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Downton Abbey story
As a result of a Spring Giftfic Exchange, I'm now committed to writing a fan-fiction story set in Downton Abbey -- not a fandom that I volunteered for (apparently it was so difficult to match people up that despite asking us to list at least five fandoms that we might be able to write stories for and five that we would like to receive, we almost all ended up being asked to do something that we hadn't actually offered!)
I'm not sure I'm particularly looking forward to receiving my 'gift', either, as I shall be expected to express enthusiasm and gratitude whether or not I feel it (and knowing me, the odds are probably against my feeling it). Probably not a good idea to go in for this sort of event; I'm not quite sure why I did it, except that they were eager for more people to participate -- I never could resist being very highly sought-after -- and I suppose I thought the challenge would be good for me. After all, I've got two decent stories recently out of challenge prompts: "To Ease Your Troubled Mind" and "Blue Remembered Hills" (although that one is still a long-running continuing saga: I've 'finished' it, but I'm suffering major doubts. But that's another story.)
Plus I don't really want to spend the rest of my life writing romances for Raoul and Christine: if I had been asked to write in the 'Phantom' fandom, that being one of the possibilities I volunteered, I was planning to make a point of writing for some other character. I never actually planned to write more than one "Love Never Dies" story in the first place, and feel that I really have milked out the possibilities of that vein with this last one -- of which the first chapter inevitably covers much the same material as the opening chapters of "The Choices of Raoul de Chagny", even though I took pains to create a different backstory for the characters this time.
On the other hand, I do have a great deal of backstory worked out for my putative WW2 French Resistance story (the Double Agents de Chagny), not to mention pages and pages of research notes for it, so it would be a pity to allow a mere absence of plot(!) to kill off that one. If it hadn't been for the crossover challenge that led to "Blue Remembered Hills", I should probably be writing 1940s AU fiction now... And I had a vague idea that it might be possible to use the 'Breton' concept -- an AU where Raoul is no Viscount but a Breton fisher-boy and events still turn out just the same, thus demonstrating that his rank doesn't make his life any easier (at least in Leroux, where he gets pushed around and generally ignored) -- in the form of an attempt at satire/comedy, where the characters break the fourth wall by remarking how "if only I were rich and titled everything would be so different"!
I think those were the last two left in my one-time queue of five R/C plot ideas:
Choices of Raoul (interrupted by Waiting in the Wings), Double Agents de Chagny (interrupted before writing by "Blue Remembered Hills", and then by To Ease Your Troubled Mind), and the Breton concept.
Meanwhile I have to come up with some Downton Abbey-related plot without having seen the show in months, and without ever having written fan-fiction for it, or read more than a very little...
To be fair, I actually think I've been paired off appropriately with my gift-recipient (ironically, one of the forum members with whom I've had rather more close contact outside the forum than most, since we've exchanged a number of messages re reviews and beta-reading): we both lay a high importance on technically correct writing (though his definition of 'wrong' seems to be 'outside my teenage experience'), we value non-romantic stories (ironic as this is when seen in the context of my recent output), and he likes dialogue-less character/situation analysis. For someone who wants a fic that doesn't revolve around 'shipping' canon characters together, I'm probably a good choice of writer...
But what I don't have is a plot!
The first thing I thought of was the coincidence -- which amused me at the time of first broadcast -- that I happen to own a 1912-vintage shorthand book, and taught myself shorthand in just the same way that one of the characters does in the first series of "Downton Abbey". So I thought I might do something centring around her efforts in this direction... but I couldn't even remember her name!
With the aid of the Internet I eventually traced her as Gwen Dawson, the housemaid who leaves at the end of the first series. And with the aid of some prompts from forum regulars, I was able to find not only complete synopses of the long-gone first series (not available to hire locally) but also script transcripts on LiveJournal... so now all I have to do is revise the entire first series and check Gwen's role in it... There is definitely something to be said for researching a character who only appears in seven episodes!
I'm not sure I'm particularly looking forward to receiving my 'gift', either, as I shall be expected to express enthusiasm and gratitude whether or not I feel it (and knowing me, the odds are probably against my feeling it). Probably not a good idea to go in for this sort of event; I'm not quite sure why I did it, except that they were eager for more people to participate -- I never could resist being very highly sought-after -- and I suppose I thought the challenge would be good for me. After all, I've got two decent stories recently out of challenge prompts: "To Ease Your Troubled Mind" and "Blue Remembered Hills" (although that one is still a long-running continuing saga: I've 'finished' it, but I'm suffering major doubts. But that's another story.)
Plus I don't really want to spend the rest of my life writing romances for Raoul and Christine: if I had been asked to write in the 'Phantom' fandom, that being one of the possibilities I volunteered, I was planning to make a point of writing for some other character. I never actually planned to write more than one "Love Never Dies" story in the first place, and feel that I really have milked out the possibilities of that vein with this last one -- of which the first chapter inevitably covers much the same material as the opening chapters of "The Choices of Raoul de Chagny", even though I took pains to create a different backstory for the characters this time.
On the other hand, I do have a great deal of backstory worked out for my putative WW2 French Resistance story (the Double Agents de Chagny), not to mention pages and pages of research notes for it, so it would be a pity to allow a mere absence of plot(!) to kill off that one. If it hadn't been for the crossover challenge that led to "Blue Remembered Hills", I should probably be writing 1940s AU fiction now... And I had a vague idea that it might be possible to use the 'Breton' concept -- an AU where Raoul is no Viscount but a Breton fisher-boy and events still turn out just the same, thus demonstrating that his rank doesn't make his life any easier (at least in Leroux, where he gets pushed around and generally ignored) -- in the form of an attempt at satire/comedy, where the characters break the fourth wall by remarking how "if only I were rich and titled everything would be so different"!
I think those were the last two left in my one-time queue of five R/C plot ideas:
Choices of Raoul (interrupted by Waiting in the Wings), Double Agents de Chagny (interrupted before writing by "Blue Remembered Hills", and then by To Ease Your Troubled Mind), and the Breton concept.
Meanwhile I have to come up with some Downton Abbey-related plot without having seen the show in months, and without ever having written fan-fiction for it, or read more than a very little...
To be fair, I actually think I've been paired off appropriately with my gift-recipient (ironically, one of the forum members with whom I've had rather more close contact outside the forum than most, since we've exchanged a number of messages re reviews and beta-reading): we both lay a high importance on technically correct writing (though his definition of 'wrong' seems to be 'outside my teenage experience'), we value non-romantic stories (ironic as this is when seen in the context of my recent output), and he likes dialogue-less character/situation analysis. For someone who wants a fic that doesn't revolve around 'shipping' canon characters together, I'm probably a good choice of writer...
But what I don't have is a plot!
The first thing I thought of was the coincidence -- which amused me at the time of first broadcast -- that I happen to own a 1912-vintage shorthand book, and taught myself shorthand in just the same way that one of the characters does in the first series of "Downton Abbey". So I thought I might do something centring around her efforts in this direction... but I couldn't even remember her name!
With the aid of the Internet I eventually traced her as Gwen Dawson, the housemaid who leaves at the end of the first series. And with the aid of some prompts from forum regulars, I was able to find not only complete synopses of the long-gone first series (not available to hire locally) but also script transcripts on LiveJournal... so now all I have to do is revise the entire first series and check Gwen's role in it... There is definitely something to be said for researching a character who only appears in seven episodes!