer.
Meanwhile I reckoned Raoul could just about make it from Stavenger up to the Arctic Circle in a month of purposeful drifting; that's pushing it, to put things mildly, but the readership are pretty unlikely to have any better idea of the distances involved than I did :-(
They are wrecked and spend maybe one night in the boats -- maybe two, with an attempt to get back to the coast against wind/current? Then they return to the ship, erect a jury rig, and try to sail her back: another couple of days? I'm guessing this is somewhere around the time when Erik is in Torkelby...
Say they then spend a month drifting northwestwards before finally getting the propellor turning and maybe a couple of days steaming eastwards before the strain on the seams gets them: we're probably a couple of weeks at least before Erik's fever and Christine's starvation crisis (which I was thinking of possibly using to end this chapter in order to provide a cliffhanger -- but then I was also possibly using the calf-kissing to provide a direct bridge to Raoul!)
All this doesn't really add up, although the Sami doesn't have to come with reindeer, as Christine never actually sees them -- maybe they are in the area waiting for the reindeer to finish calving 'in the foothills' and he is just wandering round for some purpose? After all, we never find out what exactly he was looking for when he discovers Christine (since neither of them can speak the other's language).
Assume that we do go for six weeks' captivity. Maybe the food trips are a little more frequent than fortnightly? But we need Erik to have stocked up enough food to survive a couple of months (see later) after Christine's escape, and even if he has just laid in a lot of food for a massive celebration of their 'wedding' and ends up feeding one person instead of two, if he normally needs to go for food every week then managing eight weeks or so will be quite a strain.
In that case Raoul will have spent a couple of weeks in d'Artois' camp doing nothing in particular before the 'start' of his section in flashback, as it were, and we may need to establish that -- without giving away exactly where he is -- at the start of the new section, since I'm finding it hard to visualise how it can be done in chronological order without trailing off as an addendum to the scene where they are 'rescued' by the castaways. Not a problem if we're going straight on to the small-boat voyage, but more of an issue if we're cutting back to Christine again and trying to keep the timelines in parallel.
It's easier than trying to switch over to Raoul at the point when we're specifically still on the first day of Christine's captivity, because the timings are an awful lot more vague -- but a good deal harder than running the whole thing right through and telling the two stories independently, because I do need to think through roughly parallel sets of dates :-(
More date problems: my original plotline called for Erik to injure himself chasing/rescuing Christine, and to be on the point of death from septicaemia when she returned. However, it also calls for Christine to travel first to Paris, then down to Chagny, then back to Sweden to retrieve her papers and visit Madame Valerius, then an unspecified bureaucratic delay before they legally can be married there (?three weeks?), followed by a search across Sweden to locate the hut again.
All of which implies that Christine doesn't get back for a couple of months -- far too long for Erik to survive a bout of septicaemia! While you can live for a long time with gangrene, that's 'dry' gangrene caused by poor circulation, where extremities simply self-mummify and eventually drop off painlessly. Erik's death scene is more akin to 'wet' gangrene, which kills pretty quickly.
So we're going to need some other rationale to keep Erik pinned down in that cabin for eight weeks or so before dying. His injury is going to have to 'go bad' after partially healing, I think -- maybe he reopens the break somehow (spilling bone marrow into the bloodstream and setting up infection...) He's also going to have problems with firewood-- he can't chop wood for the stove effectively with a broken limb -- and with food, which may weaken him. Maybe he just gets pneumonia? But I want his death to be a direct result of his pursuit of Christine and his impulse to save her when he glimpses what he thinks is her body :-(