Igenlode Wordsmith

Mending

2026-01-02T01:12:29Z

I have just spent an hour in *finally* getting round to taking a tuck in the seat of the set of short-sleeved hot-weather pyjamas that ripped up the back this summer -- they are at least twenty years old (in addition to being second-hand when I got them!) and have now become so thin as to be indecent, so I am not sure how long the repair will last. They have only survived this long by virtue of being made of artificial fibre instead of cotton, and by being so lightweight that I only resort to them in a heatwave, but even synthetic will eventually chafe through with friction against the sheets...

Fortunately (being second-hand) they have always been on the large side, so they will probably still fit despite having had an inch-wide slice folded into the back seam. I'm afraid I didn't attempt to try them on to test the matter since I was already wearing far too many clothes and really didn't fancy undressing under the circumstances! So we shan't find out until next summer. I did, however, take the opportunity to likewise put away all the other assorted bits of lightweight clothing that had escaped the Great Changeover -- I always miss out a few things.

(I have just remembered that the reason why the linen jackets had not been put away was that I'd been planning to wash their collars first, but it is too late now...)

And while I was engaged in doing that, virtue was rewarded by my receiving two more hits on "Little Gentlemen" -- doubling the abysmal total on Chapter 2 -- and a subscription, which means that at least someone (and presumably not on Dreamwidth, since chapters always appear here first anyway for proofreading purposes) is interested enough to want to know what happens next :-)

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Translation to radio (BBC LotR)

2025-12-20T21:34:06Z

"Little Gentlemen" has now staggered up to a grand total of five views on AO3 since publication (as opposed to the most recently-updated fic in the fandom, which features "Spanking", "Bratting", "Light Dom/sub", "Boys in Love", "Caning", and "Fluff and Smut", and currently has 1744 hits *sigh*...)

I am still working my way through the BBC "Lord of the Rings" (currently on the mistitled episode 8, "The Voice of ~~Sauron~~Saruman") for washing-up purposes, and am exceedingly impressed all over again by the way that the 'translation' from page to radio has been done.
( Read more... )

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Fic progress

2025-12-02T00:23:48Z

I 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 ( Length and chapter titles )
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

( Read more... )

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Fic progress

2025-11-16T17:21:34Z

I think I have finally almost finished my Athos crack-fic (which, as usual, is of course completely lacking in any crack humour save for the initial bizarre concept, being written entirely straight). I am not particularly happy with it; the balance of the various parts is, I suspect, distorted by how much trouble I was having in writing them respectively, which means that what I thought was the main section, consisting of the introduction and arrival of my OC, is probably now overshadowed by the much longer following sections between the canon characters, making the beginning seem a bit pointless -- even if the only point of the OC was in effect to provide a handle by which the entire AU scenario could be established.( Read more... )

*checks on AO3*
There is no separate "Little Men" fandom, as it gets rolled into the general "Little Women Series" category; checking on characters from that fandom who don't appear in any of the earlier books (e.g. Nan, Dan, and Jo's sons Rob and Teddy) suggests that many of the stories that are set within that book don't bother to use the two or three variants on "Little Men" tags that do exist and are mapped to "Little Women", but I'm guessing that there are maybe twenty or so of them out there.

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Firsts

2024-06-23T11:36:42Z

I have my first view on "The Remorse of Others" -- at least one person has now glanced at it!

The first Roma tomato has set.

We have the first corn-marigold (seen here with the 'true' marigolds in varying stages of red/orange!)

The home-grown coriander has been split up -- of course I shall now have far too much and it will all rush into flower and then die without ever having been used! -- and likewise the blue Swan River daisies, now embarrassingly vigorous. (It is very odd how the seed managed to completely fail so many times!)

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Depressing results on Broster-fic

2024-06-21T00:28:38Z

I suddenly remembered (as a result of returning to the same spot where I was originally walking when I was developing the idea a month or so ago) a massive significant chunk of invented family backstory for de Brencourt that I had managed to completely wipe from my mind while struggling simply to complete the initial set-up scene... which is what I have been doing for the past month. Fortunately I don't think that particular detail is something the Comte talks about with Roland, but rather arises from talking *about* the somewhat awkward question of Roland with Gaston de Trélan, so it fits into the next scene and not this one... but progress overall has been pretty abysmal.

( Read more... )

( zero page hits on 'The Remorse of Others' )

( notebooks )

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More Yellow Poppy thoughts

2024-05-12T14:02:02Z

It occurred to me to wonder belatedly what Christian name Gaston de Trélan is using under his pseudonym of 'the Marquis de Kersaint'. ( Much speculation )

The other thing I wonder is just how fatal, with hindsight, his resuming his true identity proved to be (foreshadowing: "it might some day mean Gaston's life if the Directory knew who he really was"). It seems to have been a pretty open secret after Valentine's arrival, since she is known to everyone as the Duchesse de Trélan and as the commander's wife, but one of the subsequent grounds for disregarding the safe-conduct is that "that man who organised Finistère, de Kersaint" has turned out to be "a ci-devant of the ci-devants; no less than the Duc de Trélan, in fact. Brune let that out too; Fouché, it seems, discovered it. So he would be worth capturing". ( Read more... )

I uploaded "The Remorse of Others" to AO3 on the 3rd of May, where it has reached a new low of zero page hits (even lower than my snippets of ancient original work, or my opera-fic, or the Gigi story where there was no pre-existing fandom). I suppose that makes a sort of sense in that an original work might conceivably be of stand-alone interest, whereas work in an unknown fandom can affect only those who already care about the characters, but to be fair it probably says more about my summary being completely opaque to anyone who doesn't know the original novel... ( Read more... )

( A possible new fan on FFnet )

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End of Hertha

2024-01-20T18:31:46Z

I uploaded the final chapter of "High City on a Hill" to FFnet, where it sank with a resounding silence. In the course of a week (as of last Friday) the new chapter 15 had received a grand total of twelve page-views, as had chapter 14; of those twelve, three people apparently went back and reread the whole thing from the start. On AO3, the stats registered 32 hits on the story as a whole (a similar number to those who clicked on chapter 1 after the update on FFnet and evidently clicked straight off again without skipping to the new chapter...)

No comments, no favourites, no follows, no kudos. So much for that project...

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The last word

2023-12-06T18:38:54Z

Six years later, Philippe gets the last word, as scheduled... though I'm still not quite sure about the wording (already variously fiddled around with).

“He’ll go far, our young Raoul,” Philippe de Chagny said quietly, and she nodded. There had been a crack in his voice, and Christine was not entirely certain she trusted her own.

“Not too far, I hope,” she managed, turning with a smile to make a jest of it.

“My dear, he’ll come back home. While there’s breath in him, he’ll come back home. For that, I can trust in you.” The Comte’s mouth was a little crooked beneath the points of his moustache, but his grip was a benediction and a promise.

Current (unedited, unproofread) word count on the final chapter is 3,681, and the total for the novel is 126,162. Really not that far off the rough estimate of 124,000 words that I made three years ago...

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Finally

2023-09-18T02:17:00Z

Finished rough-typing Chapter 32 of Arctic Raoul -- a bit of an abrupt ending, but at 4600 words I'd evidently decided I couldn't continue on to the obvious ending-place, which would have been the death of Erik at the start of the next (and penultimate) chapter!

So just two chapters left to go. Current word count 119,000 (original estimate was 124,000 for the whole thing, so it will only be about one chapter over that -- although even that was too long in the first place...)

Also, it looks as if a couple of the Red Demon chillies are *finally* turning colour after all, at the eleventh hour -- two is all I need to secure the next generation. There is also one bright red nub deep down in the plant, for some reason, which appears to have emerged red directly out of the flower, but that is so small I can't believe it has any seed in it!

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Praise from unexpected sources

2023-09-06T22:25:12Z

I picked up a random (well, not completely random, because it was someone I'd critiqued during one of my attempts at catching up on fanfiction.net) review on my "Tale of Two Cities" one-shot: ( fandom-blind FFnet reviews )

And then a comment on a snippet I posted to a writer's group on Facebook (you are allowed to post 500 words every Wednesday, so I've been drip-feeding them bits of Hertha as 'work in progress' in the hopes of maybe gaining a 'like' or two -- it sometimes happens):

That's some very fine writing, and I am very hard to impress. What is the genre, may I ask?

Which more or less confirms my instinct that the only chance for Arctic Raoul is *outside* the fan-fiction ghetto; people like my writing for its own sake when they are not actually fans of the source material, but it just doesn't fit into the whole ring-fenced ethos of fandom :-(
( Read more... )

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Stats back

2023-03-14T19:21:37Z

Well, the fanfiction.net stats are back, so I was able to see what I'd been missing out on there... a grand total of nine page views on 'Chick nor Child' since I uploaded it on March 9th :p
Now I have no excuse for not doing any work on Hertha and Arctic Raoul...

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Chick nor Child (Ch2)

2023-03-14T02:47:39Z

In the course of six days I have had 19 hits on chapter 1 of Perrette, and 3 kudos, and one person has even subscribed to the story -- either in the hopes of more, or in lieu of a bookmark :-p ( stats )

This chapter, being considerably shorter, was of course exponentially quicker to deal with... (And of course it is entirely concerned with OCs and their preoccupations, which makes it of extreme minority interest so far as fanfiction readers are concerned; at this point it is pretty much straight historical fiction, although the same could be said of Hertha's family worries.)

Ch2 — Glimmers of Goodbyes

The death of the Count de Chagny was always a notable event in the local district, but on this occasion it was a nine-days’-wonder that showed no signs of dying down, even weeks after the news had reached them from Paris. It was years now since old Count Philibert, struck down by a palsy, had taken to his bed and dwindled away, and by all accounts that had been a merciful release, and one long-awaited. It was the death of his wife in childbed, folk said, that had taken all the heart from him... and the Countess Éléonore had been a masterful woman, to be sure, still remembered among the tenantry with equal parts affection and dread.

But not every Count in the past had perished as peacefully — or as blamelessly. ( Read more... )

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Uploading Perrette

2023-03-10T00:59:59Z

Of course it's always *after* you have uploaded the chapter in three different places, one of them inaccessible, that you notice you used the term 'enlighten on [the matter]' twice in two different contexts in the space of the final paragraph... :-( "Apprise of" will do as a substitute, I think ("inform" isn't quite right, being too direct, and moreover we've had "form" in the preceding clause). "Advise of" would be less obscure, but I feel that unfortunately it risks getting read as Perrette actually offering advice on the matter rather than merely deigning-- or not-- to provide minimal information!

( AO3 series )

( page-view stats )

I *knew* this was not going to be popular and I wrote it anyway, just as I always do. It would be nice to be popular, but if you're going to insist on being wilfully obscure then you can't expect it.

Meanwhile I have very nearly finished typing the second chapter (another few hundred words to go), which is considerably shorter.

( my stats software is definitely broken )

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Some progress

2023-01-11T02:34:14Z

Right, I *finally* got round to rough-typing another chapter of Arctic Raoul (ch28 -- it helps that this was a relatively short one by recent standards). It's amazing how much productivity you can gain by the simple act of quitting your web browser!

Chapter 21	Survival	3450 words
Chapter 22	Close Quarters	3586
Chapter 23	A Ship of Seals	3491
Chapter 24	A Slip in Translation	4329
Chapter 25	Confessions	5391
Chapter 26	The House of Chagny	4091
Chapter 27	Unexpected	3920
Chapter 28	To Turn the Page	3309 (provisionally)

(Previous chapter lengths.)

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AO3 stats

2022-09-25T13:02:37Z

A total of 19 hits and zero reviews on "High City on a Hill" since I uploaded the new chapter, which is almost exactly equal to the 18 hits I got in the week after updating the previous chapter (and very likely the same people!)

But I did get another 2 guest-kudos, which by the nature of things presumably has to indicate fresh readers.

I still haven't even got round to making the trip to update the story on FFNet, at least partly because I keep telling myself I'm going to write those reviews for the other entrants in the Narrative Voices challenge... and not doing it. So I have no idea what the viewing stats are on the Sunset Boulevard story -- or even who the one person who apparently favourited it was, since the email alerts were broken at that point! I did get a lovely review from Mei Bruges, though (to which I still haven't replied either...)

[Edit: about 40 hits on FFnet, plus another unexpected review. I forgot to check on the favourite, though!]

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Stats and Progress

2022-08-24T01:02:46Z

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 )

( 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!)

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Sudden bulge in hits

2022-08-03T13:01:41Z

Display data for which month? (1-12)
(RETURN to display changes since last save by default)

From 02/08/2022 to 03/08/2022
    To Ease Your Troubled Mind  Hits:  +1  Kudos:  +0  Bookmarks: +0
                Lost and Found  Hits:  +2  Kudos:  +1  Bookmarks: +0
   Count Philippe Takes a Hand  Hits:  +1  Kudos:  +1  Bookmarks: +0
The Choices of Raoul de Chagny  Hits:  +1  Kudos:  +0  Bookmarks: +0
              A Necessary Evil  Hits:  +5  Kudos:  +0  Bookmarks: +0
           High City on a Hill  Hits:  +2  Kudos:  +1  Bookmarks: +0
                     Appraisal  Hits:  +1  Kudos:  +1  Bookmarks: +0
            A Child of the Law  Hits: +21  Kudos:  +8  Bookmarks: +3
          The Sons of Éléonore  Hits:  +1  Kudos:  +0  Bookmarks: +0
9 changes
SAVE? (y/n)

This is within the last 24 hours. Now, one user went through reading several stories and leaving one kudos on each, which is nice but not completely unusual -- but what on *earth* happened to "A Child of the Law"? I can only assume that someone must have actively recommended it somewhere, given that this was a story that had only gained 20 views, 1 kudos and 1 bookmark in the course of the last six months...!

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Writing v. cooking

2022-07-05T20:29:37Z

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... )

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Khoresh karafs -- the verdict

2022-05-23T23:37:36Z

Verdict on the khoresh karafs: even made with inauthentic pig's heart instead of lamb, it was still very tasty. (And it almost certainly benefited from being made in advance and left in the fridge for a day.) It would probably have been better with lamb, but you use what you've got. (Which reminds me that I have some rhubarb and had intended to try the recipe for khoresh rivas in the same booklet -- maybe I ought to try this vegetarian version!)

I tried making a tahdig to go with it, but with less success than on my last attempt; it was tasty (and so it should have been, with that much butter in!), but the crunchy bit stuck to the bottom of the pan instead of turning out in a neat moulded shape, and had to be scraped out and sprinkled over the rest. The quantities were pretty much guess-work, and I probably didn't cook it for long enough -- I was terrified of burning the rice.

( fanfiction.net )

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Fixed wheel?

2022-05-07T15:28:00Z

I think (hope) the bicycle is finally fixed now, after yet another round of repairs; I did a twenty-mile shopping run today (a big pot of yoghurt, some chicken carcases to boil up for stock, two Scotch eggs (one for lunch), two big cartons of still lemonade in preparation for hot weather (of which I partook gratefully when I got back), and returning the empty honey jar while buying a new one) and had no trouble with either the gears or free-wheel. Of course it may be another false dawn.

Recorded mileage: 3664.8 (actual figure will be higher, since the odometer is still malfunctioning; it is now loose in its mount and sooner or later will fly off altogether).
Nearly nine hundred miles since last July.

Chapter 6 of "High City on a Hill" has received 14 hits on AO3.

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Progress

2022-04-17T10:29:41Z

( seeds and seedlings )

There have been a total of eleven hits on Chapter 5 of Hertha since uploading it to AO3 on Friday -- or at least on the story as a whole, since AO3 doesn't provide chapter data -- which is depressingly low for a chapter that took me so long to complete typing and editing... but the only moral to be drawn from *that* is that I should get round to typing more quickly, since this is definitely a niche story and viewing figures aren't likely to increase. (Especially if people are really tracking their reading exclusively by tagged favourite 'ship': https://archiveofourown.org/comments/516425749 )

On the other hand, those eleven hits are at least enough to propel it into the "Top Five By Hits" display which is displayed by default on the stats page!

The bicycle has been temporarily patched up -- which involved waiting around for five hours, since the shop in question is five miles away and walking home and then back again really isn't an option unless absolutely unavoidable. But they were quite frank that the wheel is worn out and needs to be replaced altogether. I hope I've sourced a replacement (dated 1973, so even older...)

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Stats 1.01

2022-03-19T23:42:08Z

I managed to notice the first serious bug in my AO3 stats script, when "High City on a Hill" failed to show up as having any new hits at all for the month of March.

Because awk handles all input as text by default, the values for the number of hits etc. are being saved as text strings instead of numeric values, which means that in a comparison "6" is treated as greater than "3", but "112" is treated as less than "31" (because "1" at the start of the 'word' is less than "3"). So if the difference between two values is sufficiently large for them to have a differing number of digits, the results of the comparison become entirely spurious :-p

The answer is to multiply all values which are intended to be numeric by 1, in order to ensure that awk knows to store (and compare) them as numbers and not strings!

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AO3 stat progress

2022-03-09T01:36:09Z

There is *definitely* something weird going on with my AO3 stats; after uploading the new chapter of "High City on a Hill", I got 11 new page hits, two new subscriptions to the story (*very* nice; that means that people actually want to know what happens next), and... +19 kudos, all from guest accounts, with the proportion of kudos exceeding page hits going up over the course of the day. So not only have I got at least one reader whose page-hits don't register, I've apparently got about 50% of them, all wildly enthusiastic about the story...?

A 100% reader:kudos conversion rate would be improbable enough, but a 175% conversion rate looks decidedly fishy!

[Edit: the kudos is now up to +27 for +12 page hits, so something very queer is going on!]

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AO3 stats

2022-02-26T18:18:29Z

Display data for which month? (1-12)
(RETURN to display changes since last save by default)

From 25/02/2022 to 26/02/2022
       The Writing on the Wall  Hits:  +0  Kudos:  +1  Bookmarks: +0
           High City on a Hill  Hits: +17  Kudos:  +1  Bookmarks: +0
            A Child of the Law  Hits:  +0  Kudos:  +0  Bookmarks: +1
          The Sons of Éléonore  Hits:  +3  Kudos:  +1  Bookmarks: +0
4 changes
SAVE? (y/n)

*

Apparently AO3 has the same 'issue' as FFnet in that it's possible for someone to bookmark/favourite a story without actually registering any page hits on it (which is a slight pain from my point of view, because it means that I can't simplify my stat-checking script to only output data where the number of page views has increased, but have to do an IF...AND...AND...AND. But I did strongly suspect it as a possibility, which is why I put the triple check in to start off with.)

I've noticed that my own visits to AO3 pages never show up either on my own story statistics (which could just be clever detection of the IP address) or on anyone else's, so I'm guessing that they are using some kind of JS-based page view detection, and that whenever somebody views a page with JavaScript disabled then it doesn't register on the system. But a favourite or bookmark involves manual interaction on that user's part, so shows up as a 'ghost' visit :-p

And they like Hertha as a character in her own right! I was afraid they wouldn't like this chapter at all because it was effectively all OC backstory (and an OC with some fairly 19th-century views at that, rather than the standard modern teenager dressed up...)

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