Heaven by the sea
14 March 2021 01:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeChristine and Raoul's backstory has actually been flowing quite well, when I get down to it: a page yesterday and another the day before. (The fact that I don't get down to it until after dark means that my right hand is suffering from chilblains again...)
I always did enjoy doing backstory and dialect, and I had the idea of getting Christine's maid (having created her on the spur of the moment simply in order to open the door to Hertha) to deliver the backstory instead of Christine herself -- having just inconvenently made a big (autobiographical) point of how the latter was being extremely reticent about speaking Raoul's name at all! In fact I've ended up effectively ventriloquising the story at two removes, since Lisotte herself wasn't present for most of it -- so this is implicitly an account of the letters she received from her sister, being summarised to the reader by Hertha as narrator listening to Lisotte telling the story ;-D
(I wonder if the reason I find backstory easier is that I am inventing it myself without being tied in to canon, and that I really ought to go back to original fiction... but then backstory is very much tied in with canon, as it's an explanation of how canon could have come to be!)
I was yet again making a point of doing something completely different for my backstory, so I very consciously didn't send Christine and her father off to Brittany; here they are staying at a seaside boarding-house in Montpellier, and the landlady is busy disapproving of Raoul, whom she takes for a 'ragamuffin' (a dip in the sea doesn't do smart clothing much good ;-p)
I haven't quite worked out yet why Lisotte is apparently so disapproving of [adult] Raoul at this point: the whole not-answering-letters thing, I think, coupled with the fact that she probably knows Christine's heart better than anyone (including Christine) and doesn't want her falling for a married man, which she suspects may be happening.
I can, however, see myself having similar problems to the ones I had with Célestine in "The Choices of Raoul", where I endowed Christine with a stroppy domestic servant on impulse during the course of the story, and then had to find a way of explaining why she wasn't there at the end of the (pre-prepared) plot! (See also Lancard in Arctic Raoul...)
I always did enjoy doing backstory and dialect, and I had the idea of getting Christine's maid (having created her on the spur of the moment simply in order to open the door to Hertha) to deliver the backstory instead of Christine herself -- having just inconvenently made a big (autobiographical) point of how the latter was being extremely reticent about speaking Raoul's name at all! In fact I've ended up effectively ventriloquising the story at two removes, since Lisotte herself wasn't present for most of it -- so this is implicitly an account of the letters she received from her sister, being summarised to the reader by Hertha as narrator listening to Lisotte telling the story ;-D
(I wonder if the reason I find backstory easier is that I am inventing it myself without being tied in to canon, and that I really ought to go back to original fiction... but then backstory is very much tied in with canon, as it's an explanation of how canon could have come to be!)
I was yet again making a point of doing something completely different for my backstory, so I very consciously didn't send Christine and her father off to Brittany; here they are staying at a seaside boarding-house in Montpellier, and the landlady is busy disapproving of Raoul, whom she takes for a 'ragamuffin' (a dip in the sea doesn't do smart clothing much good ;-p)
I haven't quite worked out yet why Lisotte is apparently so disapproving of [adult] Raoul at this point: the whole not-answering-letters thing, I think, coupled with the fact that she probably knows Christine's heart better than anyone (including Christine) and doesn't want her falling for a married man, which she suspects may be happening.
I can, however, see myself having similar problems to the ones I had with Célestine in "The Choices of Raoul", where I endowed Christine with a stroppy domestic servant on impulse during the course of the story, and then had to find a way of explaining why she wasn't there at the end of the (pre-prepared) plot! (See also Lancard in Arctic Raoul...)
