Main draft finished!
10 March 2014 12:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeUnbelievably, I've actually completed circa 9,000 words of story in five days: Waiting in the Wings took three weeks, and I thought that was doing well. Of course the fact that I actually wrote more or less non-stop for the whole of Friday and then Sunday (rather than struggling to achieve a 400-word quota over a matter of hours) helped! I'm no longer quite so astounded as to how I managed to write my first 50,000-word novel in a month or so, since I remember pouring out dialogue at much the same rate onto sheet after sheet of paper. It's so much easier when you've only just invented it, and are frothing up with new ideas and backstory even as you go along... (I suppose the moral of that is to have nice simple plot ideas, so that you can get them down on the page quickly :-p)
Raoul acquired an impromptu limp and an illegitimate daughter more or less on the spur of the moment while I was writing this: the injury seemed to make psychological sense at the time (as a wound from the Great War, it's a badge of honour to counteract his sense of public dishonour), and the little girl was an attempt to show that he has in fact been getting on with his life quite adequately away from Christine... although to fulfil the remit, it had to be an irregular relationship to demonstrate that the two protagonists were both still 'single'! (And I confess that it always seemed rather unfair to me that because Christine has Gustave, Raoul therefore can't have any descendants at all, though making it a girl was a gesture at the awkward situation that might ensue between an older and a younger son where the latter was illegitimate and the former was completely unrelated to his supposed father...)
Raoul acquired an impromptu limp and an illegitimate daughter more or less on the spur of the moment while I was writing this: the injury seemed to make psychological sense at the time (as a wound from the Great War, it's a badge of honour to counteract his sense of public dishonour), and the little girl was an attempt to show that he has in fact been getting on with his life quite adequately away from Christine... although to fulfil the remit, it had to be an irregular relationship to demonstrate that the two protagonists were both still 'single'! (And I confess that it always seemed rather unfair to me that because Christine has Gustave, Raoul therefore can't have any descendants at all, though making it a girl was a gesture at the awkward situation that might ensue between an older and a younger son where the latter was illegitimate and the former was completely unrelated to his supposed father...)