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My attempt at producing a sample hand-bound copy of Arctic Raoul in its current state was a surprising success, although it used most of my blank paper and a worrying amount of my current laser cartridge! I spent ages fiddling around trying to get it to print pages two-up in 'realistic' proportions and whitespace on an A4 sheet, as opposed to the standard self-publishing approach of simply printing everything as an A5 page with minimal margins in order to reduce page count and simplify matters :-p

( bookbinding )

( synopsis )

I think that by the looks of it I shall probably have to omit the entire existence of Lancard from the synopsis, and quite possibly the whole Raoul/d'Artois and Raoul/Philippe relationships as well, leaving room only for Raoul's interactions with Christine and with Erik :-O It's also very difficult to describe the complexity of Christine's interactions with Erik in captivity, especially for a potential reader who doesn't have any idea that Erik is seriously mentally unstable at this point, and is not acquainted with his weird mixture of arrogance and cringing subservience...

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...

Finally we are onto the last notebook of Arctic Raoul, after a slight panic when I couldn't identify it among the pile of various other books with other bits of other stories in them :-O (It's the one with "The Writing on the Wall" and the start of Hertha in it....)

2646 words of Chapter 33 typed so far, plus another page and a half still to go in the final notebook. I'm already over 120,000 words.

(It does seem to me that the entire business of the treasure might be an obvious target to leave out, given that the hoard got inflated to a bigger role (and value) than originally planned. If you omit all the references to that altogether you might be able to run Chapters 32 and 33 as a single section; if you reduce its value to just enough to pay for the wooden hut it wouldn't be such an issue....)

FFNet statistics have been down for over a month at this point; I went back into the library and discovered they *still* weren't working. But I don't suppose I missed much.

[Edit: final word count for Chapter 33 is 3409]

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 :-(
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Working on chapters 30 *and* 31 of Arctic Raoul in tandem, since I wasn't at all happy with the divide between them. I realised a bit belatedly that part of the problem was that I'd done precisely what I had recently been condemning in other work, which was to switch perspectives from one half of a couple to the other half and then self-indulgently hash over the events that had just happened all over again from the other person's perspective :-( At least having identified the problem it was easier to fix it; I now understand the temptation to do this a bit better!

I cut a chunk of rehash from the start of Raoul's chapter (we shall now be in Raoul's point of view basically for the rest of the story), along with over-complex explanations about roads and so on, and that improved it a lot. I cut some of the waffle from Christine's chapter about searching and failing to find anything; conversely I rewrote the 'action scene' quite a lot, to make it slightly longer and I hope more effective. I think the balance of the two chapters is a lot better now -- finally!

And the good news is that on reading ahead -- and I wanted to read ahead, which is always a good sign -- I thought the following chapter, the infamous Plot Point Fifteen that I was struggling with all of four years ago [bigeek], worked well in its eventual revised version... so I shouldn't, mercifully, have to do too much more editing on that.

The bad news is that I am now up to 114,000 words or so, and still with multiple chapters to go before the end of the story...

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 stumbled across The Query Shark, which is terrifying. (Fortunately I can't even theoretically send a 'query' for critique because I don't have a word-count yet... and suspect that even once I do the automatic answer is 'too long, you need to revise before any agent would consider this for submission'.)

But as a result I wasted an evening trying to devise an 'idea pitch' style summary of Arctic Raoul; one advantage at least is that this is apparently supposed to be a teaser rather than a complete run-down of the plot, so the fact that I have about four acts of action and only have room to mention the start of the first isn't an issue here ;-) (Convincing the agent that there is a lot more plot to justify the remaining hundred thousand or so words would probably require an additional paragraph, I feel...)

( Teaser summary )

Having typed up Chapter 26 of Arctic Raoul in a spasm of almost unprecedented activity, I find myself unfortunately very much less happy about it than I was when I originally wrote it over a couple of weeks in August 2019 :-(
Scenes completed
Second half-chapter

I remember enjoying writing this immensely, especially in comparison with my months-long struggle with the voyage of the Résurgence immediately preceding. But looking back at it now, I'm not sure I even managed to convey all the Raoul/Lancard 'feels' that I thought I had in the course of that Paris half-scene, let alone the central plot point... and then my 'second half-chapter' is pretty much entirely a self-indulgent rehash of canon. ( Read more... )

I don't believe it. Apparently I was a little too good at making up credible names for Scandinavian coastal communities -- there actually *is* a port of Halmstad, and not only that but it is a major Swedish city which people may well have have heard of, and which is located in quite a different region from my fictional Norwegian 'Halmstad' :-(

(The only reason I found this out was that I noticed I had changed the name to "Halvestad" halfway through Chapter 24 -- unfortunately I subsequently evidently completely forgot not only that I had done so, but the reason for the change. Like Tolkien, I tend not to go back in my manuscripts and alter earlier versions of names, but generally carry any changes forward from that point, and this has come back to bite me!)

Oh well, the ability to alter this sort of thing is one of the benefits of not publishing-as-you-go. I should probably warn my beta-readers, although I do wonder if they would actually pick up on the discrepancy :-(
(It's not really fair to ask people to read with an eye to continuity when it is up to three months between chapters...)

[Edit: "Alvestad" might be better than "Halvestad", which is Dutch!]