If I were Vicomte (ch1)

After much procrastination, I finally managed to get this typed-up over the course of a couple of days by virtue of running a 'changeover' scheme with the other stuff I was supposed to be transcribing; every ten minutes an alarm was set to go off on my computer advising me to switch material and start typing in the other document! Of course this theoretically meant that the original task took twice as long as normal, but in practice it didn't seem to make much difference (nobody noticed), presumably because the change in source material helped prevent me from getting as bored as usual.

I currently have it split into four chapters, roughly according to chronological jumps (although the last two scenes are separated by a not insignificant period). The main trouble is that the scenes get shorter and shorter as the story goes on, with the last two even when paired together still coming in at under a thousand words, while the first chapter is about two-fifths of the total length all on its own. But the only other sensible division would be to run all the 'adult-epoch' scenes together, and there really is a sizeable shift across this material, both in time and in Yann's relationship with Christine.

Weirdly, I seem to have averaged a lot more words per page on this story than in the previous story in the same notebook; still, four chapters is a lot for a story that's only just over 5,000 words in all. Especially as the previous one was published as a single 3,800-word chapter! (The cynical approach on fanfiction.net, of course, is to upload across as many chapters as possible in order to accumulate maximum reviews and keep the story boosted back to the top of the fandom listing...)

Still wondering what 'category' to put this under and whether it's humorous at all; I'm tempted to do Angst/Humour.

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If I Were Vicomte

1. Jeunesse

The sun shone bright across Trestraou’s sands on the day the wandering fiddler came, and the wind raced across the wide bare sweep of that great strand with nothing to halt it but the church high above and the handful of cottages down by the shore. The fiddler and his little daughter had roamed from village to village for weeks, playing and singing as they went and refusing all payment save a bed of straw for the night and a dish of fresh milk in the morning, and much talk had been made of it thereabouts. But to the barefoot children who scuffled amidst their fathers’ nets, the big man with a fiddle-case slung over his shoulder was simply a stranger in a place where no new face was seen from one season to the next, and they watched him from a distance and with wide eyes.

The newcomer and the little girl came down to the shore and stood hand in hand, gazing out across the unmarked sands that stretched away beneath that vast overarching sky. ( Read more... )