This needs to be the climax to the whole story and hit like a hammer, and after quite a lot of tweaking I'm still not sure that it does. (Or that the thought-process behind Hertha's final conclusion is clear, which is something that was worrying me when I originally wrote this section, over a year ago -- I see that I have just been through exactly the same process of trying to fit more explanation into the ending of the chapter and then taking it all out again because it wasn't working!)

This is the scene that I was envisaging from the start as the main point of the story, and it's just got to work...

Chapter 14 — “Tell Him How You Feel”

It was from Christine Daaé that I heard the true story of what happened that night — Christine Daaé, bedraggled and defiant in the great salon at the Hôtel Chagny, and still wearing the remains of the white dress into which the Ghost had forced her in a mockery of marriage. She had both hands braced on the back of the couch on which Raoul lay; the doctor had been, and gone, and left behind a sedative draught which she had refused to take, just as she had mutely shaken her head at the offer of more seemly clothing. But the Vicomte, his principal patient, had submitted in exhaustion to the doctor’s ministrations, and had now succumbed to a deep and most merciful slumber in front of a roaring fire in the salon, while his own bedchamber was being prepared. ( Read more... )

And the final chunk -- which turns out to add up to the original estimate of 7500 words after all. Evidently I enjoyed the Persian much more than I did struggling with Mr Nameless murdering people :-p

Now I need to decide whether I'm going to submit this as one chapter, or two (3300 and 4100 respectively)-- I thought I had an extra two days, but in fact it's got to be edited and finalised by tonight!

Up ahead he could see some kind of pot-house, a momentary haven of warmth and cheap liquor for those who lived in this benighted quarter. He ducked inside, more out of instinct than with any coherent plan, and had to smother a cough at the thick reek of hot lamp-oil. But no heads turned at his entry; no eyes narrowed in suspicion at the mask that perforce hid his face.

The place was little more than a single low-roofed room, rough-hewn wood from the walls to the floor with a scatter of stools around the tables at the back. The lamps had burnt low and been left untrimmed and only a few fallen mugs gave any evidence that customers had been and gone. Somewhere close at hand, a clatter of pots bore witness to the existence of human habitation, but the sole occupant of the room was a single disconsolate figure sprawled across a table in the darkest corner, hooded and cloaked despite the heat as if awaiting some assignation too long delayed.

A trap. Danger shrieked from every instinct, wrought up to a fever-pitch alert. Yuri was brighter than he’d thought, had guessed his every move in advance— The strangler’s cord taut between his fingers, he sprang across the floor with the speed of a striking snake, twitched the hood aside and jerked the loop tight with a lethal snap.

Sticking this up here un-proofread and un-edited for consideration: this would be my putative first chapter, to be submitted on its own as the challenge entry. There are 3330 words here in about 19 pages of manuscript, which suggests that the full story could sneak under the line at about 7500 words in total; on the other hand, for reading purposes this makes a nice self-contained episode, it focuses in on the idea of the name Chrysostome, its drawbacks and how he manages to get rid of it, and lengthwise it feels like a comfortable read (it's a customary chapter length by my usual standards). I still have a suspicion that reading the whole thing in one gulp might feel a bit like hard work...

Edit: as expected, the whole thing was of course riddled with typos and creatively miscopied phrases :-p

What’s in a Name?

“He should not have been born, and having been born, should have had the good grace to die and spare the world from the spectacle of his existence. Nobody had ever made any secret of that.” Written for Writers Anonymous “What’s in a Name” challenge.

“Il me répondit qu’il n’avait ni nom, ni patrie, et qu’il avait pris le nom d’Érik par hasard” — Ch13, La Lyre d’Apollon

A/N: It was always my head-canon that Erik never reveals his real name, even to Christine, simply because it was actually Narcisse or Hyacinthe or something else terribly embarrassing! As for the name of Erik, of course, he acquired that ‘by chance’...

His own father referred to him, when he was forced to acknowledge the boy’s existence, as ‘the creature’ or ‘that thing’. From other adults in their neighbourhood he had overheard worse names, such as ‘monster’ or ‘unnatural spawn’; he had known since he was old enough to walk that by his very existence he was a stain on his family, and a target whenever he showed his face for casual stones “to drive the devil out”. He should not have been born, and having been born, should have had the good grace to die and spare the world from the spectacle of his existence. Nobody had ever made any secret of that.

His mother, buxom, devout and all too often smelling of wine —and this, too, he knew from what he had overheard, had been brought about by his birth— had bestowed upon him the fanciful name of Chrysostome in a fit of fervour, since his father had refused to name the deformed little creature at all. Old Mother Albine, who had been in attendance at the birth, had told him once, cackling, that the horror of his face and the sickly colour of his skin had been such that everyone had believed the infant already dead. He had been left to one side on a pile of soiled linens, with a cloth drawn across to hide him from his mother’s sight, while Albine and the other women worked to deliver the afterbirth. He had drawn his first breath without human assistance, and clung to life with a thin, outraged cry.

I'm frankly not sure if Raoul is coming across as a complete idiot for not working out what Perrette is talking about, or if the reader is going to be equally mystified by it — the intention was supposed to be that the reader gets it and Raoul perhaps understandably doesn't :-(

Chick nor Child

Raoul has an encounter with Philippe's past, and Perrette faces the future: side-stories from The Sons of Éléonore".

Ch1 — Strange Meeting

The local diligence was slow, ancient and crowded, the old man next to him smelled strongly of garlic, and the good-looking motherly woman and her daughter sitting together opposite kept exchanging whispered confidences and giggling in a way that made Raoul acutely uncomfortable.

He had, of course, no business to be in the common stagecoach in the first place. His trunks for the Naval Academy at Brest had been strapped up and sent off already, and his brother Count Philippe had been expecting— indeed eager— to drive into the station with him this morning, in one of the family’s own well-appointed, well-sprung vehicles, so that they could make their final goodbyes there on the platform. But Raoul was fifteen now and almost a man, and he had stood upon his dignity and insisted that he could undertake this journey all by himself... and the Count had laughed, embraced him, and let him go.

Having an all-female graveyard scene definitely changes the dynamic here (and forces Christine to take a more active part)...

Chapter 11 — “You Betrayed Me”

It was, as I’d suspected, not “La Reine de Navarre” but the Ghost’s self-proclaimed opera “Don Juan Triumphant” that was under rehearsal. It was strange and monstrously difficult to sing, Christine explained, and hazarded a hesitant opinion that it was “no doubt very clever”, from which I was able to draw my own conclusions.

I sat down to try to write my long-overdue reviews on my fellow-competitors' stories for the Writers Anonymous challenge, having eventually succeeded in downloading them via the library for offline reading despite the worst that FFnet could do, but completely failed to do so -- however I have, instead, finally managed to finish typing up and checking the next chapter of Hertha back against the manuscript. And I have also -- as of September 2^nd -- managed to complete the rewrite on Chapter 24 of Arctic Raoul (after three months of delay) and even got as far as typing up the first scene of Ch25, although I still have another two scenes comprising a total of 3,500 words or so to be typed. (Those chapters are definitely getting longer and longer, and it massively inflates the editing time because the prospect becomes so daunting...)

Chapter 9 — “Well-Beloved Wife”

As I’d anticipated, Raoul returned to follow me out almost before the carriage had been brought round. He looked tired and rather dispirited despite the splendour of his costume, and was disinclined to talk even once we were seated and driving back.

Madame Giry had been less than helpful, I gathered. She’d disclosed what she’d heard or guessed about the Ghost’s origins — a carnival freak and deformed genius who’d gone missing years before, evidently quitting the sideshow life to take up existence outside the law — but she’d said nothing of how she came to be delivering his notes, or of where he could be found, and Raoul was convinced she had to know more than she was telling.

“You know, carnival origins could explain quite a lot.” Despite myself, I found my interest caught. “Not least the use of mesmerism. And the oddly theatrical flair — this isn’t just lunacy, it’s an insane performance.”

Just over six thousand words, in the end -- almost exactly the same as Chapter 4. I haven't made any attempt to unwind the *two* flashback/framing device set-ups in this chapter, although I did try to make it a bit more clear when we finally caught up to the present again. I think the only 'present-day' passage in the entire chapter is the brief one between the return to "she had felt afraid to show her face in the street" and the section following "as I observed to Raoul in the early hours of that evening" -- the course of the actual conversation with Madame Firmin, and only that :-(

Chapter 7 — “It Will Be At Midsummer”

It was months before I set foot again in the Opera Populaire. Indeed, there was gossip abroad that the opera would never reopen; that the cost of repairs would be too great, and audiences would never return to the scene of a disaster so widely reported in such lurid terms. Raoul had tried to keep the illustrations in the papers from me, but I had seen them: images of screaming women holding aloft their infants, and dying men at one another’s throats. It was all fanciful, so far as I could tell — certainly there had been no babes in arms, nor any other women that I had seen amid the crowd in the pit, where the crush in ordinary times was unsuitable for skirts, and where the panic had been at its worst — but to my knowledge at least three people had died, and the reality of it had been nightmarish enough. The outcry against the management was immense, and poor Madame Firmin confided to me that she had felt compelled to retire to the country to avoid the opprobrium.

Unusually I ended up deleting several sentences from this chapter altogether rather than editing them, because I decided they were just unnecessary -- I remember thinking that the subtext in the chapter was very clever at the time, but it may have been a little too clever for its own good, because after a year or so's delay I can no longer remember myself exactly what all the characters were supposed to be assuming respectively about what was going on :-(

I note that Meg somehow turns up in the corps de ballet after the quick scene change despite supposedly being dressed for a walk-on part (did she execute an incredibly quick change into block shoes and tutu?) -- I suspect that's left over from the movie, where Meg is in the cast but *not*, so far as I remember, in the Act 3 ballet, and possibly I ought to change either the one reference or the other... The trouble is that I'm reluctant to lose either, which is simply authorial laziness!

[Edit: time for some more cuts, I think, to make credible Hertha's momentary assumption that Christine is talking about Raoul when she says 'he' will never let her go -- and to omit the whole paragraph about Raoul looking relieved to have their embrace interrupted. We've already got Hertha saying that he basically looked trapped rather than guilty, and it makes more sense of her assumption that Christine is running away from her as a result.

Edit: no, we need something in there, or it makes no sense that Hertha accepts his protective behaviour at the end of the chapter without feeling betrayed by it.]

Chapter 5 — “An Accident... Simply an Accident”

It was another opening night. Another glittering, chattering crowd, with the orchestra playing a well-worn warhorse of an overture: Albrizzio’s “Il Muto” had been a staple feature at opera houses across Europe for over eighty years, since the days when Italian opera reigned supreme. The new management was playing it safe in their choice of programme, and to judge by the packed house tonight it had been a prudent decision. ( Read more... )

And we're finally back to the mesmerism I spent so much time researching in January last year (like my recent worries over Hertha's Vienna address after I discovered that my 'fictional' street was in fact a real street of an unusual name which exists in Munich, not Vienna -- all the frantic research for a plausible real address with the right connotations for the family ended up as literally one word in the finished story ;-p)

I also discovered in the process of editing that Raoul had 'appeared abruptly older' several times in the course of the chapter, in addition to having already done so in Ch2; this is what happens when you write painfully slowly and forget which phrases you have previously used ;-p I managed to cut it down to a single, less repetitious occurrence...

Chapter 3 — “As if Awoken from a Dream”

I did not reach home until after midnight, and there was no shared supper of champagne and laughter, but only a cold collation that was put together for me in haste and eaten alone in a chilly salon downstairs. It was a far cry from the sparkle of wine-glasses and good company chez Valestre, where we’d planned to dine.

But Christine Daaé was nowhere to be found, there was no-one in authority from whom Raoul could get a straight answer, and I’d been more shaken by those dizzying moments at the door than I wanted to admit. ( Read more... )

Based on my activities of the last couple of days, my instinct is clearly to keep tweaking and re-shading chapter 2 to try to fit it into this one, rather than to edit what I've written here, so I may as well publish it as it stands... ( Problems with chapter 2 )

It occurs to me at the last minute that I'm not only going to need a story title, I'm also going to need a chapter title if I publish the first chapter before finishing the rest! However, thanks to the way fanfiction.net displays its navigation, any separate title for the first chapter doesn't really show up until a second and subsequent chapter exists to be differentiated from it, so I can more or less get away with leaving brainstorming for chapter titles until the story is complete, as usual. (Or even the decision on whether to have chapter titles or not; I didn't use them for the drabble-fic, after all.)

[2022: slight edit to first line to establish the first-person protagonist right from the start]

An Outsider and a Foreigner

Raoul was bound to recognise Christine when once he heard her sing. But things have changed... for both of them.

The Opera House was [as] full tonight [as I'd ever seen it, and as magnificent]. Light blazed back from the hanging lustres of the great chandelier and the glitter of tiaras and bracelets in the crowd below, and slid around the golden curves of statues and rounded white throats as girls leaned from their seats in the boxes, or waved up from beside duennas as they took their place in the stalls. Rich swags of plasterwork bedecked walls and pilasters, and gowns bore draped silks and flounces tumbling over ornate brocade. Uniforms were everywhere and decorations glistened on the breasts of dignitaries. Gold chains stretched across expansive waistcoats, and amid the heat of crowded bodies and of gaslight foreheads were surreptitiously mopped. Up on the stage, the heavy red velvet of the curtains remained firmly closed, but the orchestra continued to saw doggedly away at the overture, all but inaudible amid the buzz of conversation.

I suspected Raoul was one of the few people even likely to be listening. ( Read more... )