Igenlode Wordsmith

I have been starting on the gargantuan task of emptying out the contents of my flower-pots and putting the compost back into its bags to store over winter (plus a certain proportion of roots that will presumably break down to restore some organic matter), while attempting to check for bulbs and evacuate all the worms that are still resident. I'm not sure that the volume of earth that is going to remain outside all the winter is actually sufficient for the volume of wormflesh that is going to have to reside in it -- although presumably worms also go dormant as there can't be that much for them to eat.

A mysterious cherry stone came out of one of the pots that I definitely didn't put in there, which goes some way to explain the appearance of a young plum (?or cherry) tree a few years back!

And I located a missing leather glove which had gone suddenly absent between arrival at my front door (for surely I could not have walked home with one glove missing and not noticed it?) and hanging up my coat. It had fallen or been dropped into the inside of my umbrella, exactly as had happened to my fountain pen on a previous occasion... which I fortunately remembered.

Clearly that umbrella is a menace, since it doesn't fold completely and thus offers a bottomless pit into which items can vanish when they slip from your fingers while the handle is hanging over your arm :-p

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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( AO3 )

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!)

I have so, so, so so nearly finished the Swedish story (or the main draft, at any rate). I'm just struggling with the final sentences, which don't seem to fit at well as they were supposed to -- not a good sign, since that's the only ending I've got, and otherwise it just trails away :-(

I really ought to be more excited, but I'm not terribly happy with this whole epilogue, and haven't been all that happy with a lot of the preceding chapters, so I have a nagging feeling that the end of this story doesn't live up to the very promising beginning. And I'm very much in two minds about whether adding in Lancard's sister Gilberte as a new character in the final chapter is a good idea -- the intention was to bring Lancard back for the finale rather than just dropping him (as Kulla has effectively been dropped at the end of the last chapter, after all Christine's rhapsodizing over her), but in fact he has been communicating with Raoul by telegram, appearing alongside him in the parade, etc., and could probably be contrived to do so without the introduction of his sister, who feels a bit extraneous. (We also have Raoul's sister Valentine showing up and receiving characterisation at the very last minute, but that seems more organic somehow. But two previously-unseen characters making onstage appearances at the eleventh hour seems a bit overwhelming to the reader...)

The epilogue is currently seven pages at circa 525 words/page, which means I can afford to omit a page or two if it comes to it. I just don't know.

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And I needn't have worried about pens and fillers -- somebody smashed into me when I was walking home writing the other day and knocked the pen out of my hand, damaging the nib irretrievably on the pavement :-(
That was my 'new' steel pen, so now I'm back on the original one with its previously-damaged nib, and I'm starting to wonder if it's worth investing in that any further at all.

I finally got round to buying a new ink bottle; I don't know how long they last (a cursory glance back through my blog doesn't record when I got the last one), but I'm guessing about a year under normal usage. I haven't been writing that much this year owing to extreme slow progress on Arctic Raoul (whose Plot Point 9 rewrite is not going well, but is going again after a fashion).

At the very least they save generating an awful lot of plastic waste from those little plastic ink cartridges, although from that point of view the 'dry' ink in ballpoint pens, being far more concentrated, is a lot less wasteful.
( Read more... )

I'm not all that impressed with my new fountain pen filler - the emergency cartridge I was using lasted for the length of several one-shot stories, but I've been using the filler for a few weeks now, and basically it doesn't fill properly.( Read more... )

The other thing that has become apparent is that the foolscap ledger I've been writing in isn't going to hold nearly so many words as I thought it would, due to the heavy-duty paper; that great fat book only has ninety pages in it (sewn in five sections of eighteen), and I've used 24½ pages already and am only on chapter four. At that rate I only have room for sixteen chapters, which almost certainly won't be enough - I've already split my third plot summary sequence over two chapters, and I've got seventeen of them :-p
( Read more... )

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Out of a vague idea that Raoul gets himself into trouble by mistaking one of the sailors on board for the Phantom at the point where he reveals himself, I've managed to end up creating an uncongenial 'room-mate' for him to share a cabin with on board. (Who will presumably end up dying in the wreck and thus giving poor Raoul more angst!) I wanted him to wear spectacles, since it seemed to fit the fussy characterisation and provided a perfect explanation for how Raoul can mistake him for a glimpse of the Phantom's 'burning eyes'. Unfortunately I suspect that nobody whose eyesight was bad enough to need eye-glasses would have been accepted into the French navy of the era; my own grandfather was excused military service for being short-sighted. But it occurred to me that I could probably contrive something with a reflection off the lenses of a pair of binoculars, though it doesn't work quite so well...

The trouble with washing out the nib of your fountain pen is that you then have to spend ages and ages scribbling at random until the ink is pulled through from the barrel in a reasonable non-diluted form: the nature of the beast is that water in the inside of the nib just doesn't dry out readily, even after many hours...

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