DrabbleWriMo 8: Absent

[igenlode]

I actually managed to type up a whole chapter (3600 words) of Raoul 'playing Hornblower' on board the Requin this evening (and went on past midnight because I wanted to get to what happened next, which is a good sign). That brings us to 17 chapters and about 64,000 words -- and halfway through the second notebook of three-plus-seven-pages-of-the-fourth.

The result of which was that I started my daily drabble even later than previously...

It does occur to me that Broster's discursive style (which I think I've managed to capture quite well, especially where Roland is concerned!) is peculiarly unsuited to being adapted to the drabble format -- but then so is my own :-p (Possibly not coincidence, as she was a heavy influence on my formative years.)

Young Roland had ventured -- strictly against orders -- to Mirabel and come to grief, the Comte de Brencourt had been sent in quest of hidden treasure and been captured, and in consequence, de Kersaint reflected ruefully, he had been forced to dispatch the Abbé Chassin on that same errand and trust to his foster-brother's resource and calm good sense.

But the Abbé's absence left a void that he felt keenly. The memory of Mirabel haunted him, as it had done since that dreadful night when he had first learned of his wife's death -- when he had still been Gaston de Trélan.

Comments

[pedanther]

I had a similar style challenge a while back when I was writing a drabble inspired by a fairy tale, and it decided it wanted to be in the same prose style as the 19th-century version of the tale I'd just read.

(My own default style for fiction is less discursive, but tends to include a lot of directly reported speech, which poses its own challenges for writing drabbles.)

[igenlode]

From what I've observed, I got the impression that directly reported speech was pretty much the ideal content for drabbles -- it's certainly the only way to squeeze in more than about two paragraphs maximum ;-)
And I saw the fact that mine rarely seemed to have any dialogue at all as being a distinct handicap...

You can imply such a lot in so little space with a brief bit of dialogue, especially if it's a simple unattributed exchange between two characters.

[darlingdeathbird]

3600 words in a day... impressive!
I've gotten nowhere with writing this month - I'm embarrassed. lol

[igenlode]

Oh, that's just copy-typing from the existing manuscript (written over two years ago at this point)... transcription, not composition :-D
Admittedly the manuscript is quite heavily edited such that transcription is not altogether a trivial task!

I have managed to keep up the daily drabbles so far (nine days out of thirty), aided by the fact that in this case plot and characters are all pre-defined, so all I have to do is identify or extrapolate a scene to fit the current prompt. I am running into (self-imposed) logistical difficulties on that project, though -- it would be *infinitely* easier if I could just jump about in the timeline, rather than aiming to make all the drabbles consecutive.

Covering an entire plotline in a series of drabbles (as I did for Coming back) is one thing. Writing a series of fanfic drabbles to fit a series of random prompts is another thing. Trying to do both at once is very much more of a challenge!

(What I *haven't* done -- which I think really would be impossible -- is tried to make the drabbles actually narrate the whole story; the later ones do rely on elements already established, but big chunks of plot simply don't get mentioned at all. Like Roland's adventures at Mirabel, for instance...)