Fic despondency

[igenlode]

I'm still ploughing on very, very laboriously with "An Outsider and A Foreigner" (which I keep wanting to call "An Officer and A Gentleman) and am still continuing to be unhappy about it. The whole thing seems to have left the realms of fan-fiction (or of POTO, anyway) and degenerated into some kind of rather amateurish historical romance -- if I thought I was doing *well* at the historical elements I wouldn't mind, but I'm not nearly as confident about it as I am with all the Raoul/Christine stories, where all the references and social allusions just seemed to float fluently into place.

And having been watching Paris Police 1900 on BBC1 as 'visual research' (it's only twenty years later, so the streets/interiors etc. won't surely have changed *that* much? After all, I've already been basing things visually on La Poupée Sanglante, which is set around 1910), which is basically based entirely around anti-Jewish rioting, it makes the relatively minor element of Hertha feeling herself to be 'an outsider' because of her Jewishness -- which I'd established for plot purposes as her *grandparents* having converted for convenience' sake, which is enough to 'taint' her racially without the family actually having to be practising Jews -- seem even more potentially tasteless.

I already knew from my research (that post was a whole year ago -- ouch!) that Vienna was in fact considerably more tolerant than France at this era, so Hertha's father 'jumped the wrong way' from that point of view, but the result of that has turned out to be this whole *massive* ongoing storyline involving Hertha's dead brother Rudi and her mother's resulting struggles with clinical depression, originally introduced as more or less a throwaway piece of backstory to explain why they left Vienna in the first place. Now I've invoked her mother's condition yet again, as an excuse/rationale for Hertha to walk out on Raoul, and at this point I think the whole Graupmann family story -- like the baby's progress, which was originally just a plot device to keep Hertha out of the main action and tie Raoul into his marriage, but which has been becoming a increasingly significant presence from Hertha's perspective and hence to the reader's awareness -- is going to have to be tied up in some satisfactory fashion as well, after being invoked so often. And I have no plan as to that at all :-(

I think we really *are* going to have to continue up to the baby's birth, at least as an epilogue; it's got to the stage where it would be outright weird just to say 'she's pregnant... she's more and more pregnant... oh, the story stops there'. My immediate thought is that maybe we could have a little cameo where the child is born and Raoul suggests that they should call it Rodolphe as an allusion back to Rudi, thus showing that he is touchingly in sympathy with her family's struggles ;-p

Although exactly how he is supposed to be conscious of the significance when we never see Hertha *talk* about her brother, only refer to him repeatedly as a background presence in her thoughts, I don't know! We can probably presume that she *did* talk about Rudi's death at the time when she first came to Paris and met Raoul, and that she still mentions him at times 'off-camera' when they're not having fraught Phantom-relevant conversations...

I suppose one very clichéd outcome would be to have Hertha end up in premature labour as a result of the general uproar around the abortive "Don Juan", but that would be very premature (she will be about seven months pregnant at that point), the child would probably die, and in any case it would make the whole thing even more Catherine Cookson than it is already becoming. Besides, I don't *want* the emphasis to be on babies at that point, but on Hertha as a person not a mother; the only original intention was for Christine to be consciously hurt in the final scene by the fact that Hertha has a child from Raoul and she, Christine will never have that (or potentially any other child, unless she takes up with someone else). In fact the scene between them as I'd envisaged it pretty much requires Hertha *not* to be in labour at that point, although I suppose it could theoretically be tweaked easily enough if I wanted to :-p

But I don't want to. Besides, having the child run to full term gives us a opportunity to establish what has happened to the characters in the meantime.

---

Looking back through the tags on this project reveals the fact that I have been feeling despondent about it since December last year -- in fact, a lot of the elements in that post (over-promised in advance, Arctic Raoul being actively good in comparison, constantly repeating "so tired", dare not show distress) are literal verbatim echoes of things that were running through my mind earlier today. So basically I have been feeling hopeless about this story more or less ever since I started writing it... (the obvious answer to which is 'well, stop writing it, then! But as in the bus stop fallacy, I've spent too much time on it already to want to do that.)

At the moment my thought process is more or less that, unlike Arctic Raoul, it's never going to rise above the level of 'fan fiction', but that I never had any plans to publish it and that most POTO fan-fiction is amateurish historical romance anyway so the readers won't care -- or notice. (To be honest, however good it might be I don't think many people would ever be all that interested in reading an OC/Raoul insert anyway; the one that hurts is "Blue Remembered Hills", which *was* good, which adhered scrupulously to both canons and should potentially have satisfied fans of both, which I put four years into, and which very few people -- so far as I could tell -- ever even looked at.)

Comments

[betweensunandmoon]

"Rudi" makes me think of Rudolph Valentino. :P

My immediate thought is that maybe we could have a little cameo where the child is born and Raoul suggests that they should call it Rodolphe as an allusion back to Rudi, thus showing that he is touchingly in sympathy with her family's struggles ;-p

Sounds like Raoul. :)

[igenlode]

I've been assuming he was a 'Rudolf', but it's never explicitly stated (though I did get the 'Thaddeus' for Hertha's father officially into 'canon', even if not the 'Tadeusz' connection!)

Of course if the child is a girl, this time round one really *can't* suggest calling it Christine :-P

[pedanther]

I liked "Blue Remembered Hills", although I don't remember if I said so at the time. (I generally don't leave feedback on ff.net because I hate the interface, and I might not have got around to saying anything here.)

Do you have any plans to try it out on the AO3 audience?

[igenlode]

Very vaguely (the interface there is better for crossovers, in that you get twice the exposure instead of half...)

But the re-conversion to HTML/re-upload process is pretty painful, most notably because I've told myself I've really got to archive all this stuff on my *own* website in parallel as well this time in case I lose access to it again. Which means I have to manually construct all the shell pages and surrounding navigation links and structure for each and every chapter I upload there as well, which is a real pain for multi-chapter stories in particular... and of course the script I set out to write to automate that process is stuck in an unfinished state, and I'd told myself I wasn't going to upload anything else until I'd actually got that working!

So extremely long stories are definitely better left until I do have the process automated. Which of course may be late or never, but puts "Blue Remembered Hills" right down at the bottom of the priority list in either case. ("The Choices of Raoul", as an early work, was actually uploaded to my site *already*, and it still took me months to get round to constructing an acceptable version of the 'bonus material' I'd included in that upload but which was not allowable on fanfiction.net. To be frank, with hindsight I think that was probably a self-indulgent mistake anyway, but having told myself I was going to do it I've now done it.)

Currently top of the conversion priority list is "The Sons of Éléonore", which I've actually had a request for and which has the relative merrit of being only three chapters long. And I'm very fond of it myself!

[darlingdeathbird]

It's a shame you're not feeling very happy with your story... I hate it when there's long-term frustration and insecurity, or feelings of stagnancy even though I really want to write something, and finish it. "Well then do you really even /want/ to?" Is what I'll ask myself. The truth is: yes, yes I do, BUT I've taken the story somewhere I don't know how to navigate, and many possibilities have become off-limits because of decisions made that dictated the future more than I had foreseen. Maybe it would help you if you dialed back to wherever you were in the narrative that last made you feel like you knew what you were doing and liked where the story was going. Sometimes throwing it back on the operating table and disassembling the most recent work helps get your brain out of that quagmire. Occasionally, I have to just scrap what I made happen and imagine alternatives, and sometimes while imagining an alternative I'm lucky enough to have ideas following it that spring up in my head and immediately clear the fog. Anyway, I wish you good luck figuring it out.

[igenlode]

Locating the 'wrong fork' and ripping the story back to that point can be the source of great relief (in fact, that's generally how you know when you've correctly identified the problem in the story, because it feels so much *better* when you've discarded that bit). Although that's already happened twice in this story :-(

But in this case I don't think it's an issue with a specific plot choice; I pinned it down I think fairly accurately (because later on I felt so much more confident tackling subsequent material where I did have a canon skeleton) to feeling that I was trying to write an original novel about a relationship that I just wasn't qualified to handle. Masquerading Hertha for the readers as Philippe in Chapter 1 was fun. Trying to write her dealing with 'there are three of us in this marriage' and coping with pregnancy, with everything being cribbed at second-hand from novels that I've read, leaves me floundering through cotton wool. But unfortunately those were both pretty central to the original concept of the whole story, rather than things I specifically improvised onto the plot because they seemed like a good idea at the time they occurred to me (like sticking in a threatened miscarriage, which wasn't expected to form part of the graveyard scene at all).

The stupid thing is that I don't have any trouble at all writing about marriage for *Christine* and Raoul, even though canon tells us nothing whatsoever about it for POTO and leaves a ten-year unexplained hole in it for LND. I thoroughly enjoy making up original characters with original backstory, and improvising my own backstory for the canon characters. I would have thought I could have written an original historical romance, if I'd been challenged to do so... but apparently not :-(

Or perhaps the problem is that I don't know how to handle a marriage that *isn't* a romance, even though in many ways that's actually one of my favourite relationships to speculate about; but no, I don't think that's it. I think I've actually toed the line quite nicely over the fact that Raoul obviously does care about Hertha a lot, but isn't 'in love with' her, while making it increasingly apparent that she *is* in love with him, but isn't conscious of it or isn't admitting it to herself. The problem is more one of having her react consistently and credibly to Raoul/Christine -- and since the only model I have is that of agonizing resentment and jealousy, which is very handy for Phantom/Raoul/Christine but doesn't function at all in this context, I'm a bit lost as to how a young married woman in this situation would believably behave.

I wasn't *intending* to have her blow up and quarrel with her husband (not least because I need to have her in Raoul's vicinity for plot purposes in subsequent episodes!), but things seemed to have got to a stage where continuing to turn a blind eye just didn't fit any more. And yet frankly it hasn't made a lot of difference, because apart from the fact that she has physically moved out of the house they are back on more or less the same slightly self-conscious footing as before... Part of the problem is the whole harem situation where everybody is in love with Raoul no matter what he does (while he, poor chap, to be fair, is trying to do as little as possible in that regard).

But doing all those "Yellow Poppy" drabbles as an experience really did demonstrate that what I enjoy is the act of working *within* the existing framework; weaving variations around a known solid base and tying everything back in with satisfying nods to the original. Trying to get one set of immutable prompts to work without compromising an equally non-negotiable pre-existing plot was *difficult*, but it was also a lot easier than trying to go completely freeform with no guiding constraints whatsoever. Which suggests, depressingly, that I'm not actually all that hot stuff as a composer in my own right; just an inspired arranger :-(