Chapter edits
21 February 2022 02:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeRight, I think (after a month or so of agonized procrastination and the requirement for two multi-mile walks in order to generate 300 words or so of fresh text) that I have finally managed to patch the three-winters problem in Arctic Raoul. I ended up adopting the suggestion of postponing the Spitsbergen bid by six months, so that it takes place at the start of the third winter instead of the end of the second, and, ironically, deleting the entire paragraph describing the actual journey across the ice. Ironically, because having just finished Cherry-Garrard -- who is truly excellent, by the way -- I am now equipped to write it in vivid detail... but with the additional material now preceding it, that section no longer fitted the pacing of the passage.
(In fact I was tempted to omit any mention of the return of the scouting party, thus tacitly implying their demise; but that seemed a bit dark for what we see of the expedition later, and it was possible that I'd even written explicitly of the achievement of eventually bringing them back without losing a man! So I managed to insert a sentence of return which serves, I hope, to traverse from the reported gloom of the second winter back to the cheerful self-reliance of the party Raoul actually meets up with...)
I then simply altered the following text to remove the statement "It was at the onset of that second winter"; changing that passage alone would, of course, have technically solved the problem (and in fact I'd already tried tweaking the offending 'second'), but I'm happier with the year-long gap at least partially filled in. Frankly, after reading about Franklin eating his boots and Cherry-Garrard's despairing comment that a third winter on the Antarctic ice would have driven them all insane, I can't feel that Leroux's timescale is particularly realistic, but he does explicitly say that nothing had been heard of them for three years (l'expédition du d'Artois, dont on n'avait pas de nouvelles depuis trois ans).
So now I have to get back to proofreading and trying to improve the chapter overall. The brotherly bonding between Raoul and Lancard in the final scene doesn't seem nearly as good now as it did when I was writing it :-(
I eventually uploaded the first chapter of the rechristened "High City on a Hill" to AO3 -- having tweaked the opening according to ArkTaisch's suggestion, to establish the first-person narrator from the start. And it seems to be doing pretty well by AO3 standards, getting 2 comments and a subscription within a couple of days. (It has also generated a mini-bulge in people evidently checking out my other published stories, which my new stats software allows me to detect!)
Now I have to finalise the second chapter, which is the one that is almost entirely OC backstory... (also, I do wonder how well the story is likely to do once people realize that introducing Hertha does *not* conveniently make Christine available to pair up with the Phantom).
(In fact I was tempted to omit any mention of the return of the scouting party, thus tacitly implying their demise; but that seemed a bit dark for what we see of the expedition later, and it was possible that I'd even written explicitly of the achievement of eventually bringing them back without losing a man! So I managed to insert a sentence of return which serves, I hope, to traverse from the reported gloom of the second winter back to the cheerful self-reliance of the party Raoul actually meets up with...)
I then simply altered the following text to remove the statement "It was at the onset of that second winter"; changing that passage alone would, of course, have technically solved the problem (and in fact I'd already tried tweaking the offending 'second'), but I'm happier with the year-long gap at least partially filled in. Frankly, after reading about Franklin eating his boots and Cherry-Garrard's despairing comment that a third winter on the Antarctic ice would have driven them all insane, I can't feel that Leroux's timescale is particularly realistic, but he does explicitly say that nothing had been heard of them for three years (l'expédition du d'Artois, dont on n'avait pas de nouvelles depuis trois ans).
So now I have to get back to proofreading and trying to improve the chapter overall. The brotherly bonding between Raoul and Lancard in the final scene doesn't seem nearly as good now as it did when I was writing it :-(
I eventually uploaded the first chapter of the rechristened "High City on a Hill" to AO3 -- having tweaked the opening according to ArkTaisch's suggestion, to establish the first-person narrator from the start. And it seems to be doing pretty well by AO3 standards, getting 2 comments and a subscription within a couple of days. (It has also generated a mini-bulge in people evidently checking out my other published stories, which my new stats software allows me to detect!)
Now I have to finalise the second chapter, which is the one that is almost entirely OC backstory... (also, I do wonder how well the story is likely to do once people realize that introducing Hertha does *not* conveniently make Christine available to pair up with the Phantom).
