Igenlode Wordsmith

I have my first view on "The Remorse of Others" -- at least one person has now glanced at it!

The first Roma tomato has set.


We have the first corn-marigold (seen here with the 'true' marigolds in varying stages of red/orange!)

The home-grown coriander has been split up -- of course I shall now have far too much and it will all rush into flower and then die without ever having been used! -- and likewise the blue Swan River daisies, now embarrassingly vigorous. (It is very odd how the seed managed to completely fail so many times!)

It occurred to me to wonder belatedly what Christian name Gaston de Trélan is using under his pseudonym of 'the Marquis de Kersaint'. ( Much speculation )

The other thing I wonder is just how fatal, with hindsight, his resuming his true identity proved to be (foreshadowing: "it might some day mean Gaston's life if the Directory knew who he really was"). It seems to have been a pretty open secret after Valentine's arrival, since she is known to everyone as the Duchesse de Trélan and as the commander's wife, but one of the subsequent grounds for disregarding the safe-conduct is that "that man who organised Finistère, de Kersaint" has turned out to be "a ci-devant of the ci-devants; no less than the Duc de Trélan, in fact. Brune let that out too; Fouché, it seems, discovered it. So he would be worth capturing". ( Read more... )

---

I uploaded "The Remorse of Others" to AO3 on the 3rd of May, where it has reached a new low of zero page hits (even lower than my snippets of ancient original work, or my opera-fic, or the Gigi story where there was no pre-existing fandom). I suppose that makes a sort of sense in that an original work might conceivably be of stand-alone interest, whereas work in an unknown fandom can affect only those who already care about the characters, but to be fair it probably says more about my summary being completely opaque to anyone who doesn't know the original novel... ( Read more... )

( A possible new fan on FFnet )

Six years later, Philippe gets the last word, as scheduled... though I'm still not quite sure about the wording (already variously fiddled around with).

“He’ll go far, our young Raoul,” Philippe de Chagny said quietly, and she nodded. There had been a crack in his voice, and Christine was not entirely certain she trusted her own.

“Not too far, I hope,” she managed, turning with a smile to make a jest of it.

“My dear, he’ll come back home. While there’s breath in him, he’ll come back home. For that, I can trust in you.” The Comte’s mouth was a little crooked beneath the points of his moustache, but his grip was a benediction and a promise.

Current (unedited, unproofread) word count on the final chapter is 3,681, and the total for the novel is 126,162. Really not that far off the rough estimate of 124,000 words that I made three years ago...

I picked up a random (well, not completely random, because it was someone I'd critiqued during one of my attempts at catching up on fanfiction.net) review on my "Tale of Two Cities" one-shot: ( fandom-blind FFnet reviews )

And then a comment on a snippet I posted to a writer's group on Facebook (you are allowed to post 500 words every Wednesday, so I've been drip-feeding them bits of Hertha as 'work in progress' in the hopes of maybe gaining a 'like' or two -- it sometimes happens):

That's some very fine writing, and I am very hard to impress. What is the genre, may I ask?

Which more or less confirms my instinct that the only chance for Arctic Raoul is *outside* the fan-fiction ghetto; people like my writing for its own sake when they are not actually fans of the source material, but it just doesn't fit into the whole ring-fenced ethos of fandom :-(
( Read more... )

In the course of six days I have had 19 hits on chapter 1 of Perrette, and 3 kudos, and one person has even subscribed to the story -- either in the hopes of more, or in lieu of a bookmark :-p ( stats )

This chapter, being considerably shorter, was of course exponentially quicker to deal with... (And of course it is entirely concerned with OCs and their preoccupations, which makes it of extreme minority interest so far as fanfiction readers are concerned; at this point it is pretty much straight historical fiction, although the same could be said of Hertha's family worries.)

---

Ch2 — Glimmers of Goodbyes

The death of the Count de Chagny was always a notable event in the local district, but on this occasion it was a nine-days’-wonder that showed no signs of dying down, even weeks after the news had reached them from Paris. It was years now since old Count Philibert, struck down by a palsy, had taken to his bed and dwindled away, and by all accounts that had been a merciful release, and one long-awaited. It was the death of his wife in childbed, folk said, that had taken all the heart from him... and the Countess Éléonore had been a masterful woman, to be sure, still remembered among the tenantry with equal parts affection and dread.

But not every Count in the past had perished as peacefully — or as blamelessly. ( Read more... )

Right, I *finally* got round to rough-typing another chapter of Arctic Raoul (ch28 -- it helps that this was a relatively short one by recent standards). It's amazing how much productivity you can gain by the simple act of quitting your web browser!

Chapter 21	Survival	3450 words
Chapter 22	Close Quarters	3586
Chapter 23	A Ship of Seals	3491
Chapter 24	A Slip in Translation	4329
Chapter 25	Confessions	5391
Chapter 26	The House of Chagny	4091
Chapter 27	Unexpected	3920
Chapter 28	To Turn the Page	3309 (provisionally)

(Previous chapter lengths.)

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 )

---

( 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!)

It has eventually dawned on me that at least one of the reasons why I've spent far more time in the past weeks blogging about WW2 ration cookery on a private Facebook group (and doing a good deal of associated research in attempts to answer various questions that crop up: this archive article from 1943, for example, is the most extensive summary of how the system actually *functioned* that I came across, as opposed to the various 'How We Used to Live' educational pages or reminiscent anecdotes, simply because it was written for a contemporary American audience who wanted to see how the British were doing it before embarking on their own attempt!) is because I get far more feedback and approval as a result :-(

( Read more... )

I think (hope) the bicycle is finally fixed now, after yet another round of repairs; I did a twenty-mile shopping run today (a big pot of yoghurt, some chicken carcases to boil up for stock, two Scotch eggs (one for lunch), two big cartons of still lemonade in preparation for hot weather (of which I partook gratefully when I got back), and returning the empty honey jar while buying a new one) and had no trouble with either the gears or free-wheel. Of course it may be another false dawn.

Recorded mileage: 3664.8 (actual figure will be higher, since the odometer is still malfunctioning; it is now loose in its mount and sooner or later will fly off altogether).
Nearly nine hundred miles since last July.

Chapter 6 of "High City on a Hill" has received 14 hits on AO3.

I managed to notice the first serious bug in my AO3 stats script, when "High City on a Hill" failed to show up as having any new hits at all for the month of March.

Because awk handles all input as text by default, the values for the number of hits etc. are being saved as text strings instead of numeric values, which means that in a comparison "6" is treated as greater than "3", but "112" is treated as less than "31" (because "1" at the start of the 'word' is less than "3"). So if the difference between two values is sufficiently large for them to have a differing number of digits, the results of the comparison become entirely spurious :-p

The answer is to multiply all values which are intended to be numeric by 1, in order to ensure that awk knows to store (and compare) them as numbers and not strings!