Writing update
Sep. 4th, 2023 06:06 pmHaving done some last bits of editing following beta feedback, I now have a more or less complete draft of my Flight of the Heron/Kidnapped crossover longfic! It's about 117,000 words long, which is comfortably more than five times longer than the next longest thing I've ever written, and has taken just over a year to get to this point. I am slightly amazed—I can write longfic now! Writing it has been quite an experience, but on the whole I am pleased with it. :)
I absolutely could not have got this far without the help of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
luzula and sanguinity, who are lovely and amazing beta readers and cheerleaders. ♥
The next stage is more editing and polishing—I'm planning one more complete read-through and edit, and this evening have been preparing for that by going through my (long and not terribly well organised) notes document to pick out things I still want to address. I also want to polish the vocabulary and punctuation to match D. K. Broster's (the fic being in third person, I'm vaguely aiming at a style similar to hers rather than RLS's)—I've written a simple R script to compare the words used by two texts, and it's pretty interesting seeing which words I use that Broster doesn't and vice versa!
Another challenge I now face is the sad lack of a title. The only thing I can think of so far is 'we can make love notwar Jacobite risings (and live at peace with our hearts)', which would amuse me but is perhaps not really suitable. (I'm sure Erasure would have said 'Jacobite risings' if they'd known their song was going to feature so memorably in NTS Kidnapped). I'm a little bit sad, because IME fics that don't have a title by this stage of their composition usually never get a good one—OTOH I can do my final read-through with the goal in mind of finding a line to quote as the title, which may turn up something in all those thousands of words...
It's not going to be ready for posting entirely before Yuletide, but I might manage to get it done by the really busy phase of the exchange. I hope so—I want to get properly into Yuletide this year, and relax by writing lots of short and silly treats!...
I absolutely could not have got this far without the help of
luzula and sanguinity, who are lovely and amazing beta readers and cheerleaders. ♥The next stage is more editing and polishing—I'm planning one more complete read-through and edit, and this evening have been preparing for that by going through my (long and not terribly well organised) notes document to pick out things I still want to address. I also want to polish the vocabulary and punctuation to match D. K. Broster's (the fic being in third person, I'm vaguely aiming at a style similar to hers rather than RLS's)—I've written a simple R script to compare the words used by two texts, and it's pretty interesting seeing which words I use that Broster doesn't and vice versa!
Another challenge I now face is the sad lack of a title. The only thing I can think of so far is 'we can make love not
It's not going to be ready for posting entirely before Yuletide, but I might manage to get it done by the really busy phase of the exchange. I hope so—I want to get properly into Yuletide this year, and relax by writing lots of short and silly treats!...
