quixerotic
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Vaught WIP - 09 & 10
🕑 Added 2023-07-11 20:16:10 +0000 UTCAlright, so. Hi all! These chapters are in the narrative weeds. There's barely any sex, but lots of reserved thoughts about sex as well as logistical references to future sex and things like that. It's a hot mess at the moment, but it was better to push through than linger in it any longer.
Chapter 9 is an Alice PoV where she becomes a mini-detective, and it works out fine. (There's a bit with a weird archivist woman that's probably irrelevant). But the goal is to work though the reveal that Benny and Melanie are together. Except due to chapter 08, everyone already knows that. So, 09 will probably move to 08, but then 08 is already in a weird spot.
Chapter 10 is mostly where it should be, but it introduces its own chronological nightmares instead as it jumps back in time on the night where the "main" story is taking place.
So, it's a mess that's been bogging me down for weeks, but gonna put that behind me and press on. I will say that *what* happens is all fine, just the order of it happening is borked. Better to have three borked chapters than zero.
Comments
Quixerotic
1. Yeah, that's my general thought for the order. At one point during the current implementation, I had Maddock showing up to find Alice on that bench, but that circled the problem back in on itself. My tentative reconstruction is to move Alice's investigation to before her experience on the serum. Have her first meet Maddock while snooping the apartment, but then reconnect with him at the bar. Maddock's follows Benny first (at the same time he finds Alice), then Benny's confession to Greg. 2. The name usage is akin to a typo. Names have a weird space in my brain which often leads to using the wrong ones or the wrong forms. I try to catch them when I'm writing. That gets most of them, but half the time I'll write the correct version and then "fix" it to the incorrect version. It's something I'll watch for in the revision, but you're right that it's lacking consistency at the moment. Every time I work on Vaught, I warn my continuity reader that I'm cooking up a huge mess for them to work out.
Red Panda Seven
I have thoughts lots of thoughts I've tried to reread the entire story as it currently is laid out and then trying to swap sections/chapters around fitting the notion that Greg is telling Liz the story up until this point and where Alice being a detective vs Benny confessing fits. Honestly, reading it, it feels like it is should be Alice chapter, Alice chapter, Benny chapter and include a new scene of Maddock leaving the house and noticing Alice watching the house. That felt like it MIGHT solve some of the narrative tangling of those 3 chapters. I liked the weird Archivist woman but then again I like the weird characters that come out in stories like this. It is one of those moments when they talk the advertisement that Greg placed to build the other house and Alice questioned "Gregory" that Clara would have corrected her by saying she was sure it was Greg instead. Feels like people who aren't societal would refer to him by his actual name Greg instead of Elizabeth's moniker for him. In the re-read, I might be wrong but it felt like there have been times where Greg is referenced as Gregory when it isn't reference to society function or the house of cards that Elizabeth built. It is weird when it something he said and Gregory is used to denote that not Greg; or when Maddock or Abby are involved and it has shown up (but I could be wrong about that). It almost makes me want part of the internal struggle Elizabeth is going thru as story unfolds is the mental change into 'Liz' as she's unconsciously accepting her new status.
