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igenlodeApparently I've been wrestling with this since February :-(
I've now been working on this one story for about a year, and I've spent the vast majority of the last nine months working at an average of one or two sentences a day; I don't know if the story is ever going to pick up momentum again, or if it's just going to peter out as being too much like hard work...
All right. So far they sit around in the boats for a day or so, reboard the ship (damaging the boats in the process), patch up the hole in the hull, attempt and fail to signal to a distant passing vessel, fix up a jury rig and start sailing northwards against a easterly-southeasterly gale.
Raoul is distracted for a week or so by Lancard's fit of pneumonia. Lagarde then gets the steam-pumps working, but the leak continues to worsen rapidly (the patch is working loose/coming off). Raoul works on repairing the boats (which should have been done earlier, but he was distracted) and the wind is stated to have swung round south-westerly. They are now sailing north-east, i.e. no longer attempting to make headway upwind on account of the strain this places on the patch. Around two weeks' travel has taken place at this point. They are well north of Stavanger and still a fair way out to westward of the coast (which slopes away to the east).
I haven't yet got as far as trying to fix the engine, although the beginning of this chapter hints at it and at meeting the ice (which means I've got to get the engine-fixing in before the end of the chapter!) I'm wondering now if I ought to be including an attempt at a more permanent mend on the hull (Reux has proposed it, and had the idea brushed off as too impractical), or dropping the idea altogether. The trouble is that, as I've described it so far, they're not going to stay afloat with that temporary patch disintegrating at this rate -- and if the hull is that bad, then starting up the engines is going to look like an obviously stupid idea (especially if it actually does lead to the ship sinking as the seams open up). I want Raoul to look like a heroically resourceful commander, not an idiot!
The other issue is that, as I've described it so far, the reason why they're heading north-eastwards (rather than turning the ship round onto the other tack by any means possible, i.e. dropping all sail and towing her bows round with the boats) is that turning the ship would be very laborious, and they are at least making easterly progress now even if they are much too far north. This is going to get increasingly unconvincing once it starts to look as if they're going to 'miss' the top of Norway altogether; there is no gain in going eastwards if it means you end up with Finland/Russia between you and your destination. (Note that the Grand Duchy of Finland was ruled from Moscow at this point.)
If they stop anyway in order to start rivetting on new plates, etc., they might as well turn, really. And once they fix the worst of the leak there will be nothing stopping them from taking a beam reach across the wind and making headway south-east and away from the Arctic. I seem to remember doing a lot of research which concluded that a south-westerly was in fact the prevailing wind in that part of the world, and I've already afflicted them with a couple of weeks of unrelenting easterly gale, which I feel is as much as I can ask for!
Maybe the answer is that during the course of the permanent repair they manage to damage the rudder/steering. I mean, it's going to have to be a pretty drastic process involving laying the ship right over on her side on the open sea (while heating up red-hot rivets!) and drilling holes in the hull -- maybe the rudder mechanism doesn't like the strain of being dangled at that angle *again*...
No, because that would cause them to go round in circles :-(
OK, so maybe they decide to ditch the rudder because they can't get back to port while travelling in circles, but then they really can't do anything but blow straight downwind until they get the engine working (at which point hanging out some kind of jury rudder - minus the pressure of the wind on the sails - may be more feasible). But with all this extra explanation/justification this plot is just getting crazily overcomplicated :-(
The whole thing is only there to patch a plot-hole in getting Raoul to the Arctic, and it's turning into this ridiculous odyssey in an attempt to prevent him from taking any of the myriad available options to get himself back to land...
I've now been working on this one story for about a year, and I've spent the vast majority of the last nine months working at an average of one or two sentences a day; I don't know if the story is ever going to pick up momentum again, or if it's just going to peter out as being too much like hard work...
All right. So far they sit around in the boats for a day or so, reboard the ship (damaging the boats in the process), patch up the hole in the hull, attempt and fail to signal to a distant passing vessel, fix up a jury rig and start sailing northwards against a easterly-southeasterly gale.
Raoul is distracted for a week or so by Lancard's fit of pneumonia. Lagarde then gets the steam-pumps working, but the leak continues to worsen rapidly (the patch is working loose/coming off). Raoul works on repairing the boats (which should have been done earlier, but he was distracted) and the wind is stated to have swung round south-westerly. They are now sailing north-east, i.e. no longer attempting to make headway upwind on account of the strain this places on the patch. Around two weeks' travel has taken place at this point. They are well north of Stavanger and still a fair way out to westward of the coast (which slopes away to the east).
I haven't yet got as far as trying to fix the engine, although the beginning of this chapter hints at it and at meeting the ice (which means I've got to get the engine-fixing in before the end of the chapter!) I'm wondering now if I ought to be including an attempt at a more permanent mend on the hull (Reux has proposed it, and had the idea brushed off as too impractical), or dropping the idea altogether. The trouble is that, as I've described it so far, they're not going to stay afloat with that temporary patch disintegrating at this rate -- and if the hull is that bad, then starting up the engines is going to look like an obviously stupid idea (especially if it actually does lead to the ship sinking as the seams open up). I want Raoul to look like a heroically resourceful commander, not an idiot!
The other issue is that, as I've described it so far, the reason why they're heading north-eastwards (rather than turning the ship round onto the other tack by any means possible, i.e. dropping all sail and towing her bows round with the boats) is that turning the ship would be very laborious, and they are at least making easterly progress now even if they are much too far north. This is going to get increasingly unconvincing once it starts to look as if they're going to 'miss' the top of Norway altogether; there is no gain in going eastwards if it means you end up with Finland/Russia between you and your destination. (Note that the Grand Duchy of Finland was ruled from Moscow at this point.)
If they stop anyway in order to start rivetting on new plates, etc., they might as well turn, really. And once they fix the worst of the leak there will be nothing stopping them from taking a beam reach across the wind and making headway south-east and away from the Arctic. I seem to remember doing a lot of research which concluded that a south-westerly was in fact the prevailing wind in that part of the world, and I've already afflicted them with a couple of weeks of unrelenting easterly gale, which I feel is as much as I can ask for!
Maybe the answer is that during the course of the permanent repair they manage to damage the rudder/steering. I mean, it's going to have to be a pretty drastic process involving laying the ship right over on her side on the open sea (while heating up red-hot rivets!) and drilling holes in the hull -- maybe the rudder mechanism doesn't like the strain of being dangled at that angle *again*...
No, because that would cause them to go round in circles :-(
OK, so maybe they decide to ditch the rudder because they can't get back to port while travelling in circles, but then they really can't do anything but blow straight downwind until they get the engine working (at which point hanging out some kind of jury rudder - minus the pressure of the wind on the sails - may be more feasible). But with all this extra explanation/justification this plot is just getting crazily overcomplicated :-(
The whole thing is only there to patch a plot-hole in getting Raoul to the Arctic, and it's turning into this ridiculous odyssey in an attempt to prevent him from taking any of the myriad available options to get himself back to land...
no subject
Date: 2018-11-10 09:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-13 12:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-13 07:40 pm (UTC)It needs to be stripped back to the basics of 'the ship can't sail in the direction we need to go, therefore we're going to concentrate on trying to fix the engines'. All these frantic attempts at stopping up plot-holes as fast as they appear are playing havoc with the pace of the chapter and unbalancing the story: this was never meant to be an important element of the plot!
Raoul needs to *get* to the Arctic, preferably in a way that can plausibly make him look like the heroic saviour of the crew and not like an uninspired idiot, and meet up with d'Artois and his men. *That* is the whole point of these chapters, not boring details about how you can tow a square-rigger from one tack to another if you've got a few hours to spend....