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Finally, the final chapter.

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Chapter 15 — Epilogue

It had been raining all night, summer squalls lashing against the long windows, on the morning that my son was born. Now, when those hours of travail were finally over, the skies had cleared with the dawn. The sun greeted a world made fresh and new, and slipped in to lie bright across the foot of the bed, and I would not have the drapes pulled. Let the furnishings fade, just for today, if the room could be lapped in this joyous tide of light.

I lay back on the clean pillows, utterly drained but triumphant. Both the baby and I had been washed, dressed and made presentable. Now the early sunlight slid across the coverlet. Outside the window, as if by magic, the dusty roofs and treetops had been reborn, and here within, my son slept in his nurse’s arms, tiny, crumpled and miraculous.( Read more... )

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...

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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... )

Chapter 13 of Hertha uploaded; I was hoping for a slightly more enthusiastic reception given that this is one of the major turning points of the story and people had actually been asking where the next chapter was, but it was as muted as usual.
Nearly finished now -- we just have the final confrontation (in this case between Hertha and Christine rather than between Christine and the Phantom!) and then the epilogue chapter.

Meanwhile I have typed Chapter 30 of Arctic Raoul, although I'm not all that happy with it. It's very much an 'in-between chapter' by its nature, since it covers the lengthy and fruitless search before they happen across Kulla; the C/R stuff, perhaps unsurprisingly, is quite good, but the 'action scene' I'd remembered is literally *two paragraphs* out of a four-thousand-word chapter, 150 words from "the pony threw up his head and bolted" to "a moment later it was all over"...


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I have been rigging up tomato-strings for the benefit of the towel-tomatoes (thus covering my hands with yellow -- I'd forgotten tomatoes did that!)( Read more... )
The Demon Red chilli finally managed to outgrow its initial yoghurt-pot, and I have repotted it into a larger pot using compost retrieved from the various pots I have been emptying, including the gone-to-seed pak choi, from which I was able to harvest a little seed, but not nearly as much as I had been expecting (an awful lot of those seed pods turned out to be empty, and some of them were hosting caterpillars!)


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I have actually been doing some typing on Ch13 of Hertha, trying to fix the horrifyingly paralysing issue of the gunshot in the flashback, the prospect of tackling which had kept me from so much as touching the manuscript for six months; I've succeeded in introducing a couple more allusions to the sound of the shot and pushed more bits of Hertha's narrative into the grammatically less ambiguous past-perfect tense as a result, which I think has *probably* patched the perceived problem sufficiently, although I shall need to run the result past somebody to check (probably meibruges again!) However, I have perhaps inevitably ended up starting work on this past midnight every day, due to chronic procrastination -- the only reason why I have got round to it at all, really, is that I have now reached a stage where all the *other* tasks queued up are those that feel even less inviting, so that this now becomes an escape mechanism rather than a thing to be escaped.

(It currently looks as if Ch13 is going to come out at around 6,000 words, which is a lot, but not actually any more than the existing Chapter 7 and Ch4...)

Chapter lengths:
Ch1: "Can it be Christine?"	3551
Ch2: "We Can Make it Work"	4754
Ch3: "As if Awoken from a Dream"	3914
Ch4: "She Won't Thank You For It"	6078
Ch5: "An Accident... Simply an Accident"	4480
Ch6: "He'll Stop at Nothing"	5402
Ch7: "It Will Be At Midsummer"	6061
Ch8: "Why So Silent, Good Messieurs?"	5105
Ch9: "Well-Beloved Wife"	4242
Ch10: "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again"	3616
Ch11: "You Betrayed Me"	4845
Ch12: "I Need to See the End"	3502

The art exhibition scene and its follow-up turned out to feel rather less accomplished when I came to type the chapter up then I had remembered them in retrospect :-( And the forthcoming beginning of Chapter 13 is definitely going to need some work. I have adopted the classic approach of starting it 'with a bang', namely the sound of a gunshot, and then spending three pages of flashback explaining where and when Hertha is and how the characters got there, and upon rereading the result I don't think the readers are going to make the intended connection between Hertha sitting around and worrying in the foyer and the canonical shot that gets fired by mistake without any consequences in the auditorium just before the start of "Don Juan"...

( narcissi )

Chapter 12 — “I Need to See the End”

It was full dark by the time we drew up in the Place Clignot-les-Pins. I had been expected back from the dressmaker’s hours earlier, and the household was in a state of suppressed tumult and concern. No-one had dared worry my mother with my absence —I was a married woman, after all, and not a child— but my father would be home imminently for dinner, and it was clear that nobody had been relishing the prospect of having to explain to him that I had gone out to Madame Walbroek’s establishment that afternoon and failed to return.

For my part I had no desire to talk about my encounter with the Ghost if it could be avoided, and I did not suppose Christine was in any hurry to introduce the subject either. Stories of sinister alluring figures in deserted graveyards could only sound like hysterical delusion at the best, or a lame excuse for some more culpable assignation.

I was tired, and hurting, and consumed by terrified guilt at what my reckless behaviour might cost, and how I would ever be able to tell Raoul. The last thing I wanted to do was to try to convince a parcel of servants of the whole improbable experience; I wanted a bed, and a doctor, and my mother’s arms, and if I could not have the latter then I would say whatever it took to get rid of the crowd of worried faces.

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Rewrites: working on the graveyard scene to try to clarify and get the impact I wanted.

Original (after editing at time of writing) text:

Another fireball, this one hot enough to graze my cheek. If his aim shook enough, I thought I'd shaken his aim enough, perhaps, that he might kill me without even meaning it.
My knees gave way, and. I sank down, not gracefully but in a clumsy overbalanced fall. lurch, caught my heel against the kerbstone of a grave and fell sidelong with bruising force. A deep, griping pain ran through my belly, and a deeper pang of terror cut through swimming senses.

Current, supposedly final revision:( Read more... )

A total of 19 hits and zero reviews on "High City on a Hill" since I uploaded the new chapter, which is almost exactly equal to the 18 hits I got in the week after updating the previous chapter (and very likely the same people!)

But I did get another 2 guest-kudos, which by the nature of things presumably has to indicate fresh readers.

I still haven't even got round to making the trip to update the story on FFNet, at least partly because I keep telling myself I'm going to write those reviews for the other entrants in the Narrative Voices challenge... and not doing it. So I have no idea what the viewing stats are on the Sunset Boulevard story -- or even who the one person who apparently favourited it was, since the email alerts were broken at that point! I did get a lovely review from Mei Bruges, though (to which I still haven't replied either...)

[Edit: about 40 hits on FFnet, plus another unexpected review. I forgot to check on the favourite, though!]

I went to the library to access FFnet (and retrieve some old PMs), and took the opportunity to download copies of the monthly and legacy stats pages for "High City on a Hill". When I got them home and tried to load the files, I discovered that all I had was a couple of Cloudflare pages displaying "fanfiction.net needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding"! I should have simply saved the HTML tables out as text, and reformatted the data back into table form myself...

However, from memory both sets of data confirmed a fairly consistent figure of about 30 hits taking place on every new chapter; there were also about six people who read all the chapters of the story this month, either in order to refresh their memories after the long gap in publication or because it was the first time they had come across the story. ( pasted stat tables )

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In good -- indeed excellent -- news, I have actually managed to progress as far as rewriting the first few paragraphs of my 'flashback problem' chapter in Arctic Raoul, while taking the opportunity to tweak a few of the other bits of wording in that section, something that really ought to have been done at the initial typing-up/editing stage but which was put off due to my structural worries about the chapter. (I also managed to remove a reference to 'dawn'! -- only one, alas, of many in the preceding chapters...)

Mei Bruges suggested that maybe the principal problem with the chapter was not the existence of the flashback[s] as such, but the fact that the entire flashback takes place in the gap between a question and answer in the 'present-day' scene, and indeed immediately after the first line of dialogue in that scene, which means that it barely gets a chance to 'start' at all. So I am trying to rewrite the opening to the chapter to be a casual discussion of their surroundings rather than an unanswered inquisition on Christine, in the hopes that this new conversation will provide a more relaxed 'gap' for the flashback to take place in. ( Read more... )

But after completing the rewritten paragraphs, I found myself glancing backwards in the notebook I was using and rereading the final chapter of "High City on a Hill", which happens to be there. I enjoyed it; I think it does work, and works well. (Now I just have to get that far in the typing-up!)