Chapter counting
21 March 2021 07:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeRight, I think I've finally finished my chapter 4 on Hertha.
Chapter 1, as published, is 'Hannibal'; chapter 2 is Hertha's backstory up to her marriage, all wrapped into the "ten minutes" (rather than longer than that in reality) it takes her and Raoul to get their coats and return to Christine's dressing-room, and ends on the drama of the mysterious voice behind a locked door, followed by the discovery that Christine has vanished. Chapter 3 covers Raoul's return home and account (to his wife) of the rest of that night, along with the backstory of Hertha's acquaintance with 'animal magnetism'. Chapter 4, which feels as if it has been going on for forever, covers Hertha's attempts to befriend Christine, and the backstory of Christine's father and of her earlier acquaintance with Raoul. And Chapter 5, on which I now seem to be embarked, will, I hope, cover the ill-starred performance of 'Il Muto' and events on the roof; I'd assumed we would reach 'Il Muto' by the end of Ch4, but that was obviously not going to happen.
It had got so incredibly long and sprawly that I actually sat down for an hour or so in the park this morning and counted the words by hand just to see what the true word-count was, because I didn't trust my page-average any more; as I hoped/suspected, that estimate was almost a thousand words over, due to the fact that the last six pages or so were scrawled by the light of street-lamps while in motion. It turned out to be very slightly over five thousand words, which is nothing like as disproportionate as I'd feared.
By the time I had finished counting from one to a hundred fifty times out loud, however, my throat was getting sore ;-p
I suspect my counting is at a lower evolutionary level than my reading; I can read completely silently and at a glance, but I can't count reliably without physically tapping the words with a pointer of some sort (even on the screen!), and I can't keep count without at least mouthing the numbers as I go, like a mediæval monk attempting to read to himself...
Chapter 1, as published, is 'Hannibal'; chapter 2 is Hertha's backstory up to her marriage, all wrapped into the "ten minutes" (rather than longer than that in reality) it takes her and Raoul to get their coats and return to Christine's dressing-room, and ends on the drama of the mysterious voice behind a locked door, followed by the discovery that Christine has vanished. Chapter 3 covers Raoul's return home and account (to his wife) of the rest of that night, along with the backstory of Hertha's acquaintance with 'animal magnetism'. Chapter 4, which feels as if it has been going on for forever, covers Hertha's attempts to befriend Christine, and the backstory of Christine's father and of her earlier acquaintance with Raoul. And Chapter 5, on which I now seem to be embarked, will, I hope, cover the ill-starred performance of 'Il Muto' and events on the roof; I'd assumed we would reach 'Il Muto' by the end of Ch4, but that was obviously not going to happen.
It had got so incredibly long and sprawly that I actually sat down for an hour or so in the park this morning and counted the words by hand just to see what the true word-count was, because I didn't trust my page-average any more; as I hoped/suspected, that estimate was almost a thousand words over, due to the fact that the last six pages or so were scrawled by the light of street-lamps while in motion. It turned out to be very slightly over five thousand words, which is nothing like as disproportionate as I'd feared.
By the time I had finished counting from one to a hundred fifty times out loud, however, my throat was getting sore ;-p
I suspect my counting is at a lower evolutionary level than my reading; I can read completely silently and at a glance, but I can't count reliably without physically tapping the words with a pointer of some sort (even on the screen!), and I can't keep count without at least mouthing the numbers as I go, like a mediæval monk attempting to read to himself...
