Fic progress
7 February 2023 01:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI'm actually well into my second chapter (or possibly) scene for Chick nor Child, or whatever it's going to be called -- I have very little sense of chapter length in this small fat notebook, but I think the first scene is probably about two and a half thousand words, though it feels longer. In which case I may end up running the two together as separate scenes in a one-shot rather than as individual chapters.
[Edit: apparently my word count was for 100 words per side rather than per page, which means the first chapter is more like 5000 words... which I must say feels more likely! It just shows how the small page width completely throws off my sense of how 'large' a block of manuscript is, though...]
I had the inspiration of ascribing a minor breakdown to the diligence, thus giving the characters a bit of a chance to talk in private while the loose horseshoe is replaced, rather than the entire conversation having to be carried out in front of a carriage full of strangers, but of course this extra subject matter made the chapter rather longer than it otherwise would have been :-p
I think the second chapter is going to be a good deal shorter because basically nothing happens; it's just Perrette looking back on the events of the previous story and the previous chapter from her own viewpoint -- and clarifying matters a bit, I hope. (N.B. Bernard the saddler is now Bertrand, since I wanted to use Gaspard for Perrette's husband and Bernard sounded too similar; what with all the extra family members now being mentioned in ch2 and the necessity for producing an entire coachload of fellow-passengers in ch1, the OC contingent for this story is getting very large, even though I've avoided naming a large number of them... and most of them only get a line of two of characterisation. I don't know how well this huge cast of background characters is going to work for the actual readers (and after coming up with similarly large numbers of OCs for Arctic Raoul and "High City on a Hill", I do wonder if my subconscious is simply trying to tell me that I ought to be writing original fiction; all I need to do is drop any reference to the canon plots...!)
I'm actually wondering if I ought to get a beta-reader to look over the first chapter simply in order to see whether it is sufficiently obvious what is going on if you *haven't* read (or remembered) the previous encounter with Perrette... because after all, realistically speaking, the entire 'Perrette incident' is only one paragraph or so in one chapter of a story that was written seven years ago, however vivid it may have remained in my head!
And since Raoul as narrator remains completely oblivious, we have the awkward situation where the reader is supposed to understand the implications to which the viewpoint character remains blind, preferably without making the protagonist look like a *complete* idiot in the process. The whole humour of the situation, such as it is, relies on the reader working out (or remembering) who Perrette and her daughter are.
[Edit: apparently my word count was for 100 words per side rather than per page, which means the first chapter is more like 5000 words... which I must say feels more likely! It just shows how the small page width completely throws off my sense of how 'large' a block of manuscript is, though...]
I had the inspiration of ascribing a minor breakdown to the diligence, thus giving the characters a bit of a chance to talk in private while the loose horseshoe is replaced, rather than the entire conversation having to be carried out in front of a carriage full of strangers, but of course this extra subject matter made the chapter rather longer than it otherwise would have been :-p
I think the second chapter is going to be a good deal shorter because basically nothing happens; it's just Perrette looking back on the events of the previous story and the previous chapter from her own viewpoint -- and clarifying matters a bit, I hope. (N.B. Bernard the saddler is now Bertrand, since I wanted to use Gaspard for Perrette's husband and Bernard sounded too similar; what with all the extra family members now being mentioned in ch2 and the necessity for producing an entire coachload of fellow-passengers in ch1, the OC contingent for this story is getting very large, even though I've avoided naming a large number of them... and most of them only get a line of two of characterisation. I don't know how well this huge cast of background characters is going to work for the actual readers (and after coming up with similarly large numbers of OCs for Arctic Raoul and "High City on a Hill", I do wonder if my subconscious is simply trying to tell me that I ought to be writing original fiction; all I need to do is drop any reference to the canon plots...!)
I'm actually wondering if I ought to get a beta-reader to look over the first chapter simply in order to see whether it is sufficiently obvious what is going on if you *haven't* read (or remembered) the previous encounter with Perrette... because after all, realistically speaking, the entire 'Perrette incident' is only one paragraph or so in one chapter of a story that was written seven years ago, however vivid it may have remained in my head!
And since Raoul as narrator remains completely oblivious, we have the awkward situation where the reader is supposed to understand the implications to which the viewpoint character remains blind, preferably without making the protagonist look like a *complete* idiot in the process. The whole humour of the situation, such as it is, relies on the reader working out (or remembering) who Perrette and her daughter are.
