The Yellow Poppy story

I am rather struggling with my new Roland/de Brencourt "Yellow Poppy" one-shot, which isn't coming out as well as I had hoped -- partly because I am trying to make it accessible fandom-blind, which my previous story really was not, and since it takes place after the end of a long novel of confused identities and shifting loyalties this involves an awful lot of implicit backstory info-dump! It also doesn't help that the target audience apparently can't even understand the format "M. de Trélan" and needs 'Monsieur' to be written out in full, never mind the concept that one character can have at least three different names: Gaston de Trélan is "Duc de Trélan" when referred to by title and "Monsieur de Trélan" when addressed directly, while they probably don't even realise that "Duc" is a title and not some kind of poncy foreign name... judging by the confusion we had over Mère Brassard in To Ease Your Troubled Mind :-(

But basically I'm spending so much time between lines of dialogue trying to convey the fraught moments of the past that it is throwing off the momentum of the scene, I think. ( Read more... )