And *finally*... (six thousand-word chapters seem to be Just Too Long for me to cope with in terms of both proof-reading and editing)
The echo of the gunshot from the auditorium, when it came, was flat and oddly distant, like the sound of some piece of stage machinery. If any of those around me in the foyer noticed it, they gave no sign. ( Read more... )
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 :-(
Raoul has an encounter with Philippe's past, and Perrette faces the future: side-stories from The Sons of Éléonore".
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.
( Read more... )
Le Fantôme de l'Opéra without Raoul would still be an intensely gripping and tragic story. Le Fantôme de l'Opéra (Le Vicomte de l'Opéra, perhaps?) without Erik, however, would be quite bland, at least by comparison. (Think about it – a young, wealthy vicomte falls in love with his childhood sweetheart when he sees her perform at the Opéra, and after several months of courtship, he marries her, against the wishes of his older brother. The end.)
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vicomte_de_chagny, on the subject of Why "Love Never Dies" is a tragedy.
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 )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.
( Read more... )
Chapter 9 of Hertha was possibly the least successful to date, having been posted for weeks on both fanfiction.net and AO3 and garnering a grand total of zero reviews on either :-( (Either my 'regular reviewers' didn't like the chapter, or else they were away -- I am fairly certain that the FFnet reviewer hasn't even read it, because her country wasn't showing up at all in the stats, and the sample size is so small that I can usually identify individual non-Americans...)
However despite the lack of incentive I did finish typing up and tweaking Chapter 10, in which Hertha ends up giving Christine a lift to her father's grave; I had some trouble splitting these scenes, so we've got half a chapter here and then the rest of the graveyard adventure in the next chapter.
I had grumbled over the chill and discomforts of Beauvais. It was hard to admit, even to myself, that my father’s familiar apartments on the Place Clignot-les-Pins seemed to have grown narrow and dark and constricted after the space and luxury I’d grown used to in the Hôtel Chagny as a Vicomte’s wife. Father was glad to see me, and grateful for the company, but there was a constraint between us that had not been there before, and my thickening body was only yet another reminder that I was no longer the girl who’d left this house for her wedding over a year ago.
The childhood books that had once held comfort were battered now and more shabby than I’d remembered, torn pages a sharp reminder of how Rudi and I had once squabbled over their possession. The French novels I’d been reading at nineteen, when I’d thought myself so sophisticated, had lost their glamour and revealed themselves as shallow and foolish or cynical by turns. My bedroom had not changed since last I lived here —though I shared it now, as I’d suspected, with an overflow of boxes from my father’s study that he’d failed to find space for elsewhere— but it felt as if it had belonged to someone else entirely.
( Read more... )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 2nd -- 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...)
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.”
( Read more... ) Five- and six-thousand-word chapters are definitely not a good idea, from the point of view of getting them typed and proofread... Here at last is the Masquerade that should have been posted weeks ago.
The great foyer of the Opera Populaire was filled with bright silks and fantastical costumes, as if some exotic stage production had spilled out from the auditorium and taken over the building with a cast of thousands. Masked figures were to be found gossiping in alcoves or pausing to exchange greetings on the grand staircase, and aging devils in tights and red horns danced together with angels whose wired wings were bobbing across plump shoulders beneath their haloes of gold foil. A Julius Caesar with a lopsided laurel wreath was conducting a flirtation with a demure Diana, who was fending off his attempts to lift her mask with reproving taps from the silver bow and quiver she bore. Waiters circulated amid the throng, and the orchestra ensconced in a corner behind red velvet ropes could be seen to refresh themselves from time to time in a less decorous fashion from brown bottles.
( Read more... ) 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 :-(
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.
( Read more... )Finally, chapter 6. (There have been a total of 27 hits since I posted chapter 5, although I don't know how many of those actually got as far as the new chapter).
I *am* pleased with the 'Music of the Night' paragraph... (darkness that sang with a thousand voices like the stars).
The story came out of Christine first hesitantly, under Raoul’s incisive questioning, and then in a stumbling rush. Some of it I did not learn until much later; at some things of which she would not speak I only ever guessed.
Perhaps she herself did not know the depths of her heart, or shrank to lay them open. I never asked her — though I often wondered, in the months afterwards — if she had suspected that every word she let slip that night would go straight to the ears of the one who had perpetrated upon her the deception she described, and who would regard her appeal for help as an unforgivable betrayal.
Christine did not tell us everything. But what she did say was enough to bring down disaster upon the Opera House and upon those of us present on that roof, herself most of all.
( Read more... )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.]
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...
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... )
And finally, after almost eighteen months, we have an edited and proofread chapter 2!
I’d been married to Raoul for nine months, but I’d known him since we’d first come to Paris.
We’d left Vienna and the big house on the Praterstraße after my brother Rudolf died. It had been a hot summer, and he’d gone swimming with his friends and taken a chill that turned into a fever. I could still remember those last days, with all the windows shuttered and my mother drifting like a ghost through empty room after empty room, in those apartments that had once been so full of music and eager talk.
Without Rudi, nothing had ever been quite the same. My father had taken us first to Baden Baden, then to Paris, where he had business interests. My mother’s piano stood unplayed and she rarely left our lodgings. I was lonely and awkward, a growing girl in a city that made little distinction between Viennese and the hated Prussians. We’d been outsiders back home, though my grandfather had been baptised as a Christian, but somehow it had never seemed to matter. Now I was an outsider and a foreigner.
( 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]
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... )
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timeasmymeasure