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Back to the beginning
I have my first tomatoes setting -- one fruit so far on the towel-tomatoes and one on the magazine tomatoes. (It's just as well the towel-tomatoes haven't grown any larger, as they are directly underneath my washing-line and already in hazard from trailing shirt-sleeves and other garments...)
I haven't done any work at all on Hertha for the last week, because -- prompted by Mei Bruges, who managed to track me down from fanfiction.net -- I have finally been attempting to rewrite the first chapter of Arctic Raoul to attempt to make it work better as a stand-alone story. My reaction to that opening chapter right from the start was that it was a complete non-starter ("the whole beginning that I was so pleased with turns out to be reams of flashback written with no intention of being anything other than fan-fiction, and it really shows"), but I've never known where even to start in trying to create a new opening to the story.
Mei read the first few chapters and suggested a potential opening structure (extending the first line into a 'goodbye' scene between two characters whom the reader has not met before, and getting the readers immediately invested in Raoul and Christine as briefly as possible) after which I could change around the order of some of the rest of the chapter and attempt to provide a brief outline of the canon plot points that get referenced later. In other words, I'm attempting to cut the flashback (Madame Valerius's undergarments are abandoned -- the answer to 'can we really get away with a detour in the very first page' is "no") while simultaneously providing more backstory, which implies adding *more* flashback...
I'm pretty happy with the 'starting from cold' opening scene (and Mei was very happy with it when she saw it); the rest of the chapter is currently still a desperate juggling act of trying to insert all the allusions in the right order -- notably, Madame Valerius's backstory and the introduction of Greta both occur much later in the chapter than before, which requires a new context -- and to work out which bits of canon are actually necessary without laying myself open to the accusation of bashing Erik, among other things. Christine's childhood, which is directly relevant to her history with Madame Valerius, is currently coming in for more explanation than the whole of the timespan of the canon plot.
As I said to someone or other back at the beginning, attempting to summarise the whole of the first half of "the Phantom of the Opera" in my first chapter *in addition* to making it apparent how and where this AU version splits off from canon is a bit of a tall order :-(
Part of the problem is that, because the story follows Raoul for the entirety of the next section, I really only do have this one chapter in which to establish Christine's situation. I suppose theoretically I could work some of her backstory with Erik into Raoul's part of the novel...
I haven't done any work at all on Hertha for the last week, because -- prompted by Mei Bruges, who managed to track me down from fanfiction.net -- I have finally been attempting to rewrite the first chapter of Arctic Raoul to attempt to make it work better as a stand-alone story. My reaction to that opening chapter right from the start was that it was a complete non-starter ("the whole beginning that I was so pleased with turns out to be reams of flashback written with no intention of being anything other than fan-fiction, and it really shows"), but I've never known where even to start in trying to create a new opening to the story.
Mei read the first few chapters and suggested a potential opening structure (extending the first line into a 'goodbye' scene between two characters whom the reader has not met before, and getting the readers immediately invested in Raoul and Christine as briefly as possible) after which I could change around the order of some of the rest of the chapter and attempt to provide a brief outline of the canon plot points that get referenced later. In other words, I'm attempting to cut the flashback (Madame Valerius's undergarments are abandoned -- the answer to 'can we really get away with a detour in the very first page' is "no") while simultaneously providing more backstory, which implies adding *more* flashback...
I'm pretty happy with the 'starting from cold' opening scene (and Mei was very happy with it when she saw it); the rest of the chapter is currently still a desperate juggling act of trying to insert all the allusions in the right order -- notably, Madame Valerius's backstory and the introduction of Greta both occur much later in the chapter than before, which requires a new context -- and to work out which bits of canon are actually necessary without laying myself open to the accusation of bashing Erik, among other things. Christine's childhood, which is directly relevant to her history with Madame Valerius, is currently coming in for more explanation than the whole of the timespan of the canon plot.
As I said to someone or other back at the beginning, attempting to summarise the whole of the first half of "the Phantom of the Opera" in my first chapter *in addition* to making it apparent how and where this AU version splits off from canon is a bit of a tall order :-(
Part of the problem is that, because the story follows Raoul for the entirety of the next section, I really only do have this one chapter in which to establish Christine's situation. I suppose theoretically I could work some of her backstory with Erik into Raoul's part of the novel...