Fic progress

[igenlode]

I think I have finally almost finished my Athos crack-fic (which, as usual, is of course completely lacking in any crack humour save for the initial bizarre concept, being written entirely straight). I am not particularly happy with it; the balance of the various parts is, I suspect, distorted by how much trouble I was having in writing them respectively, which means that what I thought was the main section, consisting of the introduction and arrival of my OC, is probably now overshadowed by the much longer following sections between the canon characters, making the beginning seem a bit pointless -- even if the only point of the OC was in effect to provide a handle by which the entire AU scenario could be established.

Ironically enough this actually reflects what happens in Alcott's "Little Men" itself, where Nat Blake starts off as the main protagonist for the purposes of introducing the set-up at Plumfield and then more or less vanishes into the background for most of the rest of the book, but I can't claim to have done it as a conscious parallel!

Current page counts: first chapter (Venya's arrival), 11.5 pages. Second chapter (next morning, and d'Artagnan's arrival), about 12 pages. Third chapter (that evening), currently about 10 pages... that is actually a much better balance than I had expected, thanks largely to the fact that the late-night conversation between d'Artagnan and Athos has now extended to such a length that I'm now considering it as a chapter in its own right instead of as an unbalancing element of the second chapter :-p (NB this was originally assumed to be a one-shot...)

The word count in this notebook seems to run at about 200-300 words per page, depending on the amount of crossing-out and insertion, which means the whole story is probably going to be about 8,000–9,000 words long.

At the moment I'm currently diverted from progress by the awkward discovery that Scipio (whom I had plucked from memory as a plausible classic text for Athos's more aristocratic pupils to be studying, given that Dumas mentions in "The Three Musketeers" that Athos's Latin was actually better than that of Aramis, who was the one who had supposedly learnt it for church purposes) is not actually usable as a 'classical author' since no copies of his writings, if any, survive :-(
I think I had picked his name because it happens to have a known French variant (Scipion l'Africain) which suggested to me subconsciously that he might have been known in this era.

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*checks on AO3*
There is no separate "Little Men" fandom, as it gets rolled into the general "Little Women Series" category; checking on characters from that fandom who don't appear in any of the earlier books (e.g. Nan, Dan, and Jo's sons Rob and Teddy) suggests that many of the stories that are set within that book don't bother to use the two or three variants on "Little Men" tags that do exist and are mapped to "Little Women", but I'm guessing that there are maybe twenty or so of them out there.

Comments

[igenlode]

Scipio (whom I had plucked from memory as a plausible classic text for Athos's more aristocratic pupils to be studying, given that Dumas mentions in "The Three Musketeers" that Athos's Latin was actually better than that of Aramis, who was the one who had supposedly learnt it for church purposes) is not actually usable as a 'classical author' since no copies of his writings, if any, survive

Cicero looks like a good choice: Les débats sur le meilleur style latin visent à arbitrer entre les deux esthétiques opposées de Sénèque et Cicéron https://journals.openedition.org/ml/373

(the amount of time I waste on this sort of detail!)

[lurking_latinist]

I work on (roughly) this stuff professionally, and I agree, Cicero is a great choice! If you want to keep Scipio around you could use Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio,” which was a very influential text around this period.

[igenlode]

I had forgotten I had a Latinist lurking :-D

If you want to keep Scipio around you could use Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio,” which was a very influential text around this period.

Oh, how interesting that there is a connection!
Fortunately I don't need Scipio in particular; my subconscious just popped the name up out of nowhere when I needed a throwaway allusion to what the illegible student text (I decided they probably didn't have 'essays' at this period, although I feel they might have been expected to produce 'discourses' or something along those lines, so went for a piece of translation) might have been. The original point of it was simply that the boy in question has dreadful handwriting despite the fact that his aristocratic lineage would otherwise place him (in this AU) well above most of his fellows :-p

My subconscious is surprisingly often right even when dealing with matters of which I am not conscious of knowing anything, but in this case it was clearly wrong -- Scipio is not one of the classical authors studied by schoolboys -- which is why we check things :-)
My actual knowledge of seventeenth-century education is pretty non-existent, so as it is not a major part of the fic I have been going off my vague knowledge of the education of the Tudor cousins a century earlier plus the studies of young Lord Herbert in the 18th century -- my knowledge of Latin is largely confined to the 19th-century English boarding school context, with its cribs and lines to construe, and I'm very conscious that this is probably completely inapplicable to this context and have been taking care not to apply it!