[orig fic] "Swept Away!"

[derien]

Title: Swept Away! - Two Boys' Adventures on The Great River
(“With A Thousand Elephants!”) - A Pseudo Victorian Boys Adventure
Author: Derien
Genres: Science-fiction/Victorian Adventure/Queer Teen Romance.
Notes: Original story, inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, G.M. Fenn, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Daegaer.
My utmost, heartfelt thanks to Eor for brainstorming, listening, arguing, poking me with a pointy stick and supporting me in this venture since June of '05 - I'm sure the experience would have killed a lesser man. Daegaer has also been very patient, and several others (Littleredhead stands highly among them) have offered corrections, thoughts and considerations which have been very helpful.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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Chapter One: The Caravan Prepares.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Chapter Two:  Young Master Ethan makes himself Disliked, and the Caravan Arrives in the Village of Saradell.

Yes I'm freaking terrified to start posting this.  Note that it's been a year and a half since I started writing this.  At this rate I should probably only post one installment per month, and even so I'll have to write twice as fast as I have been if I hope to keep ahead. 

Any criticisms will be listened to and treasured!  They may not be acted upon immediately, but they will certainly be stored away for future reference. 

(Also, I figured out how to set my spellchecker for UK English, but I'm not sure that I believe it really worked, so let me know if you see something that's not right.)

ETA: It hadn't really worked. NOW Eor has properly fixed my spellchecker to use UK English, and this post has been updated with proper spelling. I think I also fixed all the "it's" mistakes and adjusted the wording where I had used the same word several times close together. Plus added a paragraph about housing, because Daegaer wrote something really nice that I wanted to use, and I just can't stop screwing around with stuff.

ETA 11/25/07 - Replacing LJ cut with link to my website so as not to have my story stored on LJ.

Comments

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

I really like the setting, and the hints of history you've put in - the little things that indicate it's not our history are good. Are you going to have more, and explanations of tech levels and so on? I'm looking forward to the awfully queer adventures that might befall a boy out on that caravan trip! The trip itself is set up nicely atmospherically - I'm interested in seeing what those hills and forests are like, and if they're really as empty as Tom believes. And I like the detail of Tom enjoying Daisy's chatter because he knows he won't have to hear it for a considerable time!

Breaking off one's congress with a handshake! How thrillingly manly ;-)

I noticed a few non-UK things: a "calico" cat is a "tortoiseshell" on this side of the pond, for example. I'm not sure that "flat" is a Victorian word - I think it was quite a modern word in the early twentieth century. An older word would simply have been "rooms" (or "room" - after all, large families used to live in very cramped accommodation, especially on the lower end of the economic scale). This family seem to be doing very well for themselves if they have a three-bedroom accommodation - parents, girls, boys - you might need to make that a little clearer, as it underlines the non-our world nature!

A typo: you have "it's" as the possessive a few times.

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

Doyle used "flat" for Baker Street, I vaguely recall. But I could be wrong.

[derien.livejournal.com]

That should be easy to look up, it might actually say in my "Encyclopedia Sherlockiana" - thanks for the tip! :)

...

Actually, Eor just did a word search on his e-bookized Complete Sherlock Holmes and found, in The Stockbroker's Clerk, mention of 'flats let as offices.' And there is 'a row of residential flats' mentioned in The Adventure of the Red Circle. Their own rooms are never refered to as a flat, I think because they have no kitchen of their own - they are boarders and Mrs. Hudson does all the cooking.

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

Yay, thanks!

[derien.livejournal.com]

A tortoiseshell? Um... Hm. I'm not sure this really varies, I think I mught just be outright confused. A tortoi here has the colors mixed and mingled in. I thought 'calico' was another name for a money cat or tri-color (with distinct patches of color). My much-missed Ginger was a tortoi http://derien.rulesthe.net/album/photos/pa04.htm whereas a cat something like the one pussreboots has on her default user icon is what I was thinking of for that scene: http://pussreboots.livejournal.com/profile

Yeah, 'flat' didn't sound quite right to me, either. I wasn't sure, though, if 'rooms' might refer to a boarding house kind of situation. And then Eor and I got into questions of 'would they have running water? and how clean would it be?' etc (which is why the mention of Daisy taking the water from the pot - she's old enough to have a sense that water which has been boiled is the thing for cleaning wounds). Do you think I should be more up front about the fact that this is really NOT Victorian England? Maybe come out and say that their accommodations are much better than would have been found in the real England of Queen Victoria because when the Investors had Victoria City built they actually had few enough working class people along so that they wanted to have them healthy, and they had a different idea of what was the minimal that a family needed? Since then I'm sure that landlords have cut up some of the original flats into smaller places in order to get more rent and house more people as the population grew. Should I have said all that?

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

Both types of cats are "tortoiseshell" here - the ones like Ginger might be qualified as "dark" or "treacle" tortoiseshells.

holyschist points out Doyle may have used "flat", so it could be ok - let's see if we can find out. "Rooms" would, I think, be ok for any non-full-house that was being rented, rather than owned (and most people, up to middle-middle class at least would have been renting). In college, "rooms" is still used to describe student accommodation - on campus that means a two-bedroom+large sitting room+kitchen flat, in the student halls it means a one-bedroom self-contained flat.

Running water - I'm not sure. Probably on the ground floor, and - depending on how nice the building is - maybe in some rooms on other floors too. Indoor toilets, no. (For reasons of hygiene, not technical impossibility - well into the 20th century it was considered disgusting to have a toilet indoors).

Other facilities: probably every room has a fireplace, and the kitchen will have a range. It's proably easiest if you also just decide that each flat/whatever has gas lighting, unless you want candles or oil lamps for plot purposes!

If the town planners had plenty of space to build on and a social reform plan in mind I think they'd have been more likely to build terraced houses for their working class population, probably "two-up, two-downs" (ie, 4 rooms in total. Yes, 4 rooms - a friend of mine was brought up in such a house, with her parents and two sisters. One room for company/sitting room, a kitchen, two bedrooms and - added by her father and not part of the original design, a bathroom/toilet. After my grandfather died, my grandmother moved with my mother and uncle back to her father's house: 2 bedrooms, a boxroom that became a tiny extra bedroom, a sitting room, a dining room and a scullery. My greatgrandfather, my grandmother, my great aunt, my uncle, my mother and a lodger all lived there in the 40's). I think you might need to indicate that this in't Victorian England, otherwise someone might think you're just assuming modern standards of living space.

[derien.livejournal.com]

Wow. I'm kind of like in info overload. :) I had wondered what the toilet situation would be - especially in multi-floor buildings with people living stacked up. It's not as though you can run down three flights every time you need to pee. Or at least I would find it inconvenient to do anything besides run up and down the stairs all day, with how often I pee. (I pee before go to work, before I go out on the work floor, on every break, before I drive home, and still have to go once or twice on company time. People often ask me if I have something wrong with me.)

Anyway, I thought perhaps they would have something like a garderobe, like in the castles, a multi-level indoor outhouse; but at the end of a hall so it would not be in anyone's living space and would be used by at least two families. I suppose I imagined this because we had an indoor outhouse in the house I grew up in; it was off the tack room, which was between the barn and the house.

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

Potties! (Seriously) Or, if they're feeling posh, a commode (basically a wooden box with a ceramic pot inset under a lifting lid, with a solid lid for the whole lot - effectively an indoor toilet for those who for some reason can't make it downstairs. It'd probably only be used by the young, the ill and by others at night, though. During the day, it's down to the yard!

[derien.livejournal.com]

Oh my! I'm very well aquainted with chamber pots (yeah, um, it's that living-in-the-middle-of-nowhere thing, again), but I had actually forgotten about the commode! My Grandparents had one, though it wasn't ever used because it was actually in an upstairs room which was right next to the room which had the water closet (with the chain you pull to flush!). I think it was just an ornament, though they would tell me I could use it in the night if I wanted to (because I was terrified of the room which one had to go through in order to get to the WC). I never did use it, though, because my brothers were also sleeping in that room with me and I didn't want to be so much of a baby as to use a pottie-chair, even a large one. So I would just nearly piss myself with fear sneaking through the room that I thought was haunted.