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Seedlings gone
Apparently Mesembryanthemum seedlings are particularly tasty. After I noticed that half the seedlings in the pot had disappeared overnight, I conducted a search for the culprit under neighbouring pots, removed a largish (by my standards -- about half an inch in diameter) snail, and moved the pot to the other side of the balcony to break any telltale slime trails. But this morning all the remainder have gone, save for a single stem with a single cotyledon adhering to it; every other scrap of green has been eaten off. None of the neighbouring seedlings appear to have been touched at all.
This wouldn't be a particular problem (I already lost all save a single marigold seedling to unexpected frost, and have replanted -- though am yet to see any further germination) if this didn't happen to have been one of the seed packets where there was only a pinch of remaining seed in the first place. So unless the sole survivor somehow pulls through, or some late-coming seed turns out to germinate, I shan't be seeing any Livingstone daisies. Which is a pity, as the packet said they were particularly suited to poor soil and hot conditions, both of which I have in abundance.
It's odd about the marigolds, as I would have expected those to be tough; nothing else succumbed to the cold.
I have managed with great labour to get Hertha and Christine to the roof-top, and am trying to negotiate an alternate "All I ask of You", though I'm not terribly happy with it. It turns out to be surprisingly difficult to have Christine say anything at all about her ecstatic little excursion with the Phantom that a listener wouldn't automatically interpret as euphemisms for a love-tryst -- grist to the mill for all the fans who like to interpret "Music of the Night" as sublimated sex! -- the result of which is that it comes across as all fear and no rapture, which feels like character-bashing on the part of the author.
And then we've got the usual issues with the characters repeatedly flinging their arms around each other and then recoiling with the ebb and flow of the conversation; fine once, but multiple times? Christine is hysterical, then calm and determined, then hysterical again... of course, it's all complicated by the fact that not only does Hertha not have the faintest idea what Christine is talking about, she has a tendency to see Christine through the lens of relationship-with-Raoul, which in this case is a distinct red herring. One that needs to be dealt with, but that rather derails the Phantom revelations.
In fact I think I'm going to end up having the actual revelations more or less dealt with in summary and/or offscreen after Raoul turns up (his arrival on the roof in pursuit of the other two being the element I'm currently trying to dispatch, and which may well turn out to be the end of the scene or even the chapter). The readers *know* what happened to Christine that night, and all that is necessary for the purposes of the story is to imply that the narrator now knows it too; we don't need a long limping scene of awkward conversation. And I'm trying to keep in mind that Christine needs to get back on stage to perform the rest of "Il Muto", so for pacing purposes we can't spend too long up on the roof! (Just as Hertha and Christine can't spend all that long in one-to-one talking-down-from-the-edge conversation if Raoul is supposed to be trying to follow/catch up with them -- and there's no way he wouldn't, given that in this version Christine's motivation for bolting from the stage appears to be that she is embarrassed at being caught in Raoul's arms by his wife, however innocent the intent.)
To be honest, the only bits of all this I remember finding at all easy or enjoyable to write were getting Hertha into Box 5 in the first place (her idea; after all, we know that it is the last available box that night, and she *doesn't* know that the Phantom has been making a fuss over it) and killing off Buquet. Not because I particularly hate him, but because it's a nice little horror scene. Hertha, of course, takes it for granted that this is an actual accident, since she has no reason to assume that the mystery blackmailer has any grudge against random backstage staff, and given the chaos of the sudden scene change a tragic accident is actually far from improbable at this point -- something which had never occurred to me...
This wouldn't be a particular problem (I already lost all save a single marigold seedling to unexpected frost, and have replanted -- though am yet to see any further germination) if this didn't happen to have been one of the seed packets where there was only a pinch of remaining seed in the first place. So unless the sole survivor somehow pulls through, or some late-coming seed turns out to germinate, I shan't be seeing any Livingstone daisies. Which is a pity, as the packet said they were particularly suited to poor soil and hot conditions, both of which I have in abundance.
It's odd about the marigolds, as I would have expected those to be tough; nothing else succumbed to the cold.
I have managed with great labour to get Hertha and Christine to the roof-top, and am trying to negotiate an alternate "All I ask of You", though I'm not terribly happy with it. It turns out to be surprisingly difficult to have Christine say anything at all about her ecstatic little excursion with the Phantom that a listener wouldn't automatically interpret as euphemisms for a love-tryst -- grist to the mill for all the fans who like to interpret "Music of the Night" as sublimated sex! -- the result of which is that it comes across as all fear and no rapture, which feels like character-bashing on the part of the author.
And then we've got the usual issues with the characters repeatedly flinging their arms around each other and then recoiling with the ebb and flow of the conversation; fine once, but multiple times? Christine is hysterical, then calm and determined, then hysterical again... of course, it's all complicated by the fact that not only does Hertha not have the faintest idea what Christine is talking about, she has a tendency to see Christine through the lens of relationship-with-Raoul, which in this case is a distinct red herring. One that needs to be dealt with, but that rather derails the Phantom revelations.
In fact I think I'm going to end up having the actual revelations more or less dealt with in summary and/or offscreen after Raoul turns up (his arrival on the roof in pursuit of the other two being the element I'm currently trying to dispatch, and which may well turn out to be the end of the scene or even the chapter). The readers *know* what happened to Christine that night, and all that is necessary for the purposes of the story is to imply that the narrator now knows it too; we don't need a long limping scene of awkward conversation. And I'm trying to keep in mind that Christine needs to get back on stage to perform the rest of "Il Muto", so for pacing purposes we can't spend too long up on the roof! (Just as Hertha and Christine can't spend all that long in one-to-one talking-down-from-the-edge conversation if Raoul is supposed to be trying to follow/catch up with them -- and there's no way he wouldn't, given that in this version Christine's motivation for bolting from the stage appears to be that she is embarrassed at being caught in Raoul's arms by his wife, however innocent the intent.)
To be honest, the only bits of all this I remember finding at all easy or enjoyable to write were getting Hertha into Box 5 in the first place (her idea; after all, we know that it is the last available box that night, and she *doesn't* know that the Phantom has been making a fuss over it) and killing off Buquet. Not because I particularly hate him, but because it's a nice little horror scene. Hertha, of course, takes it for granted that this is an actual accident, since she has no reason to assume that the mystery blackmailer has any grudge against random backstage staff, and given the chaos of the sudden scene change a tragic accident is actually far from improbable at this point -- something which had never occurred to me...