Igenlode Wordsmith

I thought I was well away on the final scene between Christine and Hertha, with a point-to-point route planned to include all the necessary dialogue... and then I decided it really wasn't credible for them to be having this fraught and above all *loud* conversation within a few feet of a sleeping Raoul :-(

( Read more... )

Meanwhile I'm still hung up on this ridiculous business of the three winters in Arctic Raoul. The sensible thing to do would be to let it be tacitly assumed that, after despairing in summer, the d'Artois Expedition do indeed pass the whole of another winter and then most of another summer on the ice before Raoul meets up with them. It just seems like an awfully big gap, when I thought I'd been to such lengths to come up with a complete narrative that would plausibly provide them with activities for the whole of the 'three years' by cleverly abbreviating it to two-and-a-bit :-(

Well, I was right about the three days to a week from last Sunday to finish Chapter 13; I provisionally completed it a couple of days ago and am now definitely launched on what is going to be the final chapter (bar epilogue) unless it massively overruns. I'm currently dealing with Christine's account of the Final Lair and with Hertha's musings on mobs (since they're not historically keen on Jews she isn't very comfortable with them -- fortunately she was still stuck up in the managers' box at the time). Four pages left in the notebook; two pages written on this chapter so far.

Also, I'm going to need a new pen filler; the identical replacement pen that I managed to get off eBay that came with a vintage squeeze-filler appears to be suffering from a perished ink-sac, as it is not holding very much ink and is staining my fingers when I squeeze it (ink is not supposed to come out at that end!) I was quite surprised that it was working in the first place, as who knows how old the rubber was -- but since the pen happened to come with a filler, it saved paying postage on a separate unit at the time.

An interesting question: in an AU where Raoul and Christine never actually had an "All I Ask of You", what does the Phantom say to her at the end of "Point of No Return"? At the moment I'm thinking that he probably cribs *Hertha's* R/C image of the knight seeking the bright citadel on the hill... but since she has never vocalised it to anyone, still less done so where the Phantom could overhear her, one has to question how he could know about it unless he possesses genuine psychic powers!

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When I took down my top sheet from the washing line yesterday, I realised that I'm really going to have to sides-to-middle it before I can safely use it again -- otherwise I'm just going to risk putting a toenail through the thin section. Which means I'm currently sleeping in a sheet-sleeping-bag with a rough mound of blankets cast over the top, a situation which I suspect may continue for some time...

The alternative is to cut down one of the spare double sheets (singles tend to prove too small), and that feels like more work than putting a seam down the existing one, somehow. Also, having the very worn sheet does suit me in practical terms because it dries out so quickly.

My subconscious produced 'Tissot and the English school of art' off the top of my head as a suitable subject for Hertha's mother to discuss at an exhibition, and when I got in from my walk I looked him up and was flattered to discover that he was indeed a French painter who was associated with England (to the degree that he chose to call himself 'James Tissot' rather than 'Jacques' ;-p)

Unfortunately he didn't actually return to exhibit in Paris until 1885, which doesn't quite fit with a story I was setting in the early 1880s! I think the reference can stand; she was said to be talking *about* Tissot in reference to the paintings they were currently looking at, rather than suggesting that any of the pictures on the wall were necessarily by him -- and there's no reason in any case why isolated canvases shouldn't have made their way back to Parisian buyers during the years he spent in England. There's certainly no suggestion that this was an exhibition solely of Tissot's work, which is what did eventually take place in 1885.

( various fic progress )

I'm quite proud of myself in that I managed to sustain my customary snail-like progress on Hertha (most of the time) in addition to writing daily D.K. Broster drabbles. The net result of which is that I have now finished what I think is Chapter Eleven, after what I had assumed was going to be the end scene of a rather short Chapter Ten massively overflowed. ( Read more... )

I'm still ploughing on very, very laboriously with "An Outsider and A Foreigner" (which I keep wanting to call "An Officer and A Gentleman) and am still continuing to be unhappy about it. The whole thing seems to have left the realms of fan-fiction (or of POTO, anyway) and degenerated into some kind of rather amateurish historical romance -- if I thought I was doing *well* at the historical elements I wouldn't mind, but I'm not nearly as confident about it as I am with all the Raoul/Christine stories, where all the references and social allusions just seemed to float fluently into place. ( Read more... )

( Baby epilogue? )

Looking back through the tags on this project reveals the fact that I have been feeling despondent about it since December last year -- in fact, a lot of the elements in that post (over-promised in advance, Arctic Raoul being actively good in comparison, constantly repeating "so tired", dare not show distress) are literal verbatim echoes of things that were running through my mind earlier today. So basically I have been feeling hopeless about this story more or less ever since I started writing it... (the obvious answer to which is 'well, stop writing it, then! But as in the bus stop fallacy, I've spent too much time on it already to want to do that.)

At the moment my thought process is more or less that, unlike Arctic Raoul, it's never going to rise above the level of 'fan fiction', but that I never had any plans to publish it and that most POTO fan-fiction is amateurish historical romance anyway so the readers won't care -- or notice. (To be honest, however good it might be I don't think many people would ever be all that interested in reading an OC/Raoul insert anyway; the one that hurts is "Blue Remembered Hills", which *was* good, which adhered scrupulously to both canons and should potentially have satisfied fans of both, which I put four years into, and which very few people -- so far as I could tell -- ever even looked at.)

I've finally finished with the Masquerade (where the Phantom really plays a rather minor walk-on part in terms of the chapter :-p) and have now begun what I think is Chapter 9.

Hertha and Raoul are going to have a confrontation that wasn't planned, but I just don't think it's plausible that she would hold her tongue any longer after the amount of angst in the last chapter. ( Read more... )

I have almost finished my second notebook, and the Phantom has *finally* made his entry in person on the stage of this story -- I suspect this is probably the only fanfic where almost the entirety of the Masquerade chapter is taken up by something completely unrelated to his sudden appearance! ( Read more... )

I spent far too long researching 12th-century costume after deciding that Hertha could come to the Masquerade dressed as Héloïse (of Héloïse and Abelard fame; inconveniently, she doesn't seem to have an identifying surname) -- the number of famously pregnant heroines being somewhat limited! This after the hippopotamus rabbit-hole, when I spent a day trying to establish whether the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes actually possessed a hippopotamus in the 1880s, all for the sake of a one-sentence attempted joke. (There was definitely a hippo in Paris at the time of the Franco-Prussian War, and another one painted as early as 1830, so I decided it was a reasonable bet that someone had one somewhere in the city.)

However, it eventually dawned on me that the important issue was not what the real Héloïse would really have worn as a young woman, but what the 19th-century French public would have pictured her as wearing, so generic mediæval was more important than accuracy ;-p
(Though I decided not to go for the wimple in the end, not because they didn't come in until above sixty years later but because they were associated with married status, and Héloïse was notoriously not married at the point of her pregnancy!)

I suppose the Phantom is actually going to show up for the first time in this chapter ;-)

I have been really struggling to meet the water needs of my tomato plants in the renewed heat (nice warm temperatures of around 70 degrees coupled with plentiful rain were much better for plant growth). Meanwhile the overwintered corn-chamomile plants that were putting on a fine display in the two large pots that I had originally destined for this year's tomatoes have finished flowering and died and dried up; I spent some time attempting to winnow out a usable seed collection from the dry heads -- having eventually worked out that the actual seeds are right down at the bottom and in practice you have to split the spiky dry head open to get them out -- so that I could empty out the larger of the pots.

I'd assumed that my tomatoes had missed the boat in terms of being moved into larger pots, since they are now fruiting and flowering prolifically and have reached the mystical stage of 'setting the second truss', after which one is allowed to administer official tomato feed. But according to the Internet it is actually possible to transplant tomatoes in fruit, and since the three towel-tomatoes which were sharing a six-inch pot were clearly quite horribly pot-bound (and were the smallest and easiest to handle of the various tomato plants, presumably in consequence) I thought I would give it a go. ( Read more... )

( calendula )

( Chillies )

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( Cycling )

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( Fic progress )