I had an extraordinary dream in which my *mother* was engaged to Robespierre (who was pretending to be blind) under orders from the British Government, who were holding him in captivity. He apparently decided that this was a fate worse than death and that he would prefer to be executed, at which she was understandably both dismayed and relieved. My subconscious then reminded me that he was very short-sighted, which would serve as an excuse for the feigned blindness, and I woke up. This is the sort of thing that happens after you stumble across the existence of Robespierre fangirls while attempting to check historical details on the Internet...

( Robespierre fangirls )

My face-claim for the Comte de Brencourt: Raymond Massey in "A Matter of Life and Death"

But F. Murray Abrahams as Salieri is something in the same line, as well.

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.

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


( notebooks )

The Remorse of Others

It was a fine winter’s day; as fine as Gaston de Trélan had thought it might be, when the first red dawn had showed above the walls of the Temple prison on his final journey out to the chateau of Mirabel. Only he lay there now silent and still, and the sun would never warm him again.

It had been very quick; very efficient. The single sharp volley was over in moments. All the same, even before the assembled troops had dispersed, echoes of another kind from the firing squad had begun to run through Paris amid gathering unrest at the news. There were sullen murmurs on street corners against what had been done, and the means by which it had been accomplished... but no whisper of them had reached to the little spinney on the outskirts of the city where a young man had just dismounted, nor come as yet to trouble the ears of that rather disconsolate young gentleman.

A squirrel, busy stripping the first buds from the branches high above, chattered sharply, and the hired mare threw up her head. Roland soothed her with word and touch, and stooped to run a hand cautiously down her foreleg, ashamed of his own lack of attention.( Read more... )

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Note to self (because I know from past experience that in ten years' time I shall have forgotten the subtext I was intending to imply!): the dialogue exchanges between Valentine and de Brencourt that Roland does not hear relate to Valentine passing on Gaston's explanation of why he would have *had* to attend the arranged surrender even if he had been certain that his opponents intended to breach the safe-conduct, because failure to do so would have been taken as a refusal to surrender and brought down reprisals upon those he was trying to protect... to which her canon reaction is "I will point out that aspect to the Comte—for he has suffered, Gaston". However, she doesn't have the opportunity or indeed any thought to spare of doing so when next she and de Brencourt meet, so in this story, after her long vigil at Mirabel, when in a calmer state of mind she does as she had said she would in an attempt to ease his mind also. The other message she has to convey to him would be the one entrusted to her in Gaston's final letter (the existence of which Roland is as yet unaware): I ask de Brencourt's pardon once more for what I said to him at La Vergne when he tried to warn me.

I am really, really struggling with trying to rewrite the beginning of "The Remorse of Others" in order to convey the same information more 'organically' rather than front-loading it :-( It's just completely messing up the pacing; I can write the extra material -- with great labour -- but it doesn't hang naturally together...

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And my bathroom clock seemed to stop again after I put all the clocks forward; it was still audibly ticking, but for some reason the hands weren't actually advancing. No sign of rotten batteries this time.

As a last resort I changed the battery despite the tick (and despite the fact that it had a brand-new battery as recently as last November), and that does seem to have fixed it. Although I'm not convinced that it was a weak battery and not, for example, the motor on the back getting twisted out of alignment so that it doesn't engage properly with the hands -- though I tried wiggling it in various different directions!

Pricked out the nasturtiums and poached-egg plants, some spare kale seedlings, the marigolds, and the (one) tomato, for the mini-greenhouse. Interestingly there was no sign whatsover of the paper towelling left in the pot, so it had completely biodegraded over the course of only three weeks! The difference in size between that tomato seedling and the chilli seedlings planted at the same time and kept in the same conditions is incredible...

Sowed pak choi (end of commercial seed), rocket (1 pot old commercial seed, 1 pot saved from last year) pink poppy (I think we are going to have plenty of red poppies...), blue Swan River Daisy, and mesembryanthemum and another square of towel-tomatoes (indoors).

I am still battling away at "The Remorse of Others" (and trying to make it fit the title a little better), having decided that I simply couldn't end the fic either with Roland following de Brencourt out of the door (as I had originally intended) or with the two of them in a hire-carriage on the way to Mirabel (which was my next expected end-point). The characters have spent so much of this scene angsting about the question of travelling to see Gaston de Trélan's dead body that I ended up driven to the conclusion that the story really does need to show them actually viewing it, because otherwise (authorial intention or not) the story is going to come across to the reader as incomplete. Which means I now need to show Valentine as an actual character in person, and tie in with the final chapter of the original novel as well, as opposed to just the events of the penultimate one.
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I am rather struggling with my new Roland/de Brencourt "Yellow Poppy" one-shot, which isn't coming out as well as I had hoped -- partly because I am trying to make it accessible fandom-blind, which my previous story really was not, and since it takes place after the end of a long novel of confused identities and shifting loyalties this involves an awful lot of implicit backstory info-dump! It also doesn't help that the target audience apparently can't even understand the format "M. de Trélan" and needs 'Monsieur' to be written out in full, never mind the concept that one character can have at least three different names: Gaston de Trélan is "Duc de Trélan" when referred to by title and "Monsieur de Trélan" when addressed directly, while they probably don't even realise that "Duc" is a title and not some kind of poncy foreign name... judging by the confusion we had over Mère Brassard in To Ease Your Troubled Mind :-(

But basically I'm spending so much time between lines of dialogue trying to convey the fraught moments of the past that it is throwing off the momentum of the scene, I think. ( Read more... )

Stats

List of Completed Fics

At this point it's starting to get repetitive to say, yet again, that 'thanks to continuing work I haven't completed much this year' -- despite the fact that I *have* been writing pretty much constantly, six days a week at least, I have published very little. The only difference is that it isn't currently 'the Swedish story' holding matters up, though I have managed a certain amount of editing work on that.( Read more... )

And... finished. Well, that's certainly three thousand words I wouldn't have written otherwise ;-)

(And a canon I almost certainly wouldn't have written fan-fiction for at all -- I can't even remember why I started, except that I happened to have mentioned that novel a few days before in some context, probably because it's one of the very few of Broster's works that happens to be available online, and therefore I had the book off the shelves and hanging around on the first of November. Though I *have* always had a fellow-feeling for de Brencourt, along with various other deeply flawed anti-heroes...)

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The end of this series is going to be a bit disjointed, as the beginning was, because I'm just picking out elements to fit the prompts rather than trying to cover the entire plot.

Basically I could either have done a retelling of an existing work in drabbles *or* created a plot from a given series of arbitrary prompts (or just done a stand-alone drabble to match every prompt-word, of course; one of my 'fellow-competitors' has done what amounts to a shopping-list for both her last two entries, a list of ingredients and side-effects for 'medicine' followed by a list of her current tasks and distractions for 'concentration'!)

But trying to achieve both -- while using a book chosen pretty much at random and a prompt-list I hadn't even scanned in advance -- would be an impossible task. Just trying to fill the prompts in plot order so that they form some kind of coherent narrative is a ridiculously challenging extra commitment :-(

(Of course, I do have the advantage that I'm not actually bothering to make anything up :-p)

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It still counts for the day if it's done before dawn, right? :(

She had seen very little of the Comte de Brencourt since their arrival in Paris; he had been almost constantly occupied on her behalf, and in the attempts to save Gaston. As he bent now to kiss her hand, she saw for the first time how worn and ill he looked, and how sleepless his nights had been of late.

Hers had been no better... but he had procured her the best possible medicine for that, in the shape of a visiting order to see her husband. For the Comte's own sufferings she had no remedy to offer in return.