Plant and fic progress
18 October 2024 10:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeUnexpectedly we now have some *yellow* mesembryanthemums among those which had self-sowed as weeds in the tomato pots -- every other plant this year has been the dark pink! So, as with the Swan River daisies, the genetic variation is still apparently out there in theory. But as with the pink Swan River daisy I shan't get any seed off this particular plant. (I am still very sceptical about getting any ripe seed from the blue Swan River daisies either.)
The chilli that was orange at one end is now red most of the way down, and some of the others have gone orange. One of the deep-down chillies on the other plant has gone orange, and some of the neighbouring fruit on that plant are now tinged. It really is a bit late in the year, though, and both plants are still flowering, which means they are still far too early in their cycle -- it really is exactly the same situation as the dark-leaf chillies from last year. But I didn't even attempt to grow those on so have no idea if the seed had ripened...
Both the spring onions and now the chives are completely infested with blackfly sucking them limp, despite my repeated efforts to clear the blades of the spring onions manually over the past few weeks -- they are quite unusable as herbs :( I suppose I could try the soapy water trick. Ironically chives are apparently recommended as a companion plant to *deter* blackfly!
I think I have finally managed to construct a final couple of paragraphs on my story, though it took me five days to write as many sentences, and I ended up using a different motif from the one I thought I was going to. On rereading and typing up I shall probably find these two chapters horribly repetitive; I have already noticed that Valentine uses the word 'friend' too often, although each individually was supposed to have the same impact as in the original novel (the relevant scene in which she does so having never actually occurred in this AU, since Gaston is not dead!)
I finished typing up Chapter 1, which runs to about six thousand words. The obvious set of titles for the three chapters, thematically, would be "Roland", "Gaston" and "Valentine" (though that is a slight spoiler for Gaston's surprise appearance in the second chapter, assuming anyone actually reads chapter titles beforehand -- they do pop up in FFnet notifications, or used to before a bug turned up which gave the Ch1 title for every notification). But of course modern readers now expect names at the top of chapters to reflect the identity of the narrator for that chapter in a multi-viewpoint story; one would have thought that in any decent book it ought to be possible to distinguish the voices of the various different characters without PoV labels, but apparently not. And it's slightly confusing in that Roland *is* the viewpoint character for the first chapter....
(But nobody is going to read it anyway, certainly not that sort of random reader, so there really isn't any point in worrying over that sort of thing.)
Edit: I decided to go for Reunion, Rapprochement and Revelation, since 'rapprochement' nicely describes Gaston and de Brencourt's tentative movement towards one another in Ch2, and 'revelation' is more widely applicable to Ch3 than 'rebirth', which was my original thought. Rapprochement is of course French, but then so, as it happens, are the two other terms!
The chilli that was orange at one end is now red most of the way down, and some of the others have gone orange. One of the deep-down chillies on the other plant has gone orange, and some of the neighbouring fruit on that plant are now tinged. It really is a bit late in the year, though, and both plants are still flowering, which means they are still far too early in their cycle -- it really is exactly the same situation as the dark-leaf chillies from last year. But I didn't even attempt to grow those on so have no idea if the seed had ripened...
Both the spring onions and now the chives are completely infested with blackfly sucking them limp, despite my repeated efforts to clear the blades of the spring onions manually over the past few weeks -- they are quite unusable as herbs :( I suppose I could try the soapy water trick. Ironically chives are apparently recommended as a companion plant to *deter* blackfly!
I think I have finally managed to construct a final couple of paragraphs on my story, though it took me five days to write as many sentences, and I ended up using a different motif from the one I thought I was going to. On rereading and typing up I shall probably find these two chapters horribly repetitive; I have already noticed that Valentine uses the word 'friend' too often, although each individually was supposed to have the same impact as in the original novel (the relevant scene in which she does so having never actually occurred in this AU, since Gaston is not dead!)
I finished typing up Chapter 1, which runs to about six thousand words. The obvious set of titles for the three chapters, thematically, would be "Roland", "Gaston" and "Valentine" (though that is a slight spoiler for Gaston's surprise appearance in the second chapter, assuming anyone actually reads chapter titles beforehand -- they do pop up in FFnet notifications, or used to before a bug turned up which gave the Ch1 title for every notification). But of course modern readers now expect names at the top of chapters to reflect the identity of the narrator for that chapter in a multi-viewpoint story; one would have thought that in any decent book it ought to be possible to distinguish the voices of the various different characters without PoV labels, but apparently not. And it's slightly confusing in that Roland *is* the viewpoint character for the first chapter....
(But nobody is going to read it anyway, certainly not that sort of random reader, so there really isn't any point in worrying over that sort of thing.)
Edit: I decided to go for Reunion, Rapprochement and Revelation, since 'rapprochement' nicely describes Gaston and de Brencourt's tentative movement towards one another in Ch2, and 'revelation' is more widely applicable to Ch3 than 'rebirth', which was my original thought. Rapprochement is of course French, but then so, as it happens, are the two other terms!