End of the story

Finally managed to finish my Carmen fanfic, after getting seriously stuck on the last page: I'd come up with a whole theory as to what becomes of Micaela, and it just wouldn't 'go'. The whole thing was seriously unbalancing the end of the story by involving a lot of extra exposition (all of which was supposedly being fitted in during the time it took the priest to come round the corner and walk towards her!), was distracting from the climax of the original canon and was in danger of making Micaela sound self-pitying and pathetic.

In the end I decided to ditch the whole thing and abandon the question of what happens to Micaela as the last character left standing, and immediately felt much happier about the entire ending, which confirmed my instinct that it simply hadn't been working before. (I'd spent hours and hours working over it very laboriously and got practically nowhere.)

Ironically enough, as soon as I crossed out my last few hard-won sentences and sat down to write the 'original' ending, the first two lines I came up with turned out to lead most invitingly into precisely the material I'd just resolved to ditch because I couldn't find a concise way of working it in... so I ended up using pretty much everything I'd planned after all! ( Read more... )

Singing solo -- aftermath

Apparently the professional musicians who were present for the Requiem a few weeks ago were asking who the unknown soloist was, and saying what a good voice I had.
Which is nice.