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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... )

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.

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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... )

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.

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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.

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.)

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.

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... )

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!)

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The Opportunist

( rewrite )

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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... )