In the silence between whisper and shout

I went sleeveless due to the heat for the first time this summer (something I can only risk when I know I'm going to be indoors all day) and managed to display an impressive blue tracery of veins underneath the aristocratically pale and translucent skin thus revealed ;-)
( Read more... )

My first poached-egg flower has now come out :-)
Unfortunately I think the ants have transferred their base of operations to the miniature rose pot, where I keep finding the main stem sheathed in earth (presumably from their excavations?) to a height of several inches, with frenetic activity going on around the pot. I daren't empty out the pot to locate and remove the nest for fear of killing off the rose and/or the fragments of the yellow poppy that have reappeared, but on the other hand I'm worried that the ants will end up doing just that :-(

Finally got round to proof-reading this, long after I typed it and about nine months after it was written, mainly on the grounds that I need to upload it *before* uploading "Think Only This of Me" if it is ever to get any eyeballs on it at all. Twenty Years After fics get pitifully few hits anyway, but since there is no fandom whatsoever for "The Yellow Poppy" the only scenario in which anyone is ever likely even to glance at this is if they are reading something else of mine and are checking my other recent works. Although nobody is likely to get as far as chapter 3 anyway on that basis... I did a review swap on fanfiction.net and got a review on chapter 1 which said that, despite all my efforts on rewriting the start, it felt as if the reader was being "expositioned at", which is incredibly depressing: I *cannot* do any more rewriting on this, so am just stuck with a non-working story :-(

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Chapter 3 — Revelation

The long room was panelled in white and gilt, and Valentine de Trélan, seated at an escritoire at the far end, wore a gown of a dusky rose colour; not draperies of the modern fashion in Paris that left very little to the imagination, nor a daringly slim gown such as that worn by Marthe de Céligny, but a sedate dress more suited to one her age. Only she did not look any older.

( Read more... )

I spent a happy evening attempting to grab some screen captures of Porthos and d'Artagnan to go with my new fic (since the "Twenty Years After" film conveniently provides footage of the two of them together at Bragelonne, as per my story, although in canon Porthos doesn't ever come there (and hence is implicitly seeing the house for the first time in my AU)... :-p)
http://ivory.ueuo.com/Tower/Albums/Porthos_pics/

This was a rather hit and miss operation, given the hefty shutter delay on screencaps: I did coincidentally grab a halfway decent image of Porthos, Raoul and d'Artagnan at Bragelonne without Athos in shot, although I was actually trying to get a usable picture of Porthos at the time! ( Low resolution footage )

So after that I went back to the scenes of d'Artagnan and Porthos together at Pierrefonds, and got quite a few decent shots of the two of them together which could potentially be used as an AO3 illustration, and some better vertical format close-ups of Porthos on his own for FFnet. ( Read more... )

( I had forgotten how endearing the morning-after scene is! )

I now need to decide on (probably) one horizontal and one vertical image out of the sixteen. I'm tempted to add the fortuitous Raoul-in-frame pic as a 'happy ending' illustration, although it has to be said that it isn't objectively very good.

I watched the finale of "Twenty Years After" (no crib, no subtitles) and I loved it! I have to say I'm pretty sure this is extremely non-canonical -- surely, surely in Dumas Mordaunt doesn't survive Athos' dagger? -- but then this is why we watch the film adaptation before rereading the book :-)

If only I'd been able to speak Russian, how my heart would have soared to see this come out back in 1992, because it was *exactly* the type of content that had filled my dreams since childhood, just as "Pirates of the Caribbean" would send me into joyous fandom in 2003. ( I get a little carried away describing the episode )

( Things that I loved )

N.B. At this point YouTube has clearly decided that I am Russian, because not only is it no longer offering to translate the comments into English, thus making my life far harder, but it has now started offering to translate comments on English-language videos into Russian for me...ooops!


Objectively speaking... is this film as good (and as delightful) as the first film? ( It was worth it anyway )

( Part 3? )

I *think* I've finished my Porthos-fic (which is of course going to need a title, although its filename is clearly going to be 'Porthos'!) I'm not sure that I've entirely captured Porthos' 'voice', either in speech or in thought-patterns, although there were intermittent bits that I was pleased with in that respect -- I may need to go through and try to simplify my convoluted syntax a *lot*...

I'm thinking of running this together with "If I Should Die" as an AO3 'series' under the name of "To Save the King", since they are basically both in the same continuity, although this one is much more obviously AU -- ironically enough, given the genesis of the fic, I'm afraid that in this situation Aramis probably *doesn't* ever carry out his commission to pass on Athos' farewells, because the story turned out to be very much about a rift between d'Artagnan and Aramis that hadn't even existed at the point when I set out to write it, and which would have made any such interaction feel impossible :-( I did know that Aramis was busy 'having a life-crisis moment', part of the idea for this fic being that maybe you could 'save' Aramis, in the same way that I did for Javert, by inflicting a canon trauma -- in Aramis' case, losing a friend -- on him at a much earlier point in his character arc, when he still has the moral and mental flexibility to change. But I didn't 'know' (until d'Artagnan unexpectedly threw it into conversation...) that this was because the Gascon was blaming him for not having prevented Athos' death :-(
( Aramis' faith )

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( Fic length )

As predicted, I found myself somewhat adrift after Porthos finishes his anecdote about how he and Athos first got to know one another, because I simply hadn't thought up any more to the sequel past that point; normally I only start to write down a fic when it comes to a good end, and with this one I had instead stopped short in the middle of the 'telling myself a story' stage. And I only had four pages left at that point, with no idea where the story was going to go :-(
But d'Artagnan then came out with something completely unexpected (for the second time), and I had a fresh development that tied satisfactorily into what had gone before, and could --on the very last page of the notebook! -- both be linked back into Porthos' previous memories of Athos in his very first days in the musketeers, and sort out some of the extra complications I'd set in the way of a happy ending. The main trouble is that it *is* a pretty random reaction, even if it was genuinely something that came up without planning as an in-character response, rather than the author desperately trying to perform a segue to an arbitrary plot point...