Aug. 15th, 2016

edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
The problem with deciding at nearly the last minute that the reason two chapters you've been consistently unhappy with aren't working is that they shouldn't exist at all, is that you have to pick apart and reconstruct all the other chapters now that you've removed some of their supports.

I feel like I am playing Jenga with phrases and plot elements. One wrong move will bring everything crashing down.

...

It really does work better without those chapters, though. The arc is much tighter and the focus is more securely on the main characters.

(I'll have the story up some time this evening.)
edenfalling: headshot of a raccoon, looking left (raccoon)
The Courting Dance: (AO3 version) Marriage is a bit more complicated than quarreling and making it up again, especially for the crown prince of Archenland and an exiled Calormene Tarkheena. Aravis/Cor. [21,100 words]

This was my 2016 WIP Big Bang entry! I started writing it back in 2010, only to stall out after ch. 8 in 2012. There were several reasons for my woes. First, I wrote ch. 1 as a oneshot and ch. 2 as an only semi-connected sequel, so the fic was structured awkwardly from the beginning and I had to construct an outline after the fact instead of going in with a plot or character arc (however vague). Second, genre romance is really not my strong point. Third, I have a tendency to get carried away by worldbuilding if given half a chance, and stirred potentially ridiculous quantities of fictional history and culture clashes into the mix. It should be obvious that these factors were a bad combination.

The story ended up being two chapters shorter than planned, because Lune and Corin's second POV chapters wound up shifting the focus away from Aravis and Cor in a way I didn't like. (They were also impossible to write, in the sense of being dead on the page.) I had to make heavy revisions to ch. 1-8 in order to get ch. 9-13 to make sense, so even if you've read the story up to this point, I'd advise starting over from the beginning.

Also, there is some wonderful art by [archiveofourown.org profile] Hecateae which you should go check out before or after you read the fic. :D

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edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
Elizabeth Culmer

January 2026

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