Fic progress
26 April 2021 06:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeChapters 10 and 11 proofread and edited; I've nearly caught up to my typing again. I'd made a lot of changes earlier while typing up Ch.11, most of which I think were (a) intentional and (b) an improvement, and I've retained most of them, while trying to clarify the obscure fanfic back-references ("in Perros-Guirec", i.e. in the year that Christine first met Raoul, "that night in the snow", i.e. the night she had gone to pray at the church in the snow).
I didn't know what to do about the line "She turned her face up to his, and tried not to remember burning eyes above Apollo's lyre" as an allusion to Christine remembering Erik's fury at her being kissed by Raoul in the moment when she thinks she is about to be kissed by Erik... it's all just too multi-layered and complicated (and I don't want to bring Raoul or kisses explicitly into that moment, never mind that it's hard enough to elucidate in that case that the 'burning eyes' are not those of a passionate lover but of a jealous watcher!)
Which is probably an indication that it would be better to cut the reference altogether :-(
Unfortunately I appear to have lost the beta-reader who would have questioned specific unclear points -- at least, I haven't heard back from him on the subject of the story in months (despite having conversed on other matters on several occasions!)
Hertha is still just about ticking over -- at the rate of about one sentence this week. I thought I'd finished Ch.5, then ended up writing several extra paragraphs onto the end of it, and am now going back to the start of Ch. 6 and the difficulties of deciding how much of Christine's story to recapitulate from Hertha's viewpoint. In principle, as little as possible; what we want is Hertha's opinion of what she hears, not a re-telling of the same old plot.
I remember being rather disparaging of "The Vicomte of the Opera" for doing nothing with the idea of Raoul's wife save to retell the existing scenes with one extra character standing around; now that I try it myself, I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm achieving little more than doing the same thing :-(
I didn't know what to do about the line "She turned her face up to his, and tried not to remember burning eyes above Apollo's lyre" as an allusion to Christine remembering Erik's fury at her being kissed by Raoul in the moment when she thinks she is about to be kissed by Erik... it's all just too multi-layered and complicated (and I don't want to bring Raoul or kisses explicitly into that moment, never mind that it's hard enough to elucidate in that case that the 'burning eyes' are not those of a passionate lover but of a jealous watcher!)
Which is probably an indication that it would be better to cut the reference altogether :-(
Unfortunately I appear to have lost the beta-reader who would have questioned specific unclear points -- at least, I haven't heard back from him on the subject of the story in months (despite having conversed on other matters on several occasions!)
Hertha is still just about ticking over -- at the rate of about one sentence this week. I thought I'd finished Ch.5, then ended up writing several extra paragraphs onto the end of it, and am now going back to the start of Ch. 6 and the difficulties of deciding how much of Christine's story to recapitulate from Hertha's viewpoint. In principle, as little as possible; what we want is Hertha's opinion of what she hears, not a re-telling of the same old plot.
I remember being rather disparaging of "The Vicomte of the Opera" for doing nothing with the idea of Raoul's wife save to retell the existing scenes with one extra character standing around; now that I try it myself, I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm achieving little more than doing the same thing :-(