Igenlode Wordsmith

Have I ever mentioned that I really, really dislike writing with no idea where I'm supposed to be going? :-(
( Multiple attempts towards an ending ) Not one of my best last lines, but it will do for a fic that basically doesn't have a storyline, the message being that Venya arrives as a 'waif and stray' and has now carved out a foreseeable place for himself in future at Bragelonne.)

click for full view


Sometimes I wonder if the universe is trying to tell me something... Having stubbornly embarked upon writing up my AU Yellow Poppy idea despite the total lack of readership for the first one (having finally found an workable conclusion for it, I decided I wanted to write up the material that I had been turning over for so long in my mind after all), I woke up this morning to find a slice of my new manuscript obliterated by a giant ink blot that had soaked all the way through a dozen or so consecutive pages :-O I think my pen, which I had just refilled, must have leaked somehow... although that does not explain how there can possibly be *two* blots in apparently the same location, four pages apart, with a smaller soaked-through section on either side of them and between!

I have just been —successfully I think— reconstructing the blacked-out wording from context and memory; fortunately I had spent most of last night rereading and battling with the wording of the next sentence, so I had at least seen it all fairly recently. I suppose this is the hard-copy equivalent of a 'cat on the keyboard' moment... as opposed to losing the manuscript altogether, which would be more of a 'corrupted hard drive' moment. And in fact quite a lot of the text appearing at that particular location on the page happened to be in sections that had already been crossed out, although that may simply reflect how high the proportion of deletions in my work tends to be nowadays :(

( deleted passage )

All right, I've now typed eight more chapters of Arctic Raoul (only one of those tonight!) and proofread one. Chapter titles are provisionally as follows:

Chapter 13	On Open Water	4241 words
Chapter 14	Derelict	3025
Chapter 15	Hard Labour	2628
Chapter 16	Hope from Afar	2854
Chapter 17	Crisis Point	3666
Chapter 18	Ice and Water	2553
Chapter 19	Along the Floes	2572
Chapter 20	Disaster and Surprise	4354

Most of them quite short. (Previous chapter lengths.)

And here, for the record, is the anecdote about Raoul and Madame Valerius' underwear that was excised from the rewrite of Chapter 1 ;-p ( Read more... )

Right. I've discarded just about everything I've written on this chapter since the 5th of November. ( lengthy summary of rationale )

So yesterday I discarded another three and a half pages of laboriously-achieved manuscript, and started yet again to copy out what could be reused from the start of the same old scene, with the explicit aim of glossing over the material as quickly as possible. We've already established in this chapter that Hertha was thinking about marriage for herself at least a year earlier, so why would it occur to the reader to find it odd that Raoul's family are thinking along the same lines? They'll just go 'oh, people got married younger Back In History' [true-ish, but all those high-society heroines depicted as being left on the shelf at twenty weren't representative of the vast majority of the population].

Oddly enough, simply switching the order of a couple of paragraphs near the start of the section turned out to work quite well as a means of jumping directly into the scene, and I got through it in the course of a couple of days within the space of about a page and a half, admittedly a fair proportion of that having been more or less directly copied from the previous versions. Now I need to write a third passage summarising -- very quickly -- the state of their marriage over the intervening timespan, as originally planned. (Before I launched into all this flashback material I did, after all, start off the chapter with I'd been married to Raoul for nine months, but I'd known him since we'd first come to Paris... but that was 17 pages -- the majority of which have been subsequently discarded! -- and over a month ago.)

Of course my sense of chapter length has now gone entirely haywire, and I can't even resort to my usual method of ripping out and/or glueing up discarded pages, because I may yet need to refer to/use some of this material elsewhere. I've also completely lost track of which details are still officially included in the backstory and which will have to be explicitly written in again if I choose to adopt them :-(

I think the chapter currently stands at around six and a half pages, which is nearly three thousand words. So my instinct was right in that I need to start thinking about wrapping it up and getting to the end within a couple of pages or so -- and that the previous version was over-running at over eight pages and still stuck in flashback territory.

---

( deleted scenes )

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 )

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... )