Musings on the swedish story
5 September 2019 02:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodePlot point twelve finished! (In the middle of a chapter; my chapter boundaries are all over the place.)
I've now reached the middle of my second A4 ledger — 42 pages @ 500 words = another 21,000 words — and doubt I'm going to be able to reach the end of the plot before the end of the book, given that it's taken me all those 21,000 words to cover the last three plot points and I still have another five to go. (Admittedly there were four thousand words or so of replacement voyage-chapter in there; I find it rather disturbing that it took me a couple of months to write that one chapter of 'action', but that I subsequently managed to spend three chapters on angst/fluff for plot point 12, one chapter of which was spent just getting the characters onto the train in Paris.)
On the other hand, plot point 15 is pretty detailed already, which means there will probably be less scope for fresh happenings around the plot (and I might get it all done in only two chapters :-p)
And sooner or later I really must get a title!
If I did want to publish this, I suspect it's getting too long (over 100,000 words by my reckoning), which would mean that a lot of these sentences of character waffle would have to be cut. Unfortunately an awful lot of it is character waffle. Oh well, I don't suppose I shall make the attempt anyway. I never was any good at handling rejection.
I do get the impression that fanfiction.net traffic in the 'Phantom' sections is rather lighter than it used to be, so the potential audience there is probably ebbing as well. *Sigh* But then there isn't that much audience for 100,000 words of unwavering R/C anyway. (I was rather pleased with what I'd done with my Leroux-Raoul and Christine in "Blue Remembered Hills", but that certainly didn't win me readers; too much other stuff to swallow, to be fair.)
Well, the big aim was always to get the pictures out of my head and safely down on paper, and I've achieved a good deal of that now — and acquired a whole load of new ones along the way, including a new version of the Château de Chagny (previously glimpsed in Newly Wed: "no grim old keep like Drinon but a wonderful adventure of a house" and A Family Man: "the distant hills had looked so inviting from the baking gravel of the parterre"), and, of course, Lancard and the rest of the Requin's crew, who really didn't exist in the original plot points four and seven :-D
Whether anybody else enjoys reading it, I have at least enjoyed having written it and 'found out what happened'; I won't say that I've enjoyed the actual ongoing process of writing it, because a lot of the time I haven't!
(If I'd known it was going to take several years, I don't think I've have had the resolution to start; I assumed it would take four or five months, as the manuscript draft of "Blue Remembered Hills" did when writing daily. The problem was all those days when I barely managed a sentence or two on Raoul's Arctic labours; this fluff-stuff I'm writing at the rate of a page or so in a day, which means I can get through a chapter in a week. This time last year I was writing Lancard's pneumonia.)
I have to say it occurs to me that the future prospect of typing up over a hundred thousand words is not at all inviting! But it will have to be done, and preferably within a reasonably short space of time so that I can spot repetitions and inconsistencies in the process. I already spotted one when I was coincidentally rereading an early chapter in search of something else, and realised that I'd described the château as having been shut up and the girls sent away to school after the Comtesse Raoul's mother died, and had to then do some quick embroidery to explain how Raoul's father came to be buried there and why Philippe regarded it as his current principal residence :-p
I've now reached the middle of my second A4 ledger — 42 pages @ 500 words = another 21,000 words — and doubt I'm going to be able to reach the end of the plot before the end of the book, given that it's taken me all those 21,000 words to cover the last three plot points and I still have another five to go. (Admittedly there were four thousand words or so of replacement voyage-chapter in there; I find it rather disturbing that it took me a couple of months to write that one chapter of 'action', but that I subsequently managed to spend three chapters on angst/fluff for plot point 12, one chapter of which was spent just getting the characters onto the train in Paris.)
On the other hand, plot point 15 is pretty detailed already, which means there will probably be less scope for fresh happenings around the plot (and I might get it all done in only two chapters :-p)
And sooner or later I really must get a title!
If I did want to publish this, I suspect it's getting too long (over 100,000 words by my reckoning), which would mean that a lot of these sentences of character waffle would have to be cut. Unfortunately an awful lot of it is character waffle. Oh well, I don't suppose I shall make the attempt anyway. I never was any good at handling rejection.
I do get the impression that fanfiction.net traffic in the 'Phantom' sections is rather lighter than it used to be, so the potential audience there is probably ebbing as well. *Sigh* But then there isn't that much audience for 100,000 words of unwavering R/C anyway. (I was rather pleased with what I'd done with my Leroux-Raoul and Christine in "Blue Remembered Hills", but that certainly didn't win me readers; too much other stuff to swallow, to be fair.)
Well, the big aim was always to get the pictures out of my head and safely down on paper, and I've achieved a good deal of that now — and acquired a whole load of new ones along the way, including a new version of the Château de Chagny (previously glimpsed in Newly Wed: "no grim old keep like Drinon but a wonderful adventure of a house" and A Family Man: "the distant hills had looked so inviting from the baking gravel of the parterre"), and, of course, Lancard and the rest of the Requin's crew, who really didn't exist in the original plot points four and seven :-D
Whether anybody else enjoys reading it, I have at least enjoyed having written it and 'found out what happened'; I won't say that I've enjoyed the actual ongoing process of writing it, because a lot of the time I haven't!
(If I'd known it was going to take several years, I don't think I've have had the resolution to start; I assumed it would take four or five months, as the manuscript draft of "Blue Remembered Hills" did when writing daily. The problem was all those days when I barely managed a sentence or two on Raoul's Arctic labours; this fluff-stuff I'm writing at the rate of a page or so in a day, which means I can get through a chapter in a week. This time last year I was writing Lancard's pneumonia.)
I have to say it occurs to me that the future prospect of typing up over a hundred thousand words is not at all inviting! But it will have to be done, and preferably within a reasonably short space of time so that I can spot repetitions and inconsistencies in the process. I already spotted one when I was coincidentally rereading an early chapter in search of something else, and realised that I'd described the château as having been shut up and the girls sent away to school after the Comtesse Raoul's mother died, and had to then do some quick embroidery to explain how Raoul's father came to be buried there and why Philippe regarded it as his current principal residence :-p