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(in the last year, rather than since the last time I did this in January 2015!) ( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

Final and even more fragmentary sections; I spent a bit of time trying to make it a little clearer what was going on and to tie it together better, which pushed the word-count just about over a thousand words. It really does come across as a bit rushed, though... and I suspect, going on reviews so far, that the fanfiction.net readers are going to feel short-changed by the total absence of any Phantom-related action. (That aspect hadn't even occurred to me while writing; set it down to my customary complete lack of interest in that direction.)

Yann barely even thinks about the Phantom here -- his jealousy is entirely concerned with his supposed aristocratic rival, or in other words his canon self. The whole 'Lyre of Apollo' confession and its consequences has been pretty much swept under the carpet... which is reasonably accurate to canon, since Raoul doesn't learn the truth until the day before Christine's abduction and spends most of the intervening period being jealous of an imagined rival, but does leave out a major and memorable element of the original: the bit that most people think of as the main part of the story :-(

4. Les Amants

Buffeted amid the chaos and panic of the Opera, Yann was desperate for help... and no-one would listen to him. But then, they never had. His own utter insignificance had never been driven so brutally home to him as in the past weeks, since Perros.

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Current Mood: distressed
Crossposts: http://igenlode.livejournal.com/88476.html

The chapters are still very short, but this one is actually longer than the previous one. (The fact that it's two scenes run together helps.)

Unfortunately, once we get Yann as far as Christine's dressing-room we start running into sections of the story that have already been described in greater detail in canon, so at this stage my version starts skipping wildly; in effect, the idea is that everything happens just as in canon from this point, Yann simply interprets it differently from his counterpart.

3. L’Officier

La Royale was good to the young Breton sailor. Yann proved quick and obedient, and self-possessed and nimble aloft. He drew the approbation of his officers without incurring the enmity of the sous-officier set over him, and found himself promoted; first among the seamen, then — after completing his first voyage around the world — among the cadets.

No allowances were made for his lack of education, and he was expected to study alongside the rest. Yann set his teeth and puzzled out mathematics and navigation along with the duffers of the class, taking a fierce pride in the speed with which he overhauled these schoolboys. It was at this time that he began to cultivate a moustache.

In the winter that he turned twenty-one he was a slim, bright-haired young man with a boyish freckled face, confident in his profession but shy among women, with whom his lack of experience put him at a disadvantage. In his leisure hours he read voraciously, in an attempt to remedy the deficiencies in his education. When one of the senior lieutenants proposed a party of pleasure to Paris among the young officers in port, since Yann’s ship was laid up for repairs for the next several months he for one accepted eagerly.

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Crossposts: http://igenlode.livejournal.com/87912.html

I'm still not particularly happy with the first chapter of my Hammerstein-story, despite having rewritten three pages of it to cut out most of René and add in old Oscar himself. My suspicion is that it's a boring info-dump — and while I'm usually pretty good at those, the trouble is that this time no-one has any reason to care about any of the characters involved, Jos, McWhirter or René. So it's effectively just a massive plot summary to describe 'how Christine managed to go missing in the middle of New York', as told from the point of view of characters who didn't actually witness it :-(

It's frustrating, because I still think the idea in itself is original and promising; the experience does at least have the merit of making this preceding story seem better in contrast, even if this one is pretty fragmentary!

2. Matelot

It was three years before he saw Christine again, and when he did it was under very different circumstances. His father’s boat, caught by unseasonal gales, had put in at Toulon, and there the boy had caught the attention of the navy. Well-grown and muscled for his age, and handy on the water, Yann Le Coennec was just the type of sailor on whom the fleet had had its eye for centuries immemorial, and the long and the short of it was that young Yann had found himself enlisted almost willy-nilly into the Marine National — the service which he soon learned to call ‘La Royale’, the nickname for the navy time out of mind.

Yann accepted it with a shrug, as he accepted most things these days. But when he found himself with a few days’ embarkation leave a brief flicker of independence woke, and he turned aside from the long road back from his dépôt to call at the little house in Perros-Guirec.( Read more... )

Crossposts: http://igenlode.livejournal.com/87392.html

After much procrastination, I finally managed to get this typed-up over the course of a couple of days by virtue of running a 'changeover' scheme with the other stuff I was supposed to be transcribing; every ten minutes an alarm was set to go off on my computer advising me to switch material and start typing in the other document! Of course this theoretically meant that the original task took twice as long as normal, but in practice it didn't seem to make much difference (nobody noticed), presumably because the change in source material helped prevent me from getting as bored as usual.

I currently have it split into four chapters, roughly according to chronological jumps (although the last two scenes are separated by a not insignificant period). The main trouble is that the scenes get shorter and shorter as the story goes on, with the last two even when paired together still coming in at under a thousand words, while the first chapter is about two-fifths of the total length all on its own. But the only other sensible division would be to run all the 'adult-epoch' scenes together, and there really is a sizeable shift across this material, both in time and in Yann's relationship with Christine.

Weirdly, I seem to have averaged a lot more words per page on this story than in the previous story in the same notebook; still, four chapters is a lot for a story that's only just over 5,000 words in all. Especially as the previous one was published as a single 3,800-word chapter! (The cynical approach on fanfiction.net, of course, is to upload across as many chapters as possible in order to accumulate maximum reviews and keep the story boosted back to the top of the fandom listing...)

Still wondering what 'category' to put this under and whether it's humorous at all; I'm tempted to do Angst/Humour.

If I Were Vicomte

1. Jeunesse

The sun shone bright across Trestraou’s sands on the day the wandering fiddler came, and the wind raced across the wide bare sweep of that great strand with nothing to halt it but the church high above and the handful of cottages down by the shore. The fiddler and his little daughter had roamed from village to village for weeks, playing and singing as they went and refusing all payment save a bed of straw for the night and a dish of fresh milk in the morning, and much talk had been made of it thereabouts. But to the barefoot children who scuffled amidst their fathers’ nets, the big man with a fiddle-case slung over his shoulder was simply a stranger in a place where no new face was seen from one season to the next, and they watched him from a distance and with wide eyes.

The newcomer and the little girl came down to the shore and stood hand in hand, gazing out across the unmarked sands that stretched away beneath that vast overarching sky. ( Read more... )

Crossposts: http://igenlode.livejournal.com/86119.html

Finally finished "If I were Vicomte" after all those years; it only took about a week in the end, though it always feels like longer when you're actually in the throes of doing it. There's nothing like actually starting a project for getting it completed!
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The first two flowers to emerge out of my smaller second tray were, predictably, yet another daisy and another Jacob's ladder, but I now have two more that didn't germinate in the first batch at all. The big bushy thistle-like thing turns out to be an ageratum:

And the second is heartsease:

Crossposts: http://igenlode.livejournal.com/85361.html

Completed "There is no Phantom of the Opera" (one-shot following Raoul's thoughts on the way up the stairs to the roof) and started work -- finally, after about two years! -- on the number-one entry in my mental 'queue', "If I Were Vicomte". Of course, as I might have predicted, when actually written it isn't coming out as a humorous spoof-fic at all, but as a 'straight' re-telling of the story as a romance with its 'Raoul' as a poor Breton peasant who is socially inferior to Christine, rather than being the entitled aristocrat of so much fan-fiction; apparently I simply can't do comedy.( Read more... )

Crossposts: http://igenlode.livejournal.com/84950.html

I don't believe this.
After discussing the finale of "Love Never Dies" (subsequent to the LND Hamburg review) I might actually end up having to write that Meg-shoots-Phantom scene... despite the fact that it's unoriginal fix-fic of the most blatant kind, that it can only plausibly be done ALW-style by milking the audience for a degree of sympathy for the Phantom that I frankly dislike, and that I said I wasn't going to write any more LND fanfic and least of all for a scene that I've already covered twice, and that every fangirl under the sun has already 'fixed' in the same unoriginal fashion. And that I still have the "Family Man" vignette to write, not to mention the long-queued "If I Were Vicomte", which I did think I might actually start!

But I've already got a beginning, an end, and a style for this scene (present tense, audience PoV). All I need to do is work out precisely how it plays out with Christine in the middle...