Igenlode Wordsmith

I have been potting up two of the towel-tomatoes and the Roma tomato into what will be their final pots, and have pretty much used up all the compost I bought in the process; I shall have to get some more. Not a lot of progress from the catch-up tomatoes, but presumably they have been developing roots under their sturdy seed-leaves.

The sweetbriar, rose campion and flax are in flower, ( red and yellow poppies )

( Clothes line buckle snapped )

My bedroom clock stopped again this week after I wound it (which is annoying, because it was working up until then!), and turning it upside down didn't seem to help this time :-(

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I have been seriously considering writing the third "Twenty Years After" fic that I was running in my head (basically as a sequel to "If I Should Die") and that I was more or less confident that I was *not* going to write, on the grounds that it had no plot ( and can't really be fitted into canon )

( The obvious sequel to 'If I Should Die' being an AU in which he does )

What worries me more is that I'm not sure Porthos' anecdote, originally conceived in the context of a puzzled conversation about Raoul's parentage (a secret which Athos at this juncture has of necessity taken to his grave so far as his friends are concerned) actually fits very well any more into the story as I am now revolving it in my mind; it's certainly not a good ending. It was simply the point at which I broke off my 'what would they say to one another if...' speculations on reaching my own front door :-p

And unfortunately that particular idea was pretty much the whole point of attempting to write this, being the sole original piece of inspiration there :-(

Right, I think I've fixed the weather (simply by substituting all reference to it with other material, as it had no function in the story other than to act as mood-setting and dialogue spacer ;-)

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My new voice teacher: Right, I think we can get you up to four octaves!
Me: I'd be quite happy to have some practical use out of three (more like two and a half for all intents and purposes)...

I embarked upon the final episode of "Twenty Years After" (it has just dawned on me that the elegaic title/theme music is in fact a slowed-down version of Nasha chest', which is effectively appropriate!) Again, this section proved unexpectedly easy to understand, even at three a.m. without subtitles or dictionary -- but I'm not sure I would have been able to follow where we'd got to without prior knowledge of the plot, because it did feel very compressed and chunky. ( Oddly lacking dynamic of friendship )

I think what has happened here is that the director has made the decision to focus on Mordaunt's activities -- and that part is effective. The scene where he casually shoots his uncle in the back of the head has a shock value that nothing else does (slightly undermined by the fact that we never see Lord Winter's face and so have no idea of the prisoner's identity until the dialogue reveals it; again, probably a conscious choice to make the act more bewilderingly random). This section is very much about Mordaunt finally discovering the identities of the men he has been hunting, and the resulting threat to their lives....

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I think I have finished† my "Three Musketeers"/"Twenty years After" one-shot, after a vast amount of struggle with the end; the final paragraph or two are constituted of about 70% crossing-out, after every sentence I carefully and laboriously formulated in my head turned out to be all wrong when I set it down on the page :-( I think I may still have a rhythm problem with this section, where I seem to have kept repeatedly coming out with similar sentence structures; too many aphorisms, I suspect.

I also appear to have managed to write my first-ever M-rated fan-fiction, in that it goes that little bit further than I think I'd be comfortable giving to a thirteen-year-old, which is the definition of the "Teen" rating. ( The episode of Athos and Madame de Chevreuse )

Yet another programme about 'toxic masculinity' recounting the sad, sad story of a young man whose father didn't say "I love you" often enough-- I don't remember my father *ever* going round saying "I love you" to his children (or to my mother, in our hearing; I've no idea what went on in private, but doing it in front of the children would have felt pretty much indecent). Come to that, I don't remember my mother ever saying "I love you" to us either; she always signed off her letters "Love from Mummy", but that was different. I'm trying to imagine her saying any such thing, and it would sound incredibly stilted.

And yet it never even *occurred* to any of us to doubt that we were very much loved. It simply went without saying; it was patently obvious. Anyone who needed constant verbal assurances about it would have been regarded as incredibly insecure and probably emotionally damaged in some way...

( Read more... )

I just came across the most elegantly insightful aphorism (in the middle of a discussion of synecdoche† in fan-fiction, e.g. referring to people by profession or eye colour rather than name): fanfic is writing whose primary function is to be written rather than to be read.
† Edit: I'm not sure that is in fact the right term, but it was the one being used...

It is regarded as a means above all of self-expression rather than of communication, created to satisfy the need of the author, who "writes to get their own personal enjoyment out of it, with little thought given to what reading it feels like" -- a chorus of squee and flailing is nice to receive, obviously, but basically it is an outlet for the writer's feelings rather than an attempt to create prose that will draw an audience. (Who might not, for example, want to plough through several paragraphs of authorial analysis about the background of a minor character as an interruption to a dialogue passage, or conversely might be cringing every time they read badly-formatted dialogue or exchanges between "the red-haired marksman" and "the tall brunet"[sic] ...)

Unexpectedly we now have some *yellow* mesembryanthemums among those which had self-sowed as weeds in the tomato pots -- every other plant this year has been the dark pink! So, as with the Swan River daisies, the genetic variation is still apparently out there in theory. But as with the pink Swan River daisy I shan't get any seed off this particular plant. (I am still very sceptical about getting any ripe seed from the blue Swan River daisies either.)

( Chillies )

Both the spring onions and now the chives are completely infested with blackfly sucking them limp, despite my repeated efforts to clear the blades of the spring onions manually over the past few weeks -- they are quite unusable as herbs :( I suppose I could try the soapy water trick. Ironically chives are apparently recommended as a companion plant to *deter* blackfly!

I think I have finally managed to construct a final couple of paragraphs on my story, though it took me five days to write as many sentences, and I ended up using a different motif from the one I thought I was going to. On rereading and typing up I shall probably find these two chapters horribly repetitive; I have already noticed that Valentine uses the word 'friend' too often, although each individually was supposed to have the same impact as in the original novel (the relevant scene in which she does so having never actually occurred in this AU, since Gaston is not dead!)

( Chapter titles )

I have just discovered that The Query Shark is dead, which explains why updates have been few and far between since I first saw the site... a bit of a shock.
(Well, I missed the boat on that one.)

I have finally reached 'that' scene (struggling all the way), which means I should now be reasonably(?) close to the end. Although it does ironically mean that de Brencourt probably spends much *less* time with Valentine than he does with Gaston -- possibly just as well, in terms of the plausibility of how long her husband is likely to leave them alone together before coming in to rejoin the conversation :-O

( Word counts and chapter lengths )

I acquired three and a half pounds of windfall plums, picked over 2lb of blackberries (and gathered some windfall apples to go with them) and paid £3 for a box with 8lb or so of overripe cherries -- so I have been drowning in fruit! Preserves: bramble jelly (2 1/2 jars), plum chutney (2 half jars), roasted savoury cherries and cherry-stone cordial. I have also made plum soufflé, German plum streusel cake, boiled cherry vareniki, and other desserts, and still have a fridge full of the least squishy plums and cherries, not to mention a summer pudding waiting to be turned out...

Contrary to my belief, the upper trusses of the Roma tomatoes did in fact set some fruit; the first and largest truss is now pretty much ripe and will need to be picked and cooked with.

( Flat tyre and mileage )

( Clock started again )

( Fic progress )

( fanfiction.net spam ) :-(

A neighbour's daughter has just had her children's book 'accepted' by Amazon and the mother was proudly showing a copy. Friends very impressed. Of course all this means is that she has submitted a formatted file to Amazon's print-on-demand process and had a (unmistakably self-published) paperback volume emerge automatically out of the other end. I didn't read the book itself, only got a glimpse of the binding and the opening page (plus home-brewed illustrations). It may of course be a work of talent, but the odds are against it, especially when it comes to writing for children, which people tend to assume is easier simply because the books are short...

Sour grapes on my part? Yes, almost certainly :-(

And I haven't even *tried* to get mine published; at least she has gone through the work of formatting and submission and soliciting reviews, even if only from friends and family.