igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)

Stats


List of Completed Fics


(over the last 12 months)

To quote from last year, "Thanks to continuing work on the Swedish story, I haven't completed much this year, and what I have done has been [almost] entirely one-shots"! An introduction I hope not to have to repeat for yet another year, or at least not for the same reason.Read more... )
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
Well, Chapter 2 went down like a lead balloon... (Clearly all the people who said they wanted to see what happened next didn't want that to happen next!)

Falls between two stools on Hans, I suspect; he doesn't become a romantic figure or get redeemed, and he doesn't act as the villain and get punished for it. At any rate, here is the original version of the 'sledge run' passage, from before the rewrite for 'shorter sentences, faster action and getting things in the right order':
Read more... )
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)

I might post the original version of the sledge-run scene later for my records before I throw away the discarded pages, but I'm too short of sleep to type that now. So here, with a rewritten sledge run and minus all references to mittens, gloves and other hand coverings, is the second half of "Familiar". The whole story comes out at 7,502 words, which is amazingly accurate to my '15 pages @ 500 words/page' manuscript estimate — funny how things do average out.


Chapter 2 — Tomorrow for Amends

She stood alone. Alone and high up on the side of North Mountain, in an Arendelle where great black ships moved on the sea and a long bridge lay like a collar across the fjord and chimneys rose in places they should not... and where no-one knew her, or had cared enough to come.

Had Elsa come up here, year after year, in search of solitude? Had she set her arms around her sister’s ice-cold form and whispered her sorrows into ears that could not hear? Had she knelt and begged Anna to answer, just once, to give her some sign, some hope, some chance to make all right again? Had she known that only her death could set Anna free, and that the long years held them hopelessly apart?

Read more... )

igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
My tomatoes are finally beginning to set! Apparently although they like heat during the day, they actually can't set fruit if the night-time temperatures are above 75F :-(
Well, now we shall see if they're really 'Green Zebra' tomatoes or not...

Finally started typing up the second chapter of "Familiar" (and found myself wanting to go on beyond my allocated time in order to get to what happened next, which is a good sign) after coming up with a title: "Tomorrow for Amends". Read more... )

And I seem to have solved my half-chapter problem with the Swedish story by producing a second half-chapter with Christine looking back on Perros-Guirec and her past correspondence with the Comte, while Philippe has still yet to enter the story :-p This is what happens when you switch viewpoints; twice as much backstory.
(I'm pretty certain that's what happened to All the Rules Rearranged...)
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
Well, I've finally written up the new 'combined version' of the last chapter of "Familiar" to incorporate the sledge scene rewritten according to the advice I was given to make it a better 'action scene'. Bits of it were better (that final sentence was never very good), but I'm not convinced that it's an improvement in the way that was intended. It's still slow and wordy, because that's my style, but slightly less so.

Meanwhile, having written out the last thousand-odd words for a second time and pasted the continuation sheets firmly down in the back of the notebook, I need actually to get down to typing it into a computer... Also, I need a chapter title.


In the Swedish story, my intended Philippe scene, having become a Raoul/Lancard angst scene, subsequently turned into a Raoul/Christine fluff scene. What it does not have in it is Philippe! So my chapter now consists of a couple of thousand words set in Paris which are not really long enough to be a chapter on their own, plus a second scene of as-yet-unknown length which will probably end up as a complete chapter in its own right. I really don't think I'm going to polish off the reunion between the brothers within the space of another two thousand words, particularly since it's from Christine's point of view and everything is new to her.
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
Having reread the manuscript for "Familiar", I observe that not only does Anna wake up not wearing mittens, but she also blows her nose several times, which would require her to take them off every time she wanted to use the handkerchief. So while I could come up with explanations for where a pair of mittens suddenly appear from (her pockets, Hans) and mention that she puts them on at some point, I really think it's simpler if I simply excise all the three or four various subsequent references where she is wearing them!



I still haven't started work on the meat of Plot Point 12, despite having written about fifteen hundred words on the chapter (which in consequence is almost certainly going to run too long, unless it comes out very unbalanced indeed). I have, however, finally said goodbye to Lancard — it's literally the last thing I wrote this evening. This chapter was not actually meant to be about Raoul/Lancard angst and misunderstandings :-p

(It dawned on me today that Lancard is basically a younger version of Jussy, acid tongue, class-conscious chip on the shoulder and all. Well, I rather liked Jussy as a character...)
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
I've just realised (while correcting other continuity issues in "Familiar" prior to posting) that I've written Anna throughout the second chapter and in the final line of the first as -- very sensibly -- wearing mittens in the snow, as we see her do in canon.

But during the first half of the chapter and, more importantly, during the scene that immediately precedes this in canon, Anna is bare handed; there is a close-up where she looks down at her hands in the snowstorm and sees ice crystals forming on her skin, and she then tries to catch Hans' sword in her open palm. So when and where does she lose her mittens (probably when she arrives back in the castle to beg Hans to kiss her?), and do I attempt to rewrite the rest of the story to remove them from the scene that follows, or attempt to explain how she gets them back? Presumably the cloak has pockets, or at least my mother's red cloak did...

(I strongly suspect that Disney's attitude to consistency in minor clothing details is entirely cavalier, as witness Hans' magically appearing sword, but unfortunately we do have an iconic scene where Anna clearly isn't wearing them.)
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)

I feel there are too many italics in this; I've tried weeding some of them out and ended up putting them back in, but en masse they do tend to diminish in effect :-(

Familiar

“All she could remember was the sword coming down”: AU. Anna wakes to a strange place and unwelcome company.

Chapter 1 — Yesterday and a Lifetime Ago

All she could remember was the sword coming down on Elsa — Elsa, who’d never intended any of this, who’d meant no harm to anyone. The fog of cold that somehow lay between had numbed her senses until she did not know where she had been, or what urgency had driven her out onto the ice. The last vivid thing in the world had been the bright flash of steel, and Elsa’s white neck bowed in yielding despair, and the impulse that had flung her between them.

Anna remembered the sword, and the agonised moment before the blade could cleave through flesh and bone. Then — nothing.

Read more... )

igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
Rough-typed the first chapter of "Familiar"; a bit over three thousand words. I'm not sure why I'm procrastinating so much about getting this published -- I always do tend to put things off once the 'hard work' has been finished, namely the manuscript, but I'm not particularly enthusiastic about this one.

And I'm still feeling a fresh surge of nervous dread every time I get a review notification on "The Opportunist", even though the vast majority of them have been unallayed praise; I'm just not equipped to deal with any kind of criticism (other than by trying to be extremely good at everything) and not used to people finding things wrong with my work. Which sounds, and is, very arrogant, especially as I'm finding things wrong with other people's work all the time.
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
I have written the first sentence of Plot Point 12 (and from Christine's point of view, because after saying that couldn't possibly be done I started seeing potential in it) :-D

In other words, after two months I have finally finished rewriting the rest of Plot Point 9, the wretched chapter that was supposedly finished back in February.Read more... )

I have also finished working over Frozen fic number two (though I didn't manage to come up with any real changes, short of rewriting the sledge-scene in an attempt to make it more 'action' friendly) and have now started typing that one up. I think I'm just going to call it "Familiar", which has sufficient ambiguity of meaning not to give the plot away; "Yesterday and a Lifetime Ago" can serve as a grandiloquent title for the first chapter, and I'll need to come up with something else for the second. Tagging accordingly.

Of course, one problem with splitting it into two chapters is that people really are apt to start expecting the standard twenty-plus-chapter 'characters reconcile slowly and realistically' epic...
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
I bought a bottle of Vimto, out of curiosity.
I shall have to get used to drinking cough medicine over the next couple of months...

Still puzzling over possible titles. Read more... )

I think I'm definitely going to split this one-shot into two chapters rather than running it as a single seven-thousand-word chapter, much as I did for A Child of the Law. Read more... )
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
I'm struggling my way through to the end of my second "Frozen" one-shot without being particularly happy about it -- I'm going to have to go back and fix Hans' characterization again, because it's all over the place. random ramblings )
And then there's poor Arctic Raoul, who has been completely abandoned for weeks now (and I can't even claim it's because of the totally unsuitable weather, given that I've got Anna fantasizing about pushing Hans into a snowdrift!)
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)

I normally just go back and incorporate edits silently into all the various copies of a story -- but this one got changed so much (and I made the edits on my word-processor document, meaning that I don't have an original manuscript copy) that I'm reluctant to overwrite the earlier version; there are a couple of bits in there that I was sorry to lose. snip edits )

(And worryingly, I had an idea for another AU fic, in which Elsa fails to lift the curse and Anna remains an ice statue until her sister's natural death, sixty years later... I really don't want to end up writing a whole series of "Frozen" fanfics, and certainly not ones centred on Hans and Anna's questionable relationship; it's just too embarrassing!)


The Opportunist

rewrite )

Bonus paragraph: the extra paragraph of manuscript that was written for the opening and then deleted again because it was just too long. Read more... )

Profile

igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
Igenlode Wordsmith

June 2025

M T W T F S S
       1
2 345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30      

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated 6 June 2025 03:24 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios