All caught up
29 April 2021 01:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeRight, I've finally completed the proofreading on all the chapters of Arctic Raoul that I've currently got typed up (twelve of them totalling 44,500 words). Again, I'd made quite a few active changes while doing the typing-up, however many weeks/months ago that was [edit: 4th March], and elected to retain almost all of them — just one I think was probably the result of an accidental skipping of a line during transcription, and I decided it was an improvement anyway.
I did a little more tinkering with the text; the only line that really gave me trouble was the one about the lonely herdsman sitting with his wife (implicit contradiction), whiling away time while (unfortunate repetition) whittling with his knife (undesirable rhyme). He is now an 'unknown' herdsman with a 'goodwife' by the fire — and an 'and' instead of a 'while' ;-p
It's amazing how long that sort of reworking always takes...
Anyway, the whole thing has now been printed off (considerably delayed by the printer's paper feed dying of apparent old age in the middle of the print run, with taking it to bits failing to fix the problem) and has been taken down to the post-box, albeit at about 1.30am. I took the opportunity to reread the entire Christine-section, and found a few more typos that had clearly slipped through previous proofreadings... but it's good. I still think that, of its kind, it's good. Maybe morbid and implausible and attempting for hyper-realism where it's not appropriate (a few too many implied bodily functions), but it does what I wanted; it takes Christine to a mental place where it seems perfectly reasonable for her to want to marry Erik — tweaking the tails of all the E/C fans out there :-p — and then snaps her out into a perception of how insane it all is, and presents her as determined to fight for her own freedom. She saves herself, as every good Christine should.
It also makes it crystal clear, after all Raoul's confusion and angst of the preceding chapters, that she is in love with Raoul, and has been all along. Raoul/Christine relationship, Christine/Erik relationship, and Christine/Kulla relationship; all essential, all complicated, all paced about right, all established and worked through, with some pretty nice writing. Whether it stands up outside the fanfic context — where it's a given that readers actually care about how Christine relates to Erik, and don't question the plausibility of his going to extreme lengths to hold her captive — is another question. Whether it would be particularly popular even as fanfic is a question in its own right (but I think we know the answer to that one...) But it does what I wanted, and I think it does it well.
I did a little more tinkering with the text; the only line that really gave me trouble was the one about the lonely herdsman sitting with his wife (implicit contradiction), whiling away time while (unfortunate repetition) whittling with his knife (undesirable rhyme). He is now an 'unknown' herdsman with a 'goodwife' by the fire — and an 'and' instead of a 'while' ;-p
It's amazing how long that sort of reworking always takes...
Anyway, the whole thing has now been printed off (considerably delayed by the printer's paper feed dying of apparent old age in the middle of the print run, with taking it to bits failing to fix the problem) and has been taken down to the post-box, albeit at about 1.30am. I took the opportunity to reread the entire Christine-section, and found a few more typos that had clearly slipped through previous proofreadings... but it's good. I still think that, of its kind, it's good. Maybe morbid and implausible and attempting for hyper-realism where it's not appropriate (a few too many implied bodily functions), but it does what I wanted; it takes Christine to a mental place where it seems perfectly reasonable for her to want to marry Erik — tweaking the tails of all the E/C fans out there :-p — and then snaps her out into a perception of how insane it all is, and presents her as determined to fight for her own freedom. She saves herself, as every good Christine should.
It also makes it crystal clear, after all Raoul's confusion and angst of the preceding chapters, that she is in love with Raoul, and has been all along. Raoul/Christine relationship, Christine/Erik relationship, and Christine/Kulla relationship; all essential, all complicated, all paced about right, all established and worked through, with some pretty nice writing. Whether it stands up outside the fanfic context — where it's a given that readers actually care about how Christine relates to Erik, and don't question the plausibility of his going to extreme lengths to hold her captive — is another question. Whether it would be particularly popular even as fanfic is a question in its own right (but I think we know the answer to that one...) But it does what I wanted, and I think it does it well.
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Date: 2021-04-29 01:03 pm (UTC)