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Fic progress
I'm stuck (again) on Arctic Raoul because I need to re-order the start of the next chapter so that it doesn't start with a sentence or two in the 'present day' and then spend half its length in a massive flashback with scene dividers etc. before picking up the present conversation again... which wouldn't *inherently* be a problem, provided only that the reader was able to pick up on the intended chronological structure, which, as I suspected myself on re-reading, is apparently not the case. Only I don't know how to do the rearrangement.
('Simply write all the events in order' is the obvious solution, except that I now remember that the whole reason for the flashback in the first place was to enable me to skim and summarise the events in question, i.e. avoid writing them in full. And I'm going to need a new start to the chapter which will pretty much require me to write at least *some* of them in full in order to supply it. At the moment I'm sort of thinking about doing d'Artois' early-morning arrival and dash to the telegraph station, which were based on Nansen's account of his own return from the "Fram" expedition... unfortunately that probably requires me to know a bit more about the setting in late-nineteenth-century Tromsø than I currently do.)
I am also still stuck on typing up chapter 7 of "High City on a Hill", which is clearly going to be another six-thousand-word chapter; it feels incredibly long already, although in fact I'm only just over five thousand words in. Mainly this is because we've already had the introduction of the new setting at Beauvais, the introduction of the pregnancy material, the whole birthday party episode, and then Hertha's visit back to Paris, with a Hertha/Raoul scene still to come -- I keep wondering if I ought to split it into two chapters, and coming back to the conclusion that this just isn't an option. Partly because I've used the exact same structure as in the "Arctic Raoul" chapter, with the whole chapter being enclosed within the nominal frame of a conversation with Madame Firmin which is mentioned right at the start, then taken up again after multiple intervening scenes; partly because that would mean choosing two new chapter titles, and I had enough trouble, in a chapter with very little direct reported speech, in getting this one ("It Will Be At Midsummer"), referring to the pregnancy storyline overall. Partly because the whole thing is a single "entr'acte" intended to cover the months between "Il Muto" and the Masquerade before we return to the canon material (which is why so much happens in it)...
And in fact we've already *had* one six-thousand-word chapter, Ch4 (Christine's backstory, mostly), and I suspect there are more long ones to come, from what I remember of the page counts. So although it feels incredibly long, thanks to its multiple scenes and sequences of events, it's actually not inconsistent with the rest of the story.
('Simply write all the events in order' is the obvious solution, except that I now remember that the whole reason for the flashback in the first place was to enable me to skim and summarise the events in question, i.e. avoid writing them in full. And I'm going to need a new start to the chapter which will pretty much require me to write at least *some* of them in full in order to supply it. At the moment I'm sort of thinking about doing d'Artois' early-morning arrival and dash to the telegraph station, which were based on Nansen's account of his own return from the "Fram" expedition... unfortunately that probably requires me to know a bit more about the setting in late-nineteenth-century Tromsø than I currently do.)
I am also still stuck on typing up chapter 7 of "High City on a Hill", which is clearly going to be another six-thousand-word chapter; it feels incredibly long already, although in fact I'm only just over five thousand words in. Mainly this is because we've already had the introduction of the new setting at Beauvais, the introduction of the pregnancy material, the whole birthday party episode, and then Hertha's visit back to Paris, with a Hertha/Raoul scene still to come -- I keep wondering if I ought to split it into two chapters, and coming back to the conclusion that this just isn't an option. Partly because I've used the exact same structure as in the "Arctic Raoul" chapter, with the whole chapter being enclosed within the nominal frame of a conversation with Madame Firmin which is mentioned right at the start, then taken up again after multiple intervening scenes; partly because that would mean choosing two new chapter titles, and I had enough trouble, in a chapter with very little direct reported speech, in getting this one ("It Will Be At Midsummer"), referring to the pregnancy storyline overall. Partly because the whole thing is a single "entr'acte" intended to cover the months between "Il Muto" and the Masquerade before we return to the canon material (which is why so much happens in it)...
And in fact we've already *had* one six-thousand-word chapter, Ch4 (Christine's backstory, mostly), and I suspect there are more long ones to come, from what I remember of the page counts. So although it feels incredibly long, thanks to its multiple scenes and sequences of events, it's actually not inconsistent with the rest of the story.
| Chapter lengths: | |
| Ch1: "Can it be Christine?" | 3551 |
| Ch2: "We Can Make it Work" | 4754 |
| Ch3: "As if Awoken from a Dream" | 3914 |
| Ch4: "She Won't Thank You For It" | 6078 |
| Ch5: "An Accident... Simply an Accident" | 4480 |
| Ch6: "He'll Stop at Nothing" | 5402 |
| Ch7: "It Will Be At Midsummer" | 5166 so far |