Igenlode Wordsmith

I went to the library to access FFnet (and retrieve some old PMs), and took the opportunity to download copies of the monthly and legacy stats pages for "High City on a Hill". When I got them home and tried to load the files, I discovered that all I had was a couple of Cloudflare pages displaying "fanfiction.net needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding"! I should have simply saved the HTML tables out as text, and reformatted the data back into table form myself...

However, from memory both sets of data confirmed a fairly consistent figure of about 30 hits taking place on every new chapter; there were also about six people who read all the chapters of the story this month, either in order to refresh their memories after the long gap in publication or because it was the first time they had come across the story. ( pasted stat tables )

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( AO3 )

In good -- indeed excellent -- news, I have actually managed to progress as far as rewriting the first few paragraphs of my 'flashback problem' chapter in Arctic Raoul, while taking the opportunity to tweak a few of the other bits of wording in that section, something that really ought to have been done at the initial typing-up/editing stage but which was put off due to my structural worries about the chapter. (I also managed to remove a reference to 'dawn'! -- only one, alas, of many in the preceding chapters...)

Mei Bruges suggested that maybe the principal problem with the chapter was not the existence of the flashback[s] as such, but the fact that the entire flashback takes place in the gap between a question and answer in the 'present-day' scene, and indeed immediately after the first line of dialogue in that scene, which means that it barely gets a chance to 'start' at all. So I am trying to rewrite the opening to the chapter to be a casual discussion of their surroundings rather than an unanswered inquisition on Christine, in the hopes that this new conversation will provide a more relaxed 'gap' for the flashback to take place in. ( Read more... )

But after completing the rewritten paragraphs, I found myself glancing backwards in the notebook I was using and rereading the final chapter of "High City on a Hill", which happens to be there. I enjoyed it; I think it does work, and works well. (Now I just have to get that far in the typing-up!)

It has eventually dawned on me that at least one of the reasons why I've spent far more time in the past weeks blogging about WW2 ration cookery on a private Facebook group (and doing a good deal of associated research in attempts to answer various questions that crop up: this archive article from 1943, for example, is the most extensive summary of how the system actually *functioned* that I came across, as opposed to the various 'How We Used to Live' educational pages or reminiscent anecdotes, simply because it was written for a contemporary American audience who wanted to see how the British were doing it before embarking on their own attempt!) is because I get far more feedback and approval as a result :-(

( Read more... )

Chapter 24 of Arctic Raoul typed up, in one long session (though as yet unproofread or edited); I have struggled repeatedly to find a suitable title, having gone through A Fellow-Foreigner (too close to the references to fellow-travellers in the first paragraphs), Starved and Semi-Conscious (a quote from the chapter itself, but not an element I want to emphasise to that degree), and Lost in Translation (too reminiscent of the Bill Murray film), and am currently on A Slip in Translation, which sums up the main twist sufficiently well without giving anything away. (It is implied in the text, and I hope apparent, that Lancard makes a mistake in his Norwegian comprehension and jumps to the conclusion that the starving wanderer in this remote place is by default a Frenchman...)

Since it ends on a bit of a cliff-hanger I found myself reading on into the next chapter, which is always a good sign. And that one, which is essentially some very overdue R/C fluff, is actually good, I think :-)

( A possible two-volume split )

Having coming across Apsley Cherry-Garrard's picture pretty much by chance as a mental image for Arctic Raoul (interestingly, apparently he was actually dark-haired; the fair/white beard in the photo was an unexpected side-effect of the extreme cold), I then stumbled across a discarded copy of his autobiographical account of the Antarctic, "The Worst Journey in the World". It's a massive tome about seven hundred pages long (counting a hundred pages or so of historical introduction by both the author and the editor)... and it turns out to be absolutely fascinating.

'Cherry' was intelligent and observant, sometimes palpably schoolboyish and sometimes painfully mature, he had access to all the archive material and personal diaries from the expedition records (he was supposed to be writing up the official report, before he decided he couldn't produce the sort of detached dry document they wanted), and he couldn't half *write*. ( Read more... )

( Tealin )

I've been reading Apsley Cherry-Garrard (who is an excellent writer, especially given that he basically only produced the one book in his life -- it's like reading those contemporary Everest narratives, and gives a really vivid idea of life on board ship as well: pumping, and engines and coal!), which makes me all the more uneasy about having the d'Artois Expedition face a third winter almost between the lines. I think one solution might be to postpone the Spitzbergen bid until *after* the relief ship fails for a second time, thus giving them Something to Do with those extra months I now have to fill, and making their reaction a little less passive. Setting out in the face of an oncoming winter means more chance of unbroken ice, but much more chance of getting trapped by shortening day length, and no hope of any relief by ship even if they do get through...

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After a good deal of dithering, I think I probably shall write the epilogue for Hertha after all. It's going to be yet another juggling job trying not to make Raoul's role too unsympathetic, given that he's not fully engaged.

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I planted some marigold seeds in my new 'mini-greenhouse', and they have come up. Although since they are only in about an inch of soil, they will need to be transplanted out of it, and presumably won't do anything much for several months!

I've managed to tie myself into worse knots than before in trying to re-establish my intended chronology for the d'Artois expedition. Reading what I've written it appears the plan for the expedition was as follows:

• Arrive midsummer Year 1
  Send supply ship Amélie back to Norway to report safe arrival of expedition
  
• Midsummer Year 2: return of supply ship to replenish provisions and allow for a change of personnel
  
• Midsummer Year 3: expedition due to return to Paris
  

What actually happens:

• Winter Year 1/2: overwinter as planned
  
• Summer Year 2: supply ship fails to arrive (and Raoul confirms 'over a year later' that the initial report failed to reach Paris)
  
• Winter Year 2/3: overwinter on short rations in the hopes of rescue in summer of Year 3
  
• Spring Year 3: vain attempt to reach Greenland across the ice. No ship arrives "in what remained of the year" after the venturers return.
  
• Midsummer Year 4(?): Wreck of the "Requin"
  

( Read more... )

Well, the good news for the year is that my second beta-reader (the first having presumably abandoned the project altogether) has been reading the laboured chapters on the salvage of the Requin and apparently thinks they are *wonderful*: "Really exciting, and a nice blend of detailed technical knowledge and ‘human interest’. Please don’t keep me in suspense... I need to know what happens next."

Which was certainly not the reaction I'd been expecting after rereading them myself! (And of course the "I need to know what happens next" is what every writer dreams of hearing...)

( Read more... )

Hertha has finally reached "Don Juan", which means that I'm now back in my comfort zone of transcribing canon events from an alternate perspective. What I had *not* expected was that, in a situation where everyone else is disparaging the Phantom's music, Hertha turns out to be the one person who actually considers that there might be something in it from a modernistic point of view.
(Well, there has to be some balance for the fact that she basically regards the Phantom with absolutely zero sympathy the whole way through; she has no reason at all to feel sorry for him in the slightest, so there's a risk of the story coming out as a deliberate exercise in 'bashing'. She needs to feel a slight stab of empathy at the moment when Christine unmasks him, too.)( Read more... )

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Another spur-of-the-moment unsolicited rewrite -- this time of text that was being held up to ridicule rather than asking for help :-(
(Only I just can't do the present-tense-description thing. It sounds all wrong to me in narrative, and more like an announcer giving a commentary on the Grand National in real time...)
( Read more... )

Chapter 18 of Arctic Raoul typed up: 2500 words, one of the shortest (but it still seemed to take forever). I did abridge it slightly as I went through, because it is so obviously infodump/filler -- this is the middle of the 'drifting north' section, so it's the point at which I'm basically trying to explain how they managed to lose a month and end up in the wrong place instead of simply abandoning ship.

( Read more... )

AO3 stats:

One side-effect of the extremely sketchy viewing statistics provided by AO3 is that it has at least broken me of the habit of checking frequently to see which stories have been viewed (since you only get 'lifetime' figures over all chapters of a story, rather than a monthly per-chapter per-story breakdown).

However, most recently I uploaded Chapters 1 and 2 of "The Sons of Éléonore", since somebody actually requested that. Chapter 1 staggered up to 26 page views in the space of a couple of weeks. When I uploaded Chapter 2, the total went up to 51 (and I'm honestly not sure whether that implies that 13 people reread chapter 1 and then read chapter 2, or whether the fresh upload meant that a number of people read chapter 1 but decided it wasn't what they were looking for, and a few went on to read the new chapter -- which is the normal FFnet pattern -- or whether 25 people jumped straight to the latest update using the fandom page link. With AO3 you just can't tell.)

( bookmarks )

I have my first tomatoes setting -- one fruit so far on the towel-tomatoes and one on the magazine tomatoes. (It's just as well the towel-tomatoes haven't grown any larger, as they are directly underneath my washing-line and already in hazard from trailing shirt-sleeves and other garments...)

I haven't done any work at all on Hertha for the last week, because -- prompted by Mei Bruges, who managed to track me down from fanfiction.net -- I have finally been attempting to rewrite the first chapter of Arctic Raoul to attempt to make it work better as a stand-alone story. My reaction to that opening chapter right from the start was that it was a complete non-starter ("the whole beginning that I was so pleased with turns out to be reams of flashback written with no intention of being anything other than fan-fiction, and it really shows"), but I've never known where even to start in trying to create a new opening to the story.

Mei read the first few chapters and suggested a potential opening structure (extending the first line into a 'goodbye' scene between two characters whom the reader has not met before, and getting the readers immediately invested in Raoul and Christine as briefly as possible) after which I could change around the order of some of the rest of the chapter and attempt to provide a brief outline of the canon plot points that get referenced later. ( Read more... )

Chapters 10 and 11 proofread and edited; I've nearly caught up to my typing again. I'd made a lot of changes earlier while typing up Ch.11, most of which I think were (a) intentional and (b) an improvement, and I've retained most of them, while trying to clarify the obscure fanfic back-references ("in Perros-Guirec", i.e. in the year that Christine first met Raoul, "that night in the snow", i.e. the night she had gone to pray at the church in the snow).( Read more... )

Hertha is still just about ticking over -- at the rate of about one sentence this week. I thought I'd finished Ch.5, then ended up writing several extra paragraphs onto the end of it, and am now going back to the start of Ch. 6 and the difficulties of deciding how much of Christine's story to recapitulate from Hertha's viewpoint. In principle, as little as possible; what we want is Hertha's opinion of what she hears, not a re-telling of the same old plot.

I remember being rather disparaging of "The Vicomte of the Opera" for doing nothing with the idea of Raoul's wife save to retell the existing scenes with one extra character standing around; now that I try it myself, I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm achieving little more than doing the same thing :-(