Thanks to 120 Ways of using Bread, I made a meal out of half a packet of stale bridge rolls :-p
( 1930s economy cookery )
I also got two new (second-hand) shirts; one is pink and the second one really needs its collar stand unpicked and reversed, as the collar fold is visibly worn, but beggars can't be choosers. They are both quite nice quality fabric, and I very badly need replacements for the two shirts that recently wore out altogether.

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Meanwhile, in Phantom terms, the chandelier has fallen at last (this time it actually falls *on* Raoul and Christine, because Hertha unintentionally distracts him at a critical moment). ( fic progress )

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Oh, and while the towel-tomatoes are now sprouting all over the place, the six seeds that I planted in the egg-carton are now showing sprouts as well -- despite their roasting. (The towel sat on top of that same radiator for quite some time before I realised the side-effects of the central heating's having come on in the winter, so apparently they can survive the process unimpaired, although I'm pretty surprised!)

Apparently Mesembryanthemum seedlings are particularly tasty. After I noticed that half the seedlings in the pot had disappeared overnight, I conducted a search for the culprit under neighbouring pots, removed a largish (by my standards -- about half an inch in diameter) snail, and moved the pot to the other side of the balcony to break any telltale slime trails. But this morning all the remainder have gone, save for a single stem with a single cotyledon adhering to it; every other scrap of green has been eaten off. None of the neighbouring seedlings appear to have been touched at all.( Read more... )

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I have managed with great labour to get Hertha and Christine to the roof-top, and am trying to negotiate an alternate "All I ask of You", though I'm not terribly happy with it. ( Read more... )

To be honest, the only bits of all this I remember finding at all easy or enjoyable to write were getting Hertha into Box 5 in the first place (her idea; after all, we know that it is the last available box that night, and she *doesn't* know that the Phantom has been making a fuss over it) and killing off Buquet. Not because I particularly hate him, but because it's a nice little horror scene. Hertha, of course, takes it for granted that this is an actual accident, since she has no reason to assume that the mystery blackmailer has any grudge against random backstage staff, and given the chaos of the sudden scene change a tragic accident is actually far from improbable at this point -- something which had never occurred to me...

I wrote this today, but I don't think I shall use it; as with the business of Raoul's father, it's just turning into far too much explanation, and is leading the chapter into places that will be hard to get out of. (It's pretty weird to have Lisotte telling Hertha all this childhood stuff as a rationale for being annoyed with Raoul, anyway; I may need to tone down/tweak the preliminary passage.) I think it's sufficient to have Raoul's hypochondriac mother whisk him away from Montpellier, leaving Christine with the feeling that she is somehow to blame -- we don't need the whole complicated story of the lost letter. They were children, and Hertha's feelings are complicated enough to navigate as it is.

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So she had come home and buried her face in Lisotte's bosom, and poured out the whole. ( deleted text )

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 think I've worked out a reasonable backstory for Christine in the context of Hertha's story. (Confusingly, I started rereading Stephen King's "Christine", which of course puts the name into a rather different context!)
( whooping-cough )

Meanwhile we've acquired another OC and some backstory for Christine's parents; ( Lisotte )

I got another five minutes' access to fanfiction.net for some reason (I tried it yet again and it just happened to work for once), and was able to 'evacuate' the reviews for four more of my stories -- and then go back and delete the Critics United spam on the local files once access was cut off again! I never attempted to delete the hundreds of spam reviews from the actual site, but since it's trivially easy simply to snip the text out of the files I don't see any point in retaining it for my reference here...
Sixteen stories done -- out of forty-six.

(And I discovered that it has been so long now that fanfiction.net has logged me out, not entirely to my surprise -- but I should think the chances of my being able to log in again are pretty much zero, so I'm no longer likely to get access to my traffic stats or past PMs, for example.)
( feedback on AO3 versus fanfiction.net )

I'm not sure what's going on, but my Internet access in general seems to be degraded this morning, probably due to rain in the wires -- I hope this will post, as a lot of pages are showing up either with their images missing, their CSS absent, or simply blank ("Error: no document source").

Here at any rate is one of the more bizarre discoveries I made while researching beliefs in Animal Magnetism circa 1840-50: the Snail Telegraph.

It has lately been stated, by M. Allix, on the authority of M. Benoit in Paris, and of another discoverer, (also, I believe, a Frenchman, who is now in America,) both of whom, during the last ten years, have been employed in working out the discovery, which they had severally and independently made, although they are now associated to work it out, that this magnetic sympathy is remarkably developed in snails; that these animals, after having once been in communication or in contact, continue ever after to sympathise, no matter at what distance they may be. And it has been proposed to found, on this fact, a mode of communication between the most distant places. ( Read more... )

Prompted as usual by pedanther

Stats

List of Completed Fics

Apparently I've only completed one story this year -- and not entirely due to "continuing work on the Swedish story" for once! (It did take me about four months to write this one, and I have written 28 pages, a considerable quantity of which was subsequently discarded, on "An Outsider and a Foreigner". But I don't have very much finished work to show. Perhaps I should have taken the Sunset Boulevard idea further.)( Read more... )

More messing around with other people's work instead of doing my own...

This was supposed to be somebody writing a 'passive' passage to indicate that the character was feeling helpless, which ended up sounding thoroughly artificial as a result -- generally the case where people are trying to apply a fixed set of rules they don't really understand. I can't say that I really understood where passivity came into it, but I took a few guesses at what was probably supposed to be happening and tried to achieve helplessness by other means (plus fixing the actual errors, and making a few random executive decisions because it seemed to sound better...)( rewrites )

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If only it were as easy to 'fix' my own! I'm still just about struggling on with Chapter 2 and have finally *almost* reached the scheduled confrontation that was originally the whole point of the chapter -- which is going to end up as an exchange of a couple of lines at most, I think -- but I'm really starting to feel that I've cursed this story by over-promising and publishing in advance, and/or that I shouldn't have started it, and/or that, given my record over the last few years, I've just burned out on writing altogether. It's like pushing through treacle. It really is. And it's so long since there was really any joy in it (but I still think that there are massive patches of Arctic Raoul that are *good* despite everything, which just makes me feel guiltier about not even attempting to do the work on it... among the many, many other things that I feel guilty about not doing).( Read more... )

Right. I've discarded just about everything I've written on this chapter since the 5th of November. ( lengthy summary of rationale )

So yesterday I discarded another three and a half pages of laboriously-achieved manuscript, and started yet again to copy out what could be reused from the start of the same old scene, with the explicit aim of glossing over the material as quickly as possible. We've already established in this chapter that Hertha was thinking about marriage for herself at least a year earlier, so why would it occur to the reader to find it odd that Raoul's family are thinking along the same lines? They'll just go 'oh, people got married younger Back In History' [true-ish, but all those high-society heroines depicted as being left on the shelf at twenty weren't representative of the vast majority of the population].

Oddly enough, simply switching the order of a couple of paragraphs near the start of the section turned out to work quite well as a means of jumping directly into the scene, and I got through it in the course of a couple of days within the space of about a page and a half, admittedly a fair proportion of that having been more or less directly copied from the previous versions. Now I need to write a third passage summarising -- very quickly -- the state of their marriage over the intervening timespan, as originally planned. (Before I launched into all this flashback material I did, after all, start off the chapter with I'd been married to Raoul for nine months, but I'd known him since we'd first come to Paris... but that was 17 pages -- the majority of which have been subsequently discarded! -- and over a month ago.)

Of course my sense of chapter length has now gone entirely haywire, and I can't even resort to my usual method of ripping out and/or glueing up discarded pages, because I may yet need to refer to/use some of this material elsewhere. I've also completely lost track of which details are still officially included in the backstory and which will have to be explicitly written in again if I choose to adopt them :-(

I think the chapter currently stands at around six and a half pages, which is nearly three thousand words. So my instinct was right in that I need to start thinking about wrapping it up and getting to the end within a couple of pages or so -- and that the previous version was over-running at over eight pages and still stuck in flashback territory.

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( deleted scenes )

I've managed to get myself enmeshed in more complicated timeline implications by dropping references without having a clear plan beforehand.

In chapter 1, Raoul is stated to be twenty-one years old and to have a forthcoming birthday (presumably his twenty-second). At the time of Christine's performance, he has been married for nine months. Hertha knew him when he was seventeen.

So far in chapter 2, Hertha has a conversation with her parents about marriage "the summer I turned nineteen" (at which point she has presumably known Raoul for a couple of years; I was carefully vague about how old she was when her brother died and about how long they spent in Baden Baden). She has another conversation with her mother "over a year later" on the eve of her marriage to Raoul, for which "the final arrangements had taken months". At some earlier point -- presumably months earlier, so possibly in the spring or summer in which she turns twenty -- she has a conversation with Raoul himself, when he tells her that his father is dying and "can't last out the year" and effectively proposes marriage, while "it would be some months yet before he was twenty-one". Raoul's father then dies three weeks after the wedding, and we get immersed in the complications of 19th-century mourning rituals. ( Read more... )