Fic progress
1 December 2025 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI have now finished rough-typing the first chapter of "Little Gentlemen" and have reached the tweaking stage; it is looking quite good to me at the moment, which is probably due to the fact that it is now about six weeks since I wrote this chapter :-p
It is about eleven pages long, including that big deletion at the end of the chapter, and almost exactly three thousand words long, which means as predicted that the whole thing is going to run to about 9,000 words -- one of my longer 'short fics', which is just about everything of four chapters or fewer.
It occurred to me suddenly this morning that I shall need chapter names before I can publish anything (not that anyone is going to read it *sigh*). I'm currently thinking of a set of names along the lines of "A New Arrival" (the first evening)/"A Fresh Start" (the following day)/"Two Old Friends" (d'Artagnan and Athos' long conversation that evening). I may simply roll the epilogue (a few pages taking place a week or so later) into the end of that last chapter, or may run it separately under the title of "Epilogue", though I'm not sure it's really substantial enough to stand on its own.
I thought I had a translation for the next verse of the nautical ballad -- which really ought to be entitled something along the lines of "The Little Cabin-Boy" rather than "The Tale of the Tipsy Gunner"; I can only assume that it's supposed to be a story being told by the narrator in his cups-- but unfortunately I came up with the solution while walking home in the rain, which meant that I couldn't safely get the manuscript out. And when I came to write it down I found I had managed to forget what the word I'd come up with to end the third line was :-p
It needs to say something along the lines of "Lady Luck has provided/A pirate"; the original runs "once again good fortune herself/To me has sent a pirate", but I need more space to fit an oath by a hundred thousand devils into the next line :-D
(A hundred times up on d'Artagnan, whose film catchphrase swore by only a thousand, but it made me laugh all the same when I came across it.) Only I think it will have to be reduced to ten thousand, both for the purposes of scansion and in terms of what sounds more natural in English.
At any rate the original has an enjambement at this point, so I can definitely have one and indeed probably should; I just can't remember which three-syllable verb rhyming with a two-syllable verb in the first line and meaning 'to give' I had picked out!
It is about eleven pages long, including that big deletion at the end of the chapter, and almost exactly three thousand words long, which means as predicted that the whole thing is going to run to about 9,000 words -- one of my longer 'short fics', which is just about everything of four chapters or fewer.
It occurred to me suddenly this morning that I shall need chapter names before I can publish anything (not that anyone is going to read it *sigh*). I'm currently thinking of a set of names along the lines of "A New Arrival" (the first evening)/"A Fresh Start" (the following day)/"Two Old Friends" (d'Artagnan and Athos' long conversation that evening). I may simply roll the epilogue (a few pages taking place a week or so later) into the end of that last chapter, or may run it separately under the title of "Epilogue", though I'm not sure it's really substantial enough to stand on its own.
I thought I had a translation for the next verse of the nautical ballad -- which really ought to be entitled something along the lines of "The Little Cabin-Boy" rather than "The Tale of the Tipsy Gunner"; I can only assume that it's supposed to be a story being told by the narrator in his cups-- but unfortunately I came up with the solution while walking home in the rain, which meant that I couldn't safely get the manuscript out. And when I came to write it down I found I had managed to forget what the word I'd come up with to end the third line was :-p
It needs to say something along the lines of "Lady Luck has provided/A pirate"; the original runs "once again good fortune herself/To me has sent a pirate", but I need more space to fit an oath by a hundred thousand devils into the next line :-D
(A hundred times up on d'Artagnan, whose film catchphrase swore by only a thousand, but it made me laugh all the same when I came across it.) Only I think it will have to be reduced to ten thousand, both for the purposes of scansion and in terms of what sounds more natural in English.
At any rate the original has an enjambement at this point, so I can definitely have one and indeed probably should; I just can't remember which three-syllable verb rhyming with a two-syllable verb in the first line and meaning 'to give' I had picked out!
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Date: 2025-12-05 01:49 am (UTC)