Fic despondency

I'm still ploughing on very, very laboriously with "An Outsider and A Foreigner" (which I keep wanting to call "An Officer and A Gentleman) and am still continuing to be unhappy about it. The whole thing seems to have left the realms of fan-fiction (or of POTO, anyway) and degenerated into some kind of rather amateurish historical romance -- if I thought I was doing *well* at the historical elements I wouldn't mind, but I'm not nearly as confident about it as I am with all the Raoul/Christine stories, where all the references and social allusions just seemed to float fluently into place. ( Read more... )

( Baby epilogue? )

Looking back through the tags on this project reveals the fact that I have been feeling despondent about it since December last year -- in fact, a lot of the elements in that post (over-promised in advance, Arctic Raoul being actively good in comparison, constantly repeating "so tired", dare not show distress) are literal verbatim echoes of things that were running through my mind earlier today. So basically I have been feeling hopeless about this story more or less ever since I started writing it... (the obvious answer to which is 'well, stop writing it, then! But as in the bus stop fallacy, I've spent too much time on it already to want to do that.)

At the moment my thought process is more or less that, unlike Arctic Raoul, it's never going to rise above the level of 'fan fiction', but that I never had any plans to publish it and that most POTO fan-fiction is amateurish historical romance anyway so the readers won't care -- or notice. (To be honest, however good it might be I don't think many people would ever be all that interested in reading an OC/Raoul insert anyway; the one that hurts is "Blue Remembered Hills", which *was* good, which adhered scrupulously to both canons and should potentially have satisfied fans of both, which I put four years into, and which very few people -- so far as I could tell -- ever even looked at.)

Frizzled chilli

I tried out half of one of my baked-black chilli peppers in a leek and kidney bean chilli (using muscovado sugar instead of 'Brown rice syrup', and beef dripping to make it thoroughly non-vegan!) and despite being black and friable they are still definitely pretty potent. So I haven't destroyed my entire crop, which is good to know...

I also discovered two more green chillis still on the plant, hiding beneath the leaves in the traditional fashion :-p

Sadly I don't think I'm going to get any viable seed out of the flower spikes on my various basil plants; the earliest ones which appeared to have set some immature seed have just gone black (apparently frosted...!?) and dropped off, and the others won't have time to mature. Amazingly, my towel-tomatoes are still flowering, possibly due to having had their normal flowering development truncated by a badly-timed heatwave -- I shan't get any fruit out of that, however! I have picked almost all the tomatoes that had started to turn colour, and those green ones where the stem was withering. There are still several trusses of green tomatoes on the magazine-tomatoes which must have set after the heatwave, where the stems of the fruit are still fairly robust, and I've left those for the moment.