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Depressing results on Broster-fic
I suddenly remembered (as a result of returning to the same spot where I was originally walking when I was developing the idea a month or so ago) a massive significant chunk of invented family backstory for de Brencourt that I had managed to completely wipe from my mind while struggling simply to complete the initial set-up scene... which is what I have been doing for the past month. Fortunately I don't think that particular detail is something the Comte talks about with Roland, but rather arises from talking *about* the somewhat awkward question of Roland with Gaston de Trélan, so it fits into the next scene and not this one... but progress overall has been pretty abysmal.
I think the best thing that can be said for the story is that it unexpectedly provides Roland's Marthe with a chance to shine after she had been entirely suppressed from the previous story in order to avoid complicating matters any further; the problem is that, being a strong-willed and fiery young woman, she then threatens to take over the scene altogether, which isn't altogether flattering to Roland! I am not particularly happy with this story even in comparison with the previous one, where at least I did feel that I had captured the characters' 'voices' reasonably accurately -- in this AU I am supposed to be writing older and wiser/sadder versions of them as they might have been if they had not, in fact, gone through that same crucible at the end of the book, and the task seems to be depressingly beyond me.
And it doesn't help that the previous story has been a quite resounding failure in audience terms even by the existing low standards of expectation; six weeks after publication it is still sitting on a record ZERO hits on AOL (at least my Perrette story got 4 views in its first 24 hours!), despite my having subsequently uploaded another of my Love Never Dies stories, which picked up 116 hits, with the story visible immediately below it on my profile having picked up a further 30 hits over the same period, and other recent-but-obscure stories like "White Knight" (likewise the *only* fic existing for its 'fandom') and "My dear Vicky" picking up a steady trickle of page views. But there is apparently no audience whatsoever for fanfic of that particular novel even among people who are reading my other work. I can't even put it down to the fic being necessarily bad, because no-one is in a position to know that -- it's not just that nobody *likes* the story, nobody has even seen it! (And while the brief summary may be at fault, it really isn't any worse than the summary for "My dear Vicky", and is in very much the same vein...)
So, in short, this current story is likely to take me months to write, without achieving any very great satisfaction as a result, and then is unlikely to find any audience once finished. Which does rather raise the question of why write it at all, then -- except that I have already sunk the emotional investment into imagining it, and the time into writing as much as I have so far, even if it does feel a bit contrived, and the scene I was ultimately aiming for both self-indulgent and uncomfortably revealing :-( And of course amateur psychoanalysis also suggests that this is a way of avoiding having to actually *do* anything about Arctic Raoul, since I've spent the time since the end of February in laboriously writing unsatisfactory Broster fanfic, instead of editing down my 126,000 word novel to try to make it nominally marketable!
I have finally filled up the pretty but glove-staining leather notebook that I started over a year ago, and am now working in a new one; I still have space in the back of the old diary that holds the end of Hertha, the entirety of "With the Best Intentions", and various rewrites, but I don't think it will be enough to hold the rest of this story at the current rate of sprawl/deletions, and am trying to avoid splitting a relatively short fic across too many different notebooks, as it becomes impossible to locate anything later :-O
This story was originally conceived as two scenes, the first being Roland running into de Brencourt in London and the second being his contriving a meeting between the Comte and Gaston and Valentine de Trélan (with the second scene being necessarily from de Brencourt's point of view, I think) -- but that may well end up as three scenes, since he has separate interviews with Gaston and with Valentine (this being implicitly by Valentine's request rather than tact on Gaston's part, but it may be the latter...) One thing it should enable me to do is to show a more 'realistic' view of a living Gaston with his admitted faults, rather than the idealised version we see in the memories of the hero-worshipping Roland after his father's death.
I think the best thing that can be said for the story is that it unexpectedly provides Roland's Marthe with a chance to shine after she had been entirely suppressed from the previous story in order to avoid complicating matters any further; the problem is that, being a strong-willed and fiery young woman, she then threatens to take over the scene altogether, which isn't altogether flattering to Roland! I am not particularly happy with this story even in comparison with the previous one, where at least I did feel that I had captured the characters' 'voices' reasonably accurately -- in this AU I am supposed to be writing older and wiser/sadder versions of them as they might have been if they had not, in fact, gone through that same crucible at the end of the book, and the task seems to be depressingly beyond me.
And it doesn't help that the previous story has been a quite resounding failure in audience terms even by the existing low standards of expectation; six weeks after publication it is still sitting on a record ZERO hits on AOL (at least my Perrette story got 4 views in its first 24 hours!), despite my having subsequently uploaded another of my Love Never Dies stories, which picked up 116 hits, with the story visible immediately below it on my profile having picked up a further 30 hits over the same period, and other recent-but-obscure stories like "White Knight" (likewise the *only* fic existing for its 'fandom') and "My dear Vicky" picking up a steady trickle of page views. But there is apparently no audience whatsoever for fanfic of that particular novel even among people who are reading my other work. I can't even put it down to the fic being necessarily bad, because no-one is in a position to know that -- it's not just that nobody *likes* the story, nobody has even seen it! (And while the brief summary may be at fault, it really isn't any worse than the summary for "My dear Vicky", and is in very much the same vein...)
So, in short, this current story is likely to take me months to write, without achieving any very great satisfaction as a result, and then is unlikely to find any audience once finished. Which does rather raise the question of why write it at all, then -- except that I have already sunk the emotional investment into imagining it, and the time into writing as much as I have so far, even if it does feel a bit contrived, and the scene I was ultimately aiming for both self-indulgent and uncomfortably revealing :-( And of course amateur psychoanalysis also suggests that this is a way of avoiding having to actually *do* anything about Arctic Raoul, since I've spent the time since the end of February in laboriously writing unsatisfactory Broster fanfic, instead of editing down my 126,000 word novel to try to make it nominally marketable!
I have finally filled up the pretty but glove-staining leather notebook that I started over a year ago, and am now working in a new one; I still have space in the back of the old diary that holds the end of Hertha, the entirety of "With the Best Intentions", and various rewrites, but I don't think it will be enough to hold the rest of this story at the current rate of sprawl/deletions, and am trying to avoid splitting a relatively short fic across too many different notebooks, as it becomes impossible to locate anything later :-O
This story was originally conceived as two scenes, the first being Roland running into de Brencourt in London and the second being his contriving a meeting between the Comte and Gaston and Valentine de Trélan (with the second scene being necessarily from de Brencourt's point of view, I think) -- but that may well end up as three scenes, since he has separate interviews with Gaston and with Valentine (this being implicitly by Valentine's request rather than tact on Gaston's part, but it may be the latter...) One thing it should enable me to do is to show a more 'realistic' view of a living Gaston with his admitted faults, rather than the idealised version we see in the memories of the hero-worshipping Roland after his father's death.