Plant progress

(testing blog image hosting)

Happy, healthy young apple seedlings... and the ink-bottle for my fountain-pens!


A tangled tray of 'salad' waiting to form flower-buds (believe it or not, I did do some thinning-out, by the unorthodox route of removing the stronger specimens of each species!)


Results from the fine-as-dust seed that was left in the bottom of the packet, which I suspect will produce a different species mix

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In further news, I have finished typing "A Family Man" and started work on the provisionally-titled "Meg Shoots the Phantom" -- which is definitely going to need a better title at some point!
It looks as if the latter story really is going to be a short one for once, which I think is partly due to the script-like presentation I've consciously adopted (present tense and third-person 'objective', hence no long digressions into backstory or characters' thoughts about other characters) and partly due to the constraints of the original model: as an alternate finale, my version needs to fit more or less back into the space occupied by the current scene. Even as it is, it's going to be a bit longer, I suspect...

A Family Man

This was supposed to be pure fluff (in the fluffiest 'bears no relation to the canon plot but is just the characters being sickeningly sweet and listing the names and ages† of all their children'-type way).
† 'Baby' Victoire is actually about five; she has been the youngest for long enough that everyone has got used to calling her that.

So I was slightly taken aback when it acquired some heavy but period-appropriate infant mortality more or less between one paragraph and the next; it works in the context, I think, and explains a couple of points elsewhere in the story rather neatly. But it's not quite the sort of thing you expect to crop up out of your subconscious when you literally had no idea it was going to happen.

This could be read as a sequel to "Newly Wed" some fifteen years later, I suppose, but it wasn't intended to be set in the same continuity; Raoul and his sisters get yet another different backstory here, and the gloomy keep at Drinon not only doesn't get mentioned, but isn't supposed to exist!

It was experimental in that I made a deliberate decision to attempt first-person present-tense narrative, but I think that has worked quite well in the context of a story that consists largely of fleeting moments in the immediate present. I'm a bit worried by the fact that in consequence the narrator isn't actually named until over halfway through, but there really didn't seem to be any natural way of getting the information in...

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A Family Man

Sometimes, Raoul’s children remind him of himself and Christine. But mostly they are very much themselves. And a long walk on a hot day is not entirely to everyone’s taste...

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