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Fic despondency
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.)
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.)
no subject
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. :)
no subject
Of course if the child is a girl, this time round one really *can't* suggest calling it Christine :-P