December prompts: Madame C- C- related questions
threeringedmoon has caught me out in an anachronistic (or is it?) usage: the term 'shotgun' for a fowling-piece or blunderbuss type of firearm, a smooth-bore gun firing small-shot rather than a rifle firing bullets, according to the OED Online dates from 1828 and originally US usage. However, the entry itself dates from 1914 and has not been updated... Anyway, what Eliza would have been brandishing would be the sort of thing a farmer would have around for vermin control and deterrence of potential home invasion. Whether this was strictly legal under the various Game Laws of the time I am really not sure, but a prosperous yeoman farmer might just have qualified. Or just kept it stashed out of sight.
kore asked: 'Did you have any of it planned out when you started? Did you have an outline at first, or develop it more as you went along? Did you bank posts against dry spells or just trust to inspiration? How did you keep those plots straight??'
*Laughs*
At first it literally was from day to day and I was writing episodes under all sorts of conditions to ensure I had one ready to go!
I think this more or less went on until the end of what is now Volume 3, after which there was a break, and before I started posting the recommencement of the narrative in Naples I had stockpiled several episodes, a practice that I continued. But although by that time I tended to have some idea of things that were going to happen I certainly didn't know about all the things that were going to happen. With the post-Memoir pieces I've tended to finish them before posting.
I didn't have so much difficulty keeping the plots as such straight: but there have been issues of chronology and timing and working out how long between events and whether there were any implausibly short/long pregnancies and so on. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2858830.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.