Thursday 14 January 2010
Now that my lunch hours are spent in the office again, it looks like I’m back to storyline-building rather than writing during that time.
I just finished a storyline for the Leofric + Hetty affair:
We should be seeing Leof again within a few weeks, so I wanted to pull together his storyline to help me get back into his head.
The chapters are mainly either Leof-related or Hetty-related. This does seem a wee bit unfair to Alred… I start with her finding the poem and Alred’s eventual marriage proposal, then skip all through the early happiness of their marriage to the moment where Leof first notices the chemistry. Then, in recent times, I skipped some of the non-Hetty-related Alred chapters where he’s being moody and volatile about other things. So the main impression you get of Alred throughout this is that he is a rather dreadful, heartless sort of husband.
But in the context of Leof’s love for Hetty, I think that is OK. Alred really is a rather dreadful sort of husband at the moment. The biggest barrier between Leof and Hetty isn’t Alred’s love for Hetty or Hetty’s love for Alred (as would be the case with Vashmalaina, since Malcolm IS a loving husband, and Iylaine DOES have a great affection for him) but rather the social situation they find themselves in. Leof and Hetty are both married to someone else, and both have kids with those someone elses. Hetty, being a woman, is all but shackled to Alred.
If Hetty and Alred are to reconcile, then it will take an effort from Alred’s side, and that is something I would include in the storyline, so I think it’s legit. I mean, speaking in terms of a new reader who doesn’t know these characters at all. If you’ve already read all these chapters, then this storyline simply spares you some of Alred’s wallowing. 
The other thing I wanted to mention is that I tweaked a couple of things on the server, so adding a new chapter comment should be noticeably faster now. The database query used to update the “Recent Comments” sidebar was taking something like 7 – 8 seconds to execute. I added an index and a few well-placed LIMIT clauses, and I have it down to 0.2 seconds now. 
I’m at work, so no new pictures. You’ll just have to settle for an old one that never gets old. 
(I wanted so badly to use it for the storyline picture, but that almost seemed like false advertising!)
Chapters
Old picture! That picture can NEVER get old!!!! (I wish there was a swooning smiley
) I just set it for my desktop background. That way I can wake up to something "HOT" instead of the usual empty bed. sigh!