I hadn't come across spoon theory before (already, I see, like most things on the modern Internet, the subject of complaints about appropriation, trivialization, and who is more victimised than whom...)

It does echo in a way what I feel, which I've been categorising to myself as an endless litany of "but I'm so tired"... but where 'tired' doesn't represent lack of sleep or physical aches, but of constant, dragging effort to do anything at all difficult, where 'difficult' is almost invariably emotional rather than objectively hard. It's somewhat like what I've always thought of as 'push', of which one only has so much before becoming completely dispirited.

But it isn't that I can't. It isn't that I don't have the energy. It isn't even, in most cases, that it's a matter of doing something which I find actively daunting or frightening (like going to complain about things, or dealing with angry people). It really does feel from my perspective like laziness and lack of self-discipline, because I know perfectly well that if I had someone standing over me to disapprove then I *would* do these things; things as simple as answering emails, which, once I start, I indeed tend to do at some length, or as complex as finding and fixing bugs in a program, or as necessary as washing-up or mending clothes.( Read more... )

I thought I had lost the notebook with the end of Arctic Raoul (and most of Hertha in it); I'd been carrying it around after starting Chapter 4 in the new notebook a couple of weeks ago in case I might need to refer back to earlier scenes, but when I did want to refer to the previous chapter I discovered I couldn't find it anywhere. Cue absolute terror.

After searching everywhere again and again I eventually found it in the bottom of a bag in a dark corridor in the bottom of the trolley-basket (every bag stored in which I had already checked twice by means of picking them up and scrumpling them in search of resistance from their contents), where it was camouflaged from my touch as a hard, flat object on the hard, flat base of the trolley. I'd taken it with me to buy greengrocery the week before last, and in my (short-lived) relief at actually being able to get some had left it in there.

I pressed the precious volume to my bosom and kissed it multiple times, as Raoul might have said ;-)
I really must get on faster with typing that novel up -- although since I also had a panic early today about not being able to get my computer to restart and then to access the Internet as a result of last night's power cut, computers aren't that safe either. And neither, as I have discovered over the last month, is uploading work to websites where you may not be able to access it in the future...

I discovered an HTML file copy of my Joseph Buquet story sitting in my website that had been there ever since 2017, but never actually linked from the index of fan-fiction. Evidently I got as far as doing the conversion, but never got round to all the laborious site maintenance involved in adding all the necessary headers/footers/links required to make it consistent with everything else!

I've been trying to update my exceedingly out-of-date website fan-fiction listing in parallel with uploading stuff to AO3, on the grounds that at least I only have to do the conversion once. ( Read more... )

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I'm not terribly impressed by the author statistics provided by AO3, which are missing a lot of the information afforded by fanfiction.net; they don't record which chapters receive page hits or kudos, for example, so you can't tell the difference between a reader who glances at the first chapter and rejects the story as not what he was looking for (which is the most common reading pattern experienced by *all* fanfiction authors) and one who gets hooked and goes on to read all the way through a story.( Read more... )

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On the plus side, I've typed (but not proofread) what will probably be Chapter 10 of Arctic Raoul, though the precise scene boundary with the next chapter may change, which takes us up to the calf-kissing episode. And I've finally made some necessary revisions to Chapters 1–5, and sent off Chapters 6–8 (which again had to be typed as a single entity before I could work out where the chapter boundaries were to fall) for beta-reading.

And I discovered completely by chance that I could still access stories on fanfiction.net via their www links rather than via the (easier to navigate) mobile site, and managed to 'evacuate' another eleven one-shots before the site cut out on me again, though I haven't been able to repeat the feat. That leaves me with I think eight stories still missing, although they are the longer ones -- I went for the 'quick wins' for obvious reasons.

Done. I have finally screwed myself up to proofread and edit everything I've typed so far on Arctic Raoul (now about 32,000 words of the whole). It took me most of two days, during which time I entirely abandoned any attempt at working on the other manuscript, but at least I have now caught up with myself and sent off the four outstanding chapters to be beta-read. I hope it won't take me another eight months to get round to dealing with any changes that need to be made in consequence of that, given that I was returned chapter 3 in May and have been putting off doing anything about it ever since.

Of course, I still have another hundred thousand words or so to type and am still on my first manuscript book out of three-and-a-bit, but it is at least progress.

(Cross-posted from a comment on vicomte_de_chagny, since I know I'll never look for it there, and had enough trouble finding the reference to material that only existed in an untagged comment in my own blog...)

One interesting thing about Leroux's reference to the initials RC carved into the wall of the Communards' dungeon is how it relates to the particule question -- it implies that, to a Frenchman, Raoul's initials are self-evidently RC, not (as I've seen in fanfics where a handkerchief embroidered with Raoul's initials forms part of the plot) RdC, or even R.D.C.
(I wondered if I ought to drop the particule on typing up, but having now done five chapters -- 15,000 words/31 pages of manuscript/Plot Point Four -- I've stuck with having Lancard refer to him as 'de Chagny". Having him address Raoul as 'Chagny' just seemed rude and weird when I was typing it....)

I have so, so, so so nearly finished the Swedish story (or the main draft, at any rate). I'm just struggling with the final sentences, which don't seem to fit at well as they were supposed to -- not a good sign, since that's the only ending I've got, and otherwise it just trails away :-(

I really ought to be more excited, but I'm not terribly happy with this whole epilogue, and haven't been all that happy with a lot of the preceding chapters, so I have a nagging feeling that the end of this story doesn't live up to the very promising beginning. And I'm very much in two minds about whether adding in Lancard's sister Gilberte as a new character in the final chapter is a good idea -- the intention was to bring Lancard back for the finale rather than just dropping him (as Kulla has effectively been dropped at the end of the last chapter, after all Christine's rhapsodizing over her), but in fact he has been communicating with Raoul by telegram, appearing alongside him in the parade, etc., and could probably be contrived to do so without the introduction of his sister, who feels a bit extraneous. (We also have Raoul's sister Valentine showing up and receiving characterisation at the very last minute, but that seems more organic somehow. But two previously-unseen characters making onstage appearances at the eleventh hour seems a bit overwhelming to the reader...)

The epilogue is currently seven pages at circa 525 words/page, which means I can afford to omit a page or two if it comes to it. I just don't know.

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And I needn't have worried about pens and fillers -- somebody smashed into me when I was walking home writing the other day and knocked the pen out of my hand, damaging the nib irretrievably on the pavement :-(
That was my 'new' steel pen, so now I'm back on the original one with its previously-damaged nib, and I'm starting to wonder if it's worth investing in that any further at all.

It turns out that Valentine's married surname does come into the story after all ;-)

She married the (presumably elderly) Comte de Saint-Mathurin, who died within a few years, and has been a somewhat unworldly widow ever since.( Read more... )

I had every intention of saving Erik's violin from the funeral pyre; I never liked the way Leroux buried Christine's father's violin in his grave, which is as bad as sacrificing your favourite horse to take it into the afterlife. I even had the line all picked out and ready (along with Erik's violin, which he had found leaning abandoned in a corner and which Christine, a fiddler's daughter, had refused to leave to a fiery fate).

But I forgot to put it in when I got to the relevant section, which is now part of an awkward-enough-as-it-is transition from the idea of Erik's treasure to the idea of Kulla via Christine, and I really can't retrofit that line in there now.
I'm already uncomfortable with the amount of time being spent on dealing with the treasure, which was not intended as a significant part of the plot (and am still debating uneasily the question of whether or not it might have been better to have excised that element altogether). I cannot feel that it would be a good idea to set up a fresh complication here: the existence of the violin has barely even been implied (Christine when chained up hears Erik in the house making jagged, disturbing music, and at the time I had in mind a violin as the most canonically probable and portable means of producing it), and I don't want to distract the reader by effectively introducing it for the first time at this juncture.

So Erik's instrument has tacitly been sacrificed; if anyone ever wonders about that aspect of the plot, it existed and got burnt along with the rest of his belongings :-(

Yesterday I FINALLY finished Plot Point Fifteen and killed off Erik -- the former being frankly much more important than the latter, at least so far as I'm concerned :-D
And I'm actually quite pleased with the killing-off; doing it through Raoul's eyes certainly produces a novel viewpoint so far as Phantom fanfic is concerned, and once we got into dialogue again it came relatively easily.

That means I only have the aftermath scene and then the epilogue (possibly featuring Mlle Gilberte Lancard) to deal with. I celebrated by spending most of today calculating a progress graph based on clues in my own blogposts in order to see where the time went; apparently I've been writing this story for 780 days [eek]
( graph )

Right, I've finally incorporated the last reusable element from my original version of Plot Point Fifteen (having decided I wasn't going to use it -- but having Raoul deal with the fire turned out to fit rather conveniently with my idea of writing Christine's conversation with Erik as sound effects only; the narrator has his back turned at the time!) The difference is that this now happens after Erik's dialogue rather than before, and in fact all the scheduled events concerning Erik happen rather earlier, thus pretty much solving the original problem.

(Sigh -- it's only taken me a month and a half. So much for being finished by January... although that in itself was a misremembering of what I'd actually written in the first place, back at the end of September, which was a mildly optimistic hope that I would be finished within the next twelve months, rather than by the end of the year, even if the latter did briefly look like a possibility.) ( Read more... )