Fic progress: untitled

[igenlode]

Well, I've got a couple of thousand words on the 'wife of Raoul' fic, starting off in the managers' box and now heading back to Christine's dressing room. It's pretty obvious that if I'm going to submit it for the Break the Cliché challenge that I'll have to break the habit of a lifetime and upload the first chapter before I'm anywhere near finishing the rest of the story -- I'm not going to complete and edit this in the next ten days.

I got my 2016 Christmas challenge story finished four days before the deadline, and found myself typing and editing a chapter a day with very little sleep in between; there is no way I am going to have finished writing this by the end of the month. It's not drabbles this time. But only the first chapter is eligible for the challenge anyway -- which I'd forgotten last time! -- and it needs to be able to stand alone. Frankly I'm not not convinced that the concept fits the 'break the cliché' requirement all that well anyway, but having been pushed into attempting a story I'd been contemplating for several years by the presence of the deadline, I may as well get it entered before said deadline passes. ('I really want you to come out to dinner with me... to meet my wife' is probably just about adequate as an unexpected outcome even for the fandom-blind...)

Unfortunately it has just occurred to me that if I'm going to upload the first chapter in the next ten days I'm going to need a title for the story in the immediate future! I tend not to name them until the story is finished and I know in retrospect what its 'theme' is. In this case I definitely can't call it "The Wife of Raoul" because that would be a complete giveaway; I could try for something like "The Vicomtesse and the Opera Singer" in the hopes that people would assume both applied to Christine, but probably not. "A Vicomtesse at the Opera", maybe :-(

I've started the story in the first-person in order to conceal the sex and identity of the narrator, although I have at least managed to avoid a present-tense narrative! It's written in a deliberate attempt to imply that the extra person present in the box that evening with Raoul and the managers is Comte Philippe, since it's clearly a member of high society and someone who is on affectionate terms with Raoul and has known him for years; I think people are unlikely to guess that this is an invented member of the family rather than an existing (but not in stage canon) one, given the cavalier way people tend to stick Philippe and the Daroga into ALW stories whenever they feel like it :-p

The existence of an OC in the story tags (and of course the absence of Philippe) might be a bit of a giveaway, and I'm tempted just to tag this first chapter for Christine and Raoul unpaired. I often do fiddle around with tags as I go along in order to avoid 'giving things away'... and I'm honestly not sure what the end tagging is going to be anyway. Not [Christine, Raoul], and probably not [Raoul, OC]; I'm not at all certain how that relationship is going to end up. He can't allow himself to fall in love with Christine, and he isn't in love with his wife. He might possibly be, in some shape or form, at some point in the future, but I don't think I want a story where he suddenly wakes to the blinding conclusion that 'it was you I really wanted all along!' It doesn't ring true.

He is loyal to Hertha, he is irrevocably committed to her and he doesn't want to hurt her -- he regards her in the light of a very good friend and ally and the potential mother of his children -- but he doesn't love her in the way that he would, if he gave in to their unspoken mutual attraction, love Christine. And I have an intrinsic distaste for being seen to write what is basically the same as a hundred self-insert Christine-bashing E/OC plotlines, where in the final chapter Erik magically learns to appreciate the blind girl/hostage/maidservant who has been right there and devoted to him all the time he was obsessed with the unattainable woman...

---

Part of the problem with writing the first chapter to come across as if it might be Philippe narrating is that Hertha ends up sounding condescending and rather bossy :-( The idea is that it represents her role in the marriage as being the sensible one, while Raoul dashes off at tangents all the time -- but it's a fine line to tread between that and making him sound immature, and both of them rather unappealing.

Comments

[erimia]

The fic sounds very interesting so far! I think a title with "vicomtesse" would indeed work well for the "fooling the readers" purpose.

[igenlode]

It's just dawned on me that I'm going to have to do a summary as well. Fortunately I think "but things have changed -- for both of them" should pretty much cover it...

[watervole]

I really dislike tags that lie. I'd rather have no tags.

Though there are problems both ways...

[igenlode]

Not tagging at all for the narrator when you're trying to hide said narrator's identity is, pretty much, the 'no tags' principle ;-)

Though I knew one story where the author went too far by having one (popular) character take on the identity of a (less popular) character as part of his backstory and not revealing the nature of the swap for a dozen chapters or so, by which point she was reduced to promising that the character everyone wanted was definitely going to appear and the romance really wasn't the way it looked, honest -- adding him to the tags, let alone adding his 'pairing' to the tags, would have been a complete giveaway for her plot, but the trouble was that otherwise the target audience weren't interested in reading it...

What I mostly do is not tag for pairings until they happen in-story and/or after the story is complete. By this point I think people are mostly going to guess the likely outcome based on the author, but it doesn't invariably happen, and I'd rather not have my occasional deviations telegraphed in advance. When people are searching through finished stories it's another matter.

[watervole]

It's difficult, isn't it.

So many people just hunt by tags.

One reason I go mainly by recs is that the often take me to stories I would not have found otherwise.

My best pieces of fiction suffer from low hit rates as they aren't slash (I don't mind slash, read and written masses in my time, but it doesn't happen to include my best work) and often about less popular characters.

I used to find I could sell them in zines with no problem, as people trusted me as an editor to publish good stories, and selling at conventions allowed for browsing, but online they just get lost in the mass of more popular tags.

[igenlode]

The theory is that the Internet has risen above the need for 'curation' because the best will always bubble to the top, but certainly in the case of fan-fiction it is very sorely in need of it. Without editorial recommendation, no-one is ever going to read outside their comfort zone (why would they, when they already know that 95% on average of the unknown material isn't worth reading even it it does happen to coincide with some of their interests?)

I'm not sure how badly my Blake's 7 stories on fanfiction.net suffer from their lack of tags and pairings, because the fandom is basically dead there anyway (I've given up checking or reviewing myself -- even though now that I do look, some of the newer stories appear quite good). But my story about Ro being educated by the Federation as their future ruler of Silmareno/Horizon was never going to win any popularity contests, given that -- even though I think every named character in it save Ro's mother is established in canon -- it doesn't feature a single one of the taggable regular cast. I'm still proud of it as a piece of writing, and of depicting an obviously biased viewpoint in such a way that it's believable as a piece of self-deception; I've always liked *writing* unreliable narrators. (I don't like reading them much...)

I've never really relied on tags myself for historical reasons -- in the Phantom fandom I use them as an indication of what to avoid when browsing rather than as any form of active search. I found most of my favourite stories by looking through the bookmarked favourites of other people who wrote coherent reviews on stories that I liked, on the grounds that they were clearly readers of discernment; I think I honestly did get pretty much all the worthwhile Raoul/Christine in the fanfiction.net archive that way, for instance, or at least all those posted during its more active periods, because after a while I started seeing only links to stories I'd already come across. There may be another self-contained set in the gap between 2005–6 (when the fandom was most active) and 2010, which seems to have been the earliest fics I found from current users...