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Fic progress
Still working my way very, very slowly through the typing up of Arctic Raoul — I've reached Christine's arrival at the cabin, which turns out to be Chapter Seven (and about 20,000 words in) and now have to tweak her rant to Erik for consistency with his final speech that "I knew you loved that boy, though you denied it"; she shouldn't actually admit here in so many words that "I loved Raoul, and you killed him". (Currently amended to "I set Raoul free, and for sheer spite you killed him".)
"The Writing on the Wall" is not doing well; I allowed myself not to work on it at all for four or five days in a row, which is always a bad idea, and now of course it has gone off the boil. Raoul's feelings are, as usual, all over the place in terms of consistency (does he have a deathwish or is he clawing for survival?), which is partly just Leroux-Raoul for you and partly the author writing different scenes weeks apart.
I've finally got Raoul chained to the wall and now have to write the bit that is supposed to be the actual point of the story, and make it read like the focal element too...
"The Writing on the Wall" is not doing well; I allowed myself not to work on it at all for four or five days in a row, which is always a bad idea, and now of course it has gone off the boil. Raoul's feelings are, as usual, all over the place in terms of consistency (does he have a deathwish or is he clawing for survival?), which is partly just Leroux-Raoul for you and partly the author writing different scenes weeks apart.
I've finally got Raoul chained to the wall and now have to write the bit that is supposed to be the actual point of the story, and make it read like the focal element too...
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Ohhh, Arctic Raoul gets closer to seeing the audience! I'm always happy to see a new long R/C fic. It is your longest POTO story so far, right?
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Which is just as well, as I still haven't got anything resembling a title; I really can't publish a book called 'Arctic Raoul', not least because it's a massive spoiler for the first cliffhanger ;-p (Reading through Plot Points Five and Six now, it does occur to me to wonder just why Christine believes Erik immediately when he claims he has killed Raoul (evidently a case of Villains Never Lie) -- doesn't it occur to her that he might be lying, or that wrecking the ship doesn't guarantee that none of the crew survives? Will it occur to the reader? It doesn't entirely matter whether or not the reader realises that Raoul may not be as dead as everyone assumes he is, since the important thing is the effect it has on Christine, but I do hope it doesn't look too foolish, or worse, plot-convenient, for her not even to cherish a hope that Erik might not have been quite as effectively lethal as he told her he was....)
I've currently just realised that it makes very little sense for Erik to respond to Christine accusing him of preying on 'real people' (thus subconsciously implying that he is not a real person, and causing him to snap and go berserk) by knocking her down and tying up her feet :-(
Why on earth wouldn't he respond by gagging her instead? (The only answer is that the plot summary says that she finds herself "hobbled and chained up by the waist" -- and I can't even remember why, except that that's what happened when I was imagining it!)
Anyway, I think I managed to get round that fairly neatly by simply deleting a couple of phrases; it now reads simply that "the ground came up to stun her into silence", with the implication that he does indeed knock her down to shut her up (rather than this being a coincidental side-effect) and that Erik's hands "gripped her roughly" rather than "gripped round her feet roughly". Since the next paragraph describes her trying to kick him, the effect is to suggest that he swiftly ropes her ankles to stop her attempting to do so, rather than that she kicks out in response to his prior attempt to tie them -- which makes more sense from his perspective, given that he doesn't know he is acting in accordance with a divine directive saying "Thou shalt bind the feet of Christine Daaé when thou art incensed with fury" ;-D
Editing is always far easier when it involves cutting phrases rather than trying to edit in new stuff...
I got a little further with "The Writing on the Wall" after taking it down to the river (I tried to sit out over the water on a fallen willow tree but there were too many spiky stubs for the crook of the trunk to be very comfortable, and further on it was all dead and too rotten to be safe). The main problem with that scene at present is I think a tendency to over-explain things; so far I've had to try to come up with a rationale for Erik to leave Raoul enough light to read the carvings (while Erik himself then has to feel his way back in the dark! But the Daroga does want Raoul in canon that they will only see their enemy's approach by the glow of his eyes, implying that he is in the habit of roaming the tunnels without a light) and then had to come up with an explanation for Raoul being able to lay his hands on tools suitable for stone-carving. Currently I'm trying to explain why he can't simply use them to escape, instead of wasting time writing on the wall -- the obvious answer being that he tries and fails, but of course all this slows the story down more and more and more. It's like my attempts to explain how the Requin ended up being driven into the Arctic -- there's a point at which overliteral realism just damages the narrative :-(