Another 'sample rewrite' that seemed worth saving: an exercise in trying to pull out the essential from amid a mass of detail to create the desired atmosphere.

The talented chapel choir above the pews starts to sing a Nordic hymn as the entrance opened, and at last, the royal strawberry-blonde bride appeared in the mirror's view. She was grinning with twinkled, peacock eyes and rosy cheeks towards her smiling husband-to-be while walking towards the altar, holding an elaborate bouquet of colorful flowers with her dainty hands while her long veil trailed after her on the crimson carpeted aisle.

Her vivid wedding ballgown, which comprises a milky close-fitting off-shoulder bodice with flowered shoulder drapes around her bare, freckled shoulders, sweetheart neckline, and a full bell-shaped plain skirt, was certainly eye-catching, reflecting the cheery atmosphere of the chapel. And the golden tiara atop her round head that resembles the crocus of Arendelle made her look shinier.

"At long last the bride came into view. The roses in her cheeks echoed those in the bouquet she held pressed to her breast, and the smile in her eyes matched that of the husband who awaited her. She came down the aisle as if the creamy sweep of her skirt weighed nothing at all, and her small head, held high, was crowned with a tiara like the gold at the heart of a crocus."

Current Mood: tired

(very old meme picked up at random from betweensunandmoon)

Pick five series and then answer the questions. Don't look at the questions before you choose!

Fionavar
Swallows and Amazons
Blake's 7
Frozen
Narnia

( Read more... )

Current Mood: sleepy

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... )

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: La Forza del Destino

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... )

Current Mood: discontent

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.)

Current Mood: frustrated

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 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...

Current Mood: relieved

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... )

Finished the main draft of my new frozen-Anna fic: circa 7500 words in twenty days. I'm quite happy with the end, so now I just need to go back and sort out the rest of it! A certain amount of Luis Trenker appears to have made its way into the original concept :-p

Provisional summary:

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

Provisional titles:
"Strange Meeting" (I'm not sure Wilfred Owen is really an appropriate association)
"Room for Two" (pinched from the last line; doesn't really sum up the theme of the story)

I'm sure I shall find something better...

Current Mood: relieved

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!)

Current Mood: depressed

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... )

Current Mood: relieved

I got a rather puzzled comment from someone whose first language is not English, asking why Hans doesn't resent Anna 'worrying for his soul' -- it is self-evident in context, isn't it, that the sally "Poor Hans, does it hurt very much? The conscience?" coupled with the blaze-up of spirit is not an expression of sympathy on Anna's part but a sarcastic rejoinder?

Here we go. I'm not as happy about this as I have been with previous one-shots; I seem to have ended up complicating the canon scenario rather than simplifying it.

(For anyone who *hadn't* seen the original, I'd be curious to know how much of the necessary backstory I managed to get across.)

Edit: last-minute change to planned title/summary (plus a couple of words here and there) prior to uploading to fanfiction.net

~~The Opportunist~~

Nothing At All

Feelings are one thing, but a golden opportunity is quite another... and all that is required is for Hans to do nothing.

( Read more... )

Right, the first draft of my "Frozen" story is finished, with the provisional title "The Opportunist" -- unless I can think of a better one -- and the summary "Hans could resist everything except temptation". I can't very well tag it as a Hans/Anna 'pairing', though to be honest it's nearer to that than anything else, in a twisted way...

I need to go back and do some edits for consistency; I think I got a bit mixed up between trying to maintain the coldly dismissive tone of the original and simplifying it to Hans basically telling the truth. This version of Hans is not really telling the truth to anyone, least of all himself, I think.

I'm slightly disturbed to discover via DeviantArt that there is apparently a flourishing school of fans busy pairing Hans off with Elsa, presumably in the same enterprising spirit of mopping up the spares as those who assume that Raoul is destined to couple up to Meg once the Phantom has appropriated his former fianceé ;-p

Last night I finally started work on my entry for the latest Writers Anonymous Challenge -- the challenge this time being that everyone is given the same opening line and has to develop their story from that. Or, in the case of many of us (including me), has to try to shoe-horn that into the start of the story they want to tell...

I decided it would be an opportunity to develop the idea that struck me back when I saw "Frozen"; that the entire plot would be much more consistent as well as more emotionally interesting if, instead of delivering the Insanely Over-Complicated Face-Heel Turn of Evil we simply take pretty much everything that Prince Hans said and did at face value. Write an ending where he acts pretty much exactly as he does in canon, but he does so not because he has been hoping to assassinate Elsa from the start (despite actually defending her in practice multiple times...) but because when he sees the chance of the throne there right in front of him, he is too weak to resist the ambition of his own worse self. Hans as understandable opportunist rather than cardboard villain.

This was one of the Disney films I meant to see during the BFI's all-year Disney-a-week marathon, but managed to miss out on (my enthusiasm had rather flagged by the end of the year). I watched it today under less-than-ideal conditions, on a salvaged second-hand DVD that jammed and skipped, and without actually being able to concentrate on the screen for considerable periods of time, and I liked it a lot: more than "Tangled", more than "Frozen". Loved the Twenties aesthetic (little references like Naveen's ukulele), Tiana's realistic working-class parents, the New Orleans setting, the jazz, the voodoo (the Shadow Man has definite overtones of Baron Samedi). I liked the way that Charlotte, though clearly spoilt rotten, turns out to be a good friend and not an antagonist (and they even manage to make the friendship between the Sugar King's daughter and Tiana the black waitress come across as plausible). The Shadow Man makes an excellent villain. And, although this sounds cruel, I liked the fact that they went so far as to really kill off Ray, instead of pulling off the last-minute magical resurrection that seemed to be on the cards -- though any last words at all were a bit implausible under the circumstances :-p
( Read more... )

Current Mood: pleased
Crossposts: http://igenlode.livejournal.com/81610.html

Apparently my sympathy for the devil instincts are still alive and kicking, since my immediate reaction to finally watching "Frozen" was "Prince Hans simply doesn't make sense" :-p ( spoilers )

Current Mood: annoyed
Crossposts: http://igenlode.livejournal.com/68701.html

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Page Summary

Royal wedding
Five Series
Fanfic Year in Review 2019
Original sledge run
Frozen oops
Lack of excitement
Finishing
Titles and Splits
First draft done
More Frozen trouble
The Opportunist (was Nothing at All)
Lost in translation
Nothing At All (was: The Opportunist)
Frozen draft finished
Frozen for challenge
The Princess and the Frog (2009)
Frozen - Hans

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Igenlode Wordsmith

Entries tagged with frozen

Royal wedding

Five Series

Fanfic Year in Review 2019

Stats

List of Completed Fics

Original sledge run

Frozen oops

Lack of excitement

Finishing

Titles and Splits

First draft done

More Frozen trouble

The Opportunist (was Nothing at All)

The Opportunist

Lost in translation

Nothing At All (was: The Opportunist)

Nothing At All

Frozen draft finished

Frozen for challenge

The Princess and the Frog (2009)

Frozen - Hans