Igenlode Wordsmith

What's in a Name (ch2.2)

Mon, 29 May 2023 16:06:16 GMT

And the final chunk -- which turns out to add up to the original estimate of 7500 words after all. Evidently I enjoyed the Persian much more than I did struggling with Mr Nameless murdering people :-p

Now I need to decide whether I'm going to submit this as one chapter, or two (3300 and 4100 respectively)-- I thought I had an extra two days, but in fact it's got to be edited and finalised by tonight!

Up ahead he could see some kind of pot-house, a momentary haven of warmth and cheap liquor for those who lived in this benighted quarter. He ducked inside, more out of instinct than with any coherent plan, and had to smother a cough at the thick reek of hot lamp-oil. But no heads turned at his entry; no eyes narrowed in suspicion at the mask that perforce hid his face.

The place was little more than a single low-roofed room, rough-hewn wood from the walls to the floor with a scatter of stools around the tables at the back. The lamps had burnt low and been left untrimmed and only a few fallen mugs gave any evidence that customers had been and gone. Somewhere close at hand, a clatter of pots bore witness to the existence of human habitation, but the sole occupant of the room was a single disconsolate figure sprawled across a table in the darkest corner, hooded and cloaked despite the heat as if awaiting some assignation too long delayed.

A trap. Danger shrieked from every instinct, wrought up to a fever-pitch alert. Yuri was brighter than he’d thought, had guessed his every move in advance— The strangler’s cord taut between his fingers, he sprang across the floor with the speed of a striking snake, twitched the hood aside and jerked the loop tight with a lethal snap.

( Read more... )

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What's in a Name (ch2.1)

Mon, 29 May 2023 01:19:45 GMT

And here's another chunk, or at least as much as I can get typed tonight (the clock is ticking...) We are now up to 31 pages of the 43 in the manuscript, and the total predicted word-count is down to 6500 words according to the current average -- given the large quantities of crossings-out that come with (a) trying to write action scenes (b) trying to write Erik, the ultimate unreliable narrator/viewpoint character, I can't imagine that end total is going to increase very much in practice. So that may be a reasonably workable story, although I'm still tempted to post just the first half... especially if the three thousand-odd words of that 'first chapter' actually *is* around halfway, rather than only being a chunk out of the beginning!

The road from Rouen, in the years that followed, was to take him further —and to far stranger places— than the poor provincial child he had been could ever have believed possible. In the course of those travels he went through half a dozen names or more, picking them up and discarding them as casually as he acquired possessions when it proved convenient.

The name of Kolzhak had appealed to his childish taste, but he’d had to leave Guntram’s show in a hurry near the Belgian border, and it had seemed a wise precaution to leave that identity behind.

There had been trouble with Mazzini the conjuror — his magic had been tawdry enough, in hindsight, nothing but sleight of hand and a few bits of simple apparatus, but he’d seen no reason to take on an apprentice of any sort, still less to pass on the tricks of his trade to a half-dead freak. When he’d caught the boy practising to duplicate the basics of his art through nothing more than eagle-eyed observation, he’d accused him of being a spy, a thief, and worse. Simmy, who’d seen the writing on the wall for his own Living Skeleton act, had been quick to take Mazzini’s side against the interloper, and between them they’d made a good deal of unpleasantness. And so it had all ended in an accident, like the various pointed mishaps that used to befall boys at home.

( Read more... )

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What's in a Name (ch1?)

Sat, 27 May 2023 21:44:56 GMT

Sticking this up here un-proofread and un-edited for consideration: this would be my putative first chapter, to be submitted on its own as the challenge entry. There are 3330 words here in about 19 pages of manuscript, which suggests that the full story could sneak under the line at about 7500 words in total; on the other hand, for reading purposes this makes a nice self-contained episode, it focuses in on the idea of the name Chrysostome, its drawbacks and how he manages to get rid of it, and lengthwise it feels like a comfortable read (it's a customary chapter length by my usual standards). I still have a suspicion that reading the whole thing in one gulp might feel a bit like hard work...

Edit: as expected, the whole thing was of course riddled with typos and creatively miscopied phrases :-p

What’s in a Name?

“He should not have been born, and having been born, should have had the good grace to die and spare the world from the spectacle of his existence. Nobody had ever made any secret of that.” Written for Writers Anonymous “What’s in a Name” challenge.

“Il me répondit qu’il n’avait ni nom, ni patrie, et qu’il avait pris le nom d’Érik par hasard” — Ch13, La Lyre d’Apollon

A/N: It was always my head-canon that Erik never reveals his real name, even to Christine, simply because it was actually Narcisse or Hyacinthe or something else terribly embarrassing! As for the name of Erik, of course, he acquired that ‘by chance’...

His own father referred to him, when he was forced to acknowledge the boy’s existence, as ‘the creature’ or ‘that thing’. From other adults in their neighbourhood he had overheard worse names, such as ‘monster’ or ‘unnatural spawn’; he had known since he was old enough to walk that by his very existence he was a stain on his family, and a target whenever he showed his face for casual stones “to drive the devil out”. He should not have been born, and having been born, should have had the good grace to die and spare the world from the spectacle of his existence. Nobody had ever made any secret of that.

His mother, buxom, devout and all too often smelling of wine —and this, too, he knew from what he had overheard, had been brought about by his birth— had bestowed upon him the fanciful name of Chrysostome in a fit of fervour, since his father had refused to name the deformed little creature at all. Old Mother Albine, who had been in attendance at the birth, had told him once, cackling, that the horror of his face and the sickly colour of his skin had been such that everyone had believed the infant already dead. He had been left to one side on a pile of soiled linens, with a cloth drawn across to hide him from his mother’s sight, while Albine and the other women worked to deliver the afterbirth. He had drawn his first breath without human assistance, and clung to life with a thin, outraged cry.

( Read more... )

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Facts and figures about money at the Opera

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:23:02 GMT

I turned up some of my old research about the running costs/ticket prices etc at the Opera Garnier (weirdly, this appears to have been a totally *different* set of research from the additional values cited in my existing post of assorted opera research!)

While trying to find out which operas were actually produced at the Palais Garnier during the early 1880s (in order to give Raoul and Philippe a plausible production to attend for the third chapter of my Christmas story!), I came across a very useful book mentioning various facts about opera in Paris, for example https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KSQGZOTQKmwC&pg=PA2

The Opera might take 20,000F in ticket sales from a single performance, which puts Erik's 'salary' into perspective -- on the other hand, it cost 16-17,000F per night to stage an opera at all.( Read more... )

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Count Philippe Takes a Hand: character discussions

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 22:58:59 GMT

Compiled from all the various character/plot discussions I've had on "Philippe Takes a Hand" (a sizeable number!)

( Being a mistress versus being a wife )

( The reputation of opera singers )

( Why don't they simply elope? )

( Sexual issues )

( Continuity )

( Marriage )

( Adult life together )

( Raoul and Philippe )

( Eustacie )

( Fandom reception )

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Raoul and Erik's roles in effect exchanged

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 02:37:57 GMT

I know that I have written at length and with some analysis about my old theory that the issue with "Love Never Dies" was that Lloyd Webber had accidentally managed to swap over the functions of Raoul and the Phantom from those seen in POTO -- but I can't actually *find* any of those discussions in order to archive them, save for my very brief original mention of it as "the insight that didn't make it into the story" of "The Choices of Raoul"...

I think the topic must always have come up as part of *replies* on my part to other people, which means that the relevant discussions are either trapped in my FFnet PM box (might be worth trying to check all the outgoing messages from the relevant period, circa April 2013-2014, the next time I travel in to the library), in my likewise inaccessible Dreamwidth message outbox, or else scattered all over LiveJournal/Dreamwidth in assorted journals :-(

The closest thing I have managed to track down is a comment to a comment in vicomte_de_chagny, on the subject of Why "Love Never Dies" is a tragedy.
( Edit: found :-) )

Second edit (Jan 27th): ( further material from old PM discussions )

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High City on a Hill (Ch11)

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 05:03:30 GMT

Having an all-female graveyard scene definitely changes the dynamic here (and forces Christine to take a more active part)...

Chapter 11 — “You Betrayed Me”

It was, as I’d suspected, not “La Reine de Navarre” but the Ghost’s self-proclaimed opera “Don Juan Triumphant” that was under rehearsal. It was strange and monstrously difficult to sing, Christine explained, and hazarded a hesitant opinion that it was “no doubt very clever”, from which I was able to draw my own conclusions.

( Read more... )

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Movie timeline woes

Fri, 09 Oct 2020 03:53:23 GMT

All right, I finally got round to watching the 2004 "Phantom of the Opera" movie, and...ouch. ( Read more... )

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The Writing on the Wall (Ch2)

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 16:27:01 GMT

Finally, I have my kitchen sink back! I celebrated by having a bath... forgetting that the bath sealant hadn't fully cured yet, having been done later. Ooops ;-p

Well, I'm not nearly so sploshy in my bathing as I am in my washing up...

The first chapter of "The Writing on the Wall" went down like what felt like the proverbial lead balloon, struggling to reach 30 page views in total and getting no reviews in 24 hours other than 'is this all or will there be more?' But now I've got a couple of reviews from Raoul-friendly people and am feeling happier about it :-) ( Read more... )

Ch2: Words in the Dark

At the end of a few minutes’ frenzied excavation, the candle set well back out of danger, Raoul had in his possession the rotted remains of what had once been a wooden sabot, several lumps of stone large enough to serve as a weapon or a hammer, and — the ultimate prize, clawed out at the farthest stretch of the chain from between two slabs too heavy for him to shift — a blunted and broken chisel-blade. It would not do for carving out caryatids or smoothing off the bannisters of a marble balustrade, but at this precise moment it meant hope, and perhaps life. Perhaps freedom for Christine. Beyond that prospect he dared not let himself think.

( Read more... )

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The Writing on the Wall (Ch1)

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 23:59:44 GMT

I have finally finished typing up "The Writing on the Wall". So here, to celebrate ~~(and completely un-corrected, so everything up to and including the summary is subject to change)~~, is the first half of what came out as a two-chapter story.

The Writing on the Wall

Chained and alone in the cells of the Communards, Raoul reaches into the past for a final act of defiance.

Ch1: Imprisonment

Raoul choked on blackness, gulped again for air he could not find, and knew in some fast-shrinking core of awareness that this was the end. The battering waters, the iron tree, his own drowning struggles had all become — in one final mercy — very distant. He was twenty years old. He could not die...

Christine. A lightning-bolt of memory through the dark, in one last agonized convulsion. And then the flicker was swallowed, and went out.

( Read more... )

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Death of a violin

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 10:27:37 GMT

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 :-(

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The Infamous Plot Point 15 - halfway.

Thu, 05 Dec 2019 23:23:41 GMT

Right, I've *finally* finished rewriting the first half of Plot Point Fifteen; Stefan and Raoul are both far less seriously injured by Erik than was previously implied (in particular, Raoul still has full use of his previously-wounded arm as and when it suits me), nobody fires a gun, I've gone back to the old plot where the two of them are in a Male Conspiracy to keep Christine out of danger instead of having her kept occupied by trying to resuscitate Stefan, and as a last-minute decision Erik *does* assault Raoul after all, but only very briefly, so I don't have to worry about keeping it quiet. ( Read more... )

At least I'm finally writing *new* material, which is an inexpressible relief. I can actually feel the ideas bubbling up and chaining on to the anticipated plot in advance, which is precisely how it's supposed to work, instead of desperately trying to hack out stale stuff.

The rewritten version is an improvement, though. It gets rid of the plot elements I was increasingly unhappy about and gets back to the originally intended feel of the scene -- there were a few character moments I'm a little sorry to lose, but they weren't worth the plot machinations required to lead to them.

(Plot Point Fifteen is practically worthy of a tag of its own by this point...)

( Deleted scenes )

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Double Agents de Chagny

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 02:22:44 GMT

Summary post of all the surviving material on my long-pending "Double Agents de Chagny" WW2 AU story, prompted by betweensunandmoon:

(extracts from an email conversation - with text emoticons :-p)

17 Sep 2013
I am seriously tempted by Pika-la-cynique's throwaway suggestion of a Paris-based Second World War version "featuring the Double Agents de Chagny playing collaborateurs and hosting champagne parties for the Nazi top brass, while secretly in touch with the Phantom, explosives expert and leader of the underground sabotage movement, reluctant allies for La Cause..."

Well, 'tempted' isn't the word. The possibilities are there all right, but I simply don't know enough about the setting (and more importantly [eyes] its mythology: not what *really* happened, but the heroic tropes) to write it. I can't use a supply of gangster/pirate movie references, swashbuckler conventions, background stage experience, basic social mores or re-reading of the source material (because, being AU, there *isn't* any) to provide standard plot themes for Occupied France, and don't know enough about daily life under those conditions to sketch in the background. But tantalisingly, I know just enough to have vague ideas of the potential ("Scarlet Pimpernel" meets "Colditz")... and to realise that, given the possibly explosive effects of fiddling with a sore point in someone else's history, it would need an awful lot of research! ( first thoughts )

( Research on Occupation-era Paris )

( initial suggestions for the story )

( Raoul's backstory )

( Christine and the Phantom in cabaret )

( Philippe's death )

7 Jan 2019
The other bit I remember that doesn't seem to be mentioned here anywhere is that (as hinted above) it was actually a shot-down English airman being smuggled in the bed of the lorry, they take him back to the flat for the night, he gets Christine's luxurious marital bedroom, and Christine and Raoul end up in Raoul's single bed in the dressing-room together :-p

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Collected thoughts on Erik and fanfiction

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 03:23:53 GMT

Collected thoughts on Erik and fanfiction (a companion piece to C
ollected thoughts on Raoul posted to vicomte_de_chagny)

I cringe whenever I see fan-fiction in which 'Erik' is routinely best friends with 'Nadir' -- this just doesn't exist unless you're writing a story set in Susan Kay's world, which is in itself fan-fiction. The Persian in Leroux finds Erik both pitiful and terrible, but he isn't his friend -- more a sort of tolerated watcher who knows that he may some day have to take action. One can extrapolate a complex relationship from that, but simply importing Kay's names wholesale into a world that doesn't share her backstory because you want to give Erik someone to club around with feels like pure laziness to me :-(

The fandom tends to treat both Raoul and Christine as effectively inconsequential, with almost all their interest revolving around an idealised Phantom; it's something I find difficult to understand, given that the musical is basically Christine's story and the novel is largely seen from Raoul's point of view.
I'm not sure how you get devoted to a character to the degree that you ignore most of his original conception (smells of rotten flesh; laughs insanely; blackmails people for outrageously large sums of money; designs and installs torture chambers for fun; intends to blow up a full theatre during a performance; randomly pretends to be a ghost) and impose on him your own self-identification of the helpless unloved outsider... or at least, that's my best guess at the psychology behind it. I feel that people think of *themselves* as the poor Phantom whom everybody hates unreasonably, and whose cause they can passionately espouse, and transfer that into wanting to force Christine to love him as a reward for his sufferings.
I'm conscious, however, that I'm guilty of taking a rather similar attitude to Raoul where Christine is concerned -- not that I want to 'reward him for his sufferings', of course, but that I'm more concerned in fanfiction that he 'gets Christine' than that she is happy (which is why I can read tragic endings, in which one or all of the characters die, with more equanimity than endings in which Christine is taught that what she really wants is Erik after all!

Susan Kay's Erik

( Read more... )

The Persian

( Read more... )

Erik as plot device

( Read more... )

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Blue Remembered Hills (ch22)

Sun, 29 Apr 2018 01:57:42 GMT

And finally, four years and seventy-five thousand words later... Erik gets the last word. Well, it's canon!

Although I had quite a lot of trouble getting Dar to feel plausibly sympathetic towards him, given that he basically sabotaged everything the two of them had been working for in a fit of pique...

A pair of scenes here to mirror the pair at the beginning; I'd forgotten how amusing Carla is to write, with her overweening self-deception -- she takes care not to think in a straight line even about herself (and very rarely thinks about anybody else). But I did want to show that a lot of the faceless goons on the 'other side' would actually have been boys just like Rall, with people to grieve them. Revolution isn't all bright colours and heroism and Good versus Evil :-(

Chapter 22: The End of the Ghost’s Love Story

Carla trod down the street with a spring in her step, humming a little.

She’d cried buckets — positively howled — when she heard about Salj, of course she had. She wasn’t completely heartless, whatever some people might think, and they’d had a lot of fun together. The last thing she’d expected was to come into work one morning and learn that he’d died in some stupid botched-up attack on the Federation ships just outside her office.

He’d done his duty, defended his post to the last, and helped to beat off the dissidents; no doubt they’d make sure he got some kind of posthumous medal. But all it came down to in the end was that handsome, black-haired Salj, who’d known how to give a girl a good time, had been shot in the head by some angry lunatic with an antiquated energy gun and had his brains boiled out there on the landing field. She hadn’t been able to walk past that point for days.

( Read more... )

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Swedish story progress

Fri, 13 Apr 2018 09:24:46 GMT

Still working my way very slowly through plot point 6; I just need the episode with the Lapp (?and his herd?), and then I was going to use the calf-kissing episode as the end of the chapter. I just hope this isn't going to be as laborious to read as it is to write -- it does need to be a pretty soul-draining experience, because it isn't exactly a barrel of laughs for Christine, plus I suspect that the audience appetite for C/E interaction is much greater than mine :-p

However, having decided that I was going to pursue this plotline to the bitter end before branching back to Raoul, I'm now strongly tempted all over again to switch at the end of this chapter( Read more... )

Facts and figures:

Reindeer calves are born in May. Reindeer migrate in April/May, before their calves are born 'in the foothills of the mountains'. Swedish migration patterns seem to be basically towards the Norwegian border all along the mountains -- I'm assuming they went on down to the sea in the days before border control, as other sources talk about reindeer/caribou going to the coast for the summer...
I've very carefully avoided any clear indication of exactly where Erik is holding Christine prisoner( Read more... )

More date problems: my original plotline called for Erik to injure himself chasing/rescuing Christine, and to be on the point of death from septicaemia when she returned. However, it also calls for Christine to travel first to Paris, then down to Chagny, then back to Sweden to retrieve her papers and visit Madame Valerius, then an unspecified bureaucratic delay before they legally can be married there (?three weeks?), followed by a search across Sweden to locate the hut again.
All of which implies that Christine doesn't get back for a couple of months -- far too long for Erik to survive a bout of septicaemia! ( Read more... )

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Blue Remembered Hills (ch20)

Fri, 02 Mar 2018 18:52:41 GMT

I can't remember if I thought that telling this scene from the point of view of Gan-the-outsider was inherently a good idea, or if it was just Gan's turn to narrate a chapter, or what... At any rate the impact doesn't seem to have come out as inadequately as I remembered it in retrospect. Fortunately.

The B7 characters' contribution to the crossover plot is basically limited to providing a magic means of exit, but then they did supply the entire setting and political scenario in the first place, so their role isn't quite as uneven as it might seem. Still, it isn't a 'what if character X turned up in plot Y and totally changed everything' plot, more of a 'what if plot Y took place in an AU setting from series X'...

Chapter 20: And Cannot Come Again

The first thing Gan had known about the atmospheric breach had been the buzz of warning as the pressure doors in the shaft to the lowest level began to close while the two of them were still only halfway down. Blake, who’d been ahead of him, had let go instinctively and dropped down onto the floor plates below with a jolt. All that saved Gan himself from injury or worse had been lack of maintenance in the mechanism.

( Read more... )

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Blue Remembered Hills (ch19)

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 02:11:26 GMT

My leg has pretty much healed, save for a large round burn mark on my shin; it swelled up into the most gigantic spherical blister for four or five days and then went on weeping slowly for a few days before drying up. Fortunately nobody ever sees my shins, so they didn't even know there was anything wrong.

Trying to bathe while keeping one leg cocked up in a chilly way on the side of the tub is quite a challenge, especially when it comes to soaping underneath! I managed it twice...

Work continues on the still-unnamed Swedish story, in which Christine has finally met Kulla the cow (who isn't very impressed with an intruder in her bed); I'm tempted to go with Frökenstjärna as her (unofficial) name for the calf — 'Little Miss Star' — but they're not on that sort of terms yet! Her feelings about Erik are all over the place, from crawling horror to an optimistic "I can talk him out of this", though without the canonical pity, at least as yet — it's been a little odd writing this in conjunction with the similar confrontation scenes from "Blue Remembered Hills", originally written years ago but of course drawing on the same limited Leroux source material in its attempt to get Erik's logic/speech patterns...

Chapter 19: Breath for Breath

What she was doing could kill. Cris knew that. Knew that Erik was taller than she was, and stronger than she was, and very, very fast, and that she could not afford to hold anything back at all.

She hit him as hard as she could with a little sob of breath, striking out at the place behind the mask where the scalp showed bare and vulnerable, and tried not to think of that fragile shell of bone, and the tissue of that great mind helpless beyond... She’d held off this moment for too long. She could not fail in her one chance now.

Erik went down with an animal grunt, mask falling askew, and did not move. Cris choked back a pang of horror at what she’d done and fled to Rall, pulling frantically against the bands that held him.( Read more... )

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A freak accident

Fri, 26 Jan 2018 23:50:42 GMT

Apparently I managed to burn my leg on my hot water bottle last night; at any rate I woke up with a sore leg and a blister an inch in diameter that wasn't there when I went to bed. I really don't have the faintest idea how that happened, since the bottle went into the bed some time before I did, it has a thick fuzzy cover which appears undamaged, I was wearing pyjama trousers (though it's possible they pulled up while I was asleep), and I've been using the same bottle all winter with no ill effects. Indeed, I've never had this happen to me or anyone I know in my entire life. It's probably the biggest burn I've ever had... bizarre.

Still struggling to write Erik and Christine( Read more... )

After the initial honeymoon period I've been having quite a lot of trouble with my new Brooks saddle, which I hope I've now finally sorted out( Read more... )

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Blue Remembered Hills (ch18)

Sun, 14 Jan 2018 00:12:06 GMT

And finally (after I'd edited it, and the computer crashed, and edited it again, and discovered I hadn't installed the HTML mode when I upgraded my text editor...)

I still remember the sense of achievement when I succeeded in finishing this chapter after breaking off to write To Ease Your Troubled Mind in an unprecedented (and since unequalled!) rush of inspiration — oops, that was back in March 2014! https://igenlode.dreamwidth.org/35318.html

This of course was the chapter where I could finally use that eerily apt line from Housman's original poem.

Chapter 18: Into my Heart on Air that Kills

Dar’s men were dying.

Cris watched disaster unfold with dry eyes and an aching heart.

Erik was beyond her pleas entirely now, voice and mind lost behind the mocking, raging mask of the Ghost. He’d routed Dar’s communications back through the control tower at the dockyard and flung them wide open to Federation monitors; every move, every desperate attempt to regroup was betrayed before it could even begin, and long-planned routes of retreat were compromised at the very outset. The Operation on Newparis was falling apart in the vengeful hands of its creator like the toy of an angry child, and the Ghost’s electronic laughter reigned over all.

( Read more... )

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Can't write C/E conversation

Wed, 10 Jan 2018 03:02:33 GMT

Making very heavy weather of writing a single page (~500 words) of Christine/Erik interaction -- how on earth do people write entire epics of these two shut up together, and how am I going to manage several chapters of it? :-(

I seem to remember having this trouble with "Blue Remembered Hills"; after two or three chapters of Erik's view on Cris and then Cris's view on Erik, I just couldn't think of any fresh reaction for them to have towards one another, and had to resort to writing the final scene from Rall's viewpoint instead after running out of viewpoint for Cris :-P

What amuses me is that the conversation immediately picks up when they start talking about Raoul... heavens above, I really do have a one-track subconscious, don't I? It's very odd, because I'm certainly not fixated on him the way the fangirls are on their Erik; it's just that that seems to be where my ideas come from.

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Plot holes

Mon, 11 Dec 2017 03:22:21 GMT

Well, I've written chapter three (another 3000 words), which came out considerably more violent than I'd originally intended/remembered (and only actually covers about half of the plot summary for point three; the second half will probably fit into the succeeding chapter, though). I spent some time wondering how (a) I was actually going to get Raoul out of this safely and (b) how I was going to avoid Philippe finding out about what was going on. Then it dawned on me that maybe Philippe finding out might be the solution...( Read more... )

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Blue Remembered Hills (ch16)

Sat, 02 Dec 2017 09:48:26 GMT

Female protagonists in the B7 universe don't usually wait around for someone else to rescue them...

Chapter 16: Mistress of Her Own Fate

Cris slid her boot back on and tried to get a grip on herself, shivering. Her hair was escaping from its loose plait; she pulled it down across her shoulder and began braiding it again properly, the fierce grip of each strand upon her scalp a source of reassurance and strength. It was an armour against the world... and it was a defiance of Erik. She was not going to be his damsel in distress, or his veiled doll in soft colours and pretty tunics. He would have to take her as she was, not treat her as he pleased.

( Read more... )

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End of Swedish story

Tue, 14 Nov 2017 05:15:25 GMT

Right, I think I've got an ending for this 'Swedish' story, although not quite the one I expected... which means I'm now landed with the responsibility of actually writing the thing, having done all the 'fun' bit!
( Read more... )

Phew. Well, I make that at least seventeen chapters -- any story which ends up taking that many days to tell usually comes out massively long, given how long it takes me to write a 'normal' length story in three or four scenes. Mind you, on fanfiction.net stories are expected to extend over far more chapters than mine normally do -- not sure if that is because they make them up like soap operas as they go along, or because I always jump between 'highlights' instead of showing the much-advertised 'slow burn' of the characters gradually falling for one another over weeks or months...

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Blue Remembered Hills (ch15)

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 19:14:46 GMT

I was a bit stuck on a title for this chapter, but it was of course inevitable once I'd remembered my Blake's 7! ( progress of Swedish story )

Chapter 15: Rumours of Death

MURDER.

Communications buzzed with it. Alerts ran out across the planet. Dispatches were encrypted to Space Command. Sentries neglected their duties to discuss it; surveillance officers, chasing shadows, missed the purposeful movement of bodies of men. Dar Ogar, moving among them, heard the news and had no reason to doubt it. A Federation commander meant nothing to him, and he spared a moment’s wry gratitude for the distraction — the boy had just made his life a great deal easier.

( Read more... )

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