5/8/99 And the update proceeds sloooowly.
Okay, the new front page is up for Sanctuary and the Gallery is being slowly refurbished. It's taking forever for pictures to upload since for some reaon they only want to go up one or two at a time and since I have somewhere around 200 of them it'll be awhile, but the links that are up, are great. Also, the proofed version of Resurrections is now up. If there are any more typos etc. please email me, you know the address.
Also I have finished my review of the 1952 Italian version of Les Misérables for the Comparative Media Checklist. You have been warned.
Something new I hope to have up this summer is a crossover quiz I like to call, "You Don't Know Jacques", wherein a piece of dialog or a scene from some other movie is seen through the LM filter. For example, if you were given the following:
And now for something completely different... a man with two candlesticks.Then the answer obviously is "Monty Python." When I get it together it will be fun. Trust me. :-)
And as soon as I get the pics developed I'll be posting mug shots of les miséranimals and the new house. And now that I don't have a foot of sewage in my bathtub I can actually calm down enough to work on Sanctuary. Good thing I have it all plotted out, or I'd be out of my tree at this point.
I don't anticipate any major uploads between now and June 7, for the first section of Book 2. I'll just keep plugging away at uploading the Gallery pics in between writing sessions.
5/3/99 Even shorter update: you may have noticed that this is the only thing updated on this page. My weekend was shot all to barricade due to a very fast move from, well, Gorbeau House to Rue Plumet. I mean, an apartment in a 2 story Victorian on a quiet side street a block away from the Catholic Church (and the bells are lovely, absolutely lovely), with a garden in the back that the guy upstairs takes care of. When I moved in he gave me one of the sterling roses (my favorite!) so I'm feeling all special. When I get the apartment together (right now I have the necessities, bed and computer, assembled) I will be taking pictures for posting.
Meanwhile the page will be updated this weekend (May 8ish). Really. Then I can start actually writing Sanctuary. Because if I'm late on that I shall by lynched... and don't lie and say I won't :-)
4/28/99 Quick update: I found (or rather dug up) something really really nice and had to post it; it's in the Oddities section and I've found a title for it: Counterpoint. For reasons that are really hard to get into I cannot credit it, nor can I myself take the credit. It refers directly to events that occur in Pont-au-Change, and I did write (and rewrite) some of it, and the rights to it were given to me, but beyond that it is not mine. The pictures however are entirely mine. Other than that, to quote Forrest Gump: "that's all I have to say about that."
Meanwhile, the reviews are coming in and I have updated the page of commentary that follows the epilogue to Resurrections. Thanks to those who wrote in.
This weekend (May 1 and 2) I shall be uploading the proofed chapters of Pont-au-Change, fixing those nagging little typos and a couple of small inconsistencies... and well yes the very big inconsistency that I caught (fortunately) before anyone else did and (unfortunately) before it posted in glorious Technicolor. I'm beginning to think I prefer publishing on-line as opposed to print, since such errors in bound book form seem so, well, permanent. And fatal.
Also this weekend I hope to have the review of the Italian Les Misérables posted on the Media page... but I might not be able to finish it in a timely manner due to reasons which will become very clear once it does go up. Needless to say I finally got my hands on it, and it is without a doubt the best $30 I ever spent on a video. More on that when the review hits. But be afraid. Be very, very afraid.
BTW, the secret page contest is over, and as requested, the winner remains "Anne Ominous". :-) For the record it took ten days for ten people to find it. Congratulations to all who did!
4/18/99 At last... an ending, and a beginning.
With this post, Book One: Resurrections is, except for a few minor proofing corrections, finished, all sixty-two chapters of it. And that's just round one! The ending certainly surprised me, despite the fact that, to use a quote from Louis-Philippe, "C'est moi qui mène le fiacre" (trans: I'm driving the carriage). Several things that happened in the last two chapters never happened in the outline, that's for sure. And a few more things came up that I can't explain here without giving it away. Let's say that I managed to tie in the title, the theme, and the denouement of the book together, in one single line, a string of words that explains everything "in terms so plain as to command their attention" (Thomas Jefferson). And it came to me from a very short story some guy wrote in our high school literary magazine, almost (coincidence?) nineteen years ago. I wonder whatever happened to Dave Byrd, the guy who wrote it; he was a heckuvan actor (he played Nathan Detroit in our "Guys & Dolls" production) and a real nice guy. I'd like to ask his permission to reprint it, because it is so darned topical. It would make a fantastic forward to the entire book. Thanks, Dave.
So the optimist in me says, "Great job! You did yourself proud." And the pessimist, which unfortunately won a majority of seats in the last by-election, says "one down, six or seven to go." Yes, that's how frigging long this is going to be. I can only hope that the next ones come out as good as Resurrections did. I am "well pleased" with my literary offspring.
A month and a half doesn't seem nearly long enough a break, but I'd really like to start the next book (for those of you who are not copyright notice readers, it's called Sanctuary and has nothing whatsoever to do with that other Victor Hugo book <g>). The updates to the Very Large Array of Gallery Pictures is proceeding apace, and that will give me something to work on; also, on May 1 I will be changing the wallpaper to the Sanctuary design.
Also you may notice that when you access the book from the Pont-au-Change homepage you are now directed to a title page and table of contents. Also the book itself has its own cover, which is very nice-looking and I'm very happy about it. Thanks to Whitewhiskers for letting me swipe her background artwork for it.
Also, thanks to Lindsay and Trout for helping me proofread this behemoth, even after the fact <g> and to the booksellers who helped me find so much material to work with. I will begin, when Sanctuary starts to post, to give a selected bibliography of the works I'm using in my research. I say "selective" because I'll only be listing the books I've used up to the point of whatever chapter is being posted; there are some things happening very much later that would be tipped off if I gave away the research material on it. For the most part my research has been on 19th century France, in both a political and social frame of reference.
Well, that's enough from me for now. Keep checking back here if you want to see the humongous Gallery I'm building, and other odds and ends (and a couple more video reviews: it seems there's another animated Les Misérables that looks much better than the one I've seen already, though it's long out of print... and I have a line on that Italian version!), but Pont-au-Change is on hiatus until June 7—the first anniversary of this website, and the 167th anniversary of the night when two men crossed a bridge and the history of the world changed... forever.
4/10/99: Art imitates life. I seem to be having the same problem the characters are having, which is making the choice between speed and care. I had finished the whole of Resurrections until I found a loophole I could have driven a pile-driver through, so to plug it up I ended up with twice as much material. The first half is completed, and so I'm posting it five days early from the April 15th deadline. The other half, the last half, really, I mean it this time, will go up on the 18th, a Sunday, or Patriot's Day if you're in Massachusetts, when I can spend the whole day making it all nice and pretty before attempting to force feed it through the FTP site.
However, in breaking "Calais" in almost exactly half, I seem to have created the mother, father, and second cousin of all cliffhangers. Get over it, it'll be done in a week. Oh, don't whine, it could be worse: think of how it'll be afterwards, with nothing new going up until June! That's right, a whole month an a half with no story going up. So make it last. :-)
On the other hand, the rest of the site will be continually updated. I seem to have acquired the biggest collection of Les Misérables illustrations anywhere, and the sorting and cataloguing of same is a project in and of itself. So that's something you, the readers, can do until the next book comes up, and it's something I, the writer, can do to procrastinate against working on the next book ;-)
See you all in a week....
3/31/99: Almost almost almost. Actually, if I wanted, I could post all the rest of it now, since it's all done, finally... but stretching it out a little give me breathing room and you all a good dose of suspense. Which frankly we could both use. Also, with the final posting of Book One next month, I should have the proofing done on the earlier chapters, all the stupid typos and a little cleaning up of repetitive words, things like that. No major rewrites are scheduled, mainly because if this publishing deal comes through some editor will just red-line it anyway, so there's not much point at this point, is there? Besides, I'd rather write new stuff now than rehash the stuff for the previous (yikes) year... oh, and also I will be setting up the new front pages for the book, making it look more like an online book should look, with a new gateway page and other design changes.
With regards to my previous note, it seems, strange to say, that I was wrong when I thought I found a major mistake on someone else's page. After checking two sources I discovered that what I thought was impossible, is in fact possible. It has to do with the use of the tricolor flag (aka the red white and blue) in certain connection with Les Misérables.
The tricolor, you see, was used during the Revolution, incorporating the white flag of the royalists with the red and blue of the city of Paris. Later it was adopted by Napoleon and became a symbol of the same. Now, in the general sense of Les Misérables, the red flag is used for the student revolutionaries, but the tricolor is also used. However, when the Bourbons came into power in 1814 they brought back the old banner, the oriflamme. This would have been the official flag of France for 90% of the action in Les Misérables. This was the mistake I thought was made.
However, the revolution of 1830 brought Louis-Philippe to power, and in a gesture of appeasement restored the tricolor as the flag of France, which it has remained to this day. So from 1830 to the end of the book, the tricolor is in fact the legal flag of France. Therefore, I was wrong. But not by much.
And the point is, as far as I'm concerned, going back to the original argument, it is unwise to get into a nitpick fight with me. I will nickel and dime you to death. I can prove myself wrong just as thoroughly as I can prove myself right (which is even harder since, technically, it is impossible to prove a negative).
And none of this detracts from the other incredibly anal-retentive mistake I found in the same picture, but which really can't be attributed to the website owner since said owner scanned it off an archival picture. Therefore the mistake is not theirs originally, but merely being passed on from someone else. But at least I'm right on that count, and batting .500 is fabulous if you play baseball....
3/14/99: Oh, after the chapters I just wrote, I think I'm going to get some letters... but what the heck, can't make an omlette without breaking some eggs, right? Okay, bad analogy....
I had some fun, though, in my meager spare time, doing two things at once: proving myself right and figuring out Javert's birthday. On the first front, someone wrote in and told me that "Javert and Valjean can't be the ages they claim to be in the first section, and they can't be ten years apart." She then went on to quote chapter, verse, and so on, that since Javert is 52 in 1832 and Valjean was 55 in 1823 (after rescuing Cosette, who is 8), so he was 63 in 1832 and that makes them eleven years apart.
Now, this kind of überfan bothers me... I run into them every so often, in other genres... it's not so much that she thinks she caught a mistake (well, she did, but not the one she thought she caught), because yes I do make mistakes and I like people to tell me so I don't make a fool out of myself. It was the smug, I-know-more-than-you-do attitude she put on, like she's Hugo's official arbiter of what is and isn't permissible. Like the one who told me I didn't have the right to diss Kate Winslet on my media comparison page... and usually I can spot trouble brewing because such people invariably give themselves proprietary aliases, like (for example) Mrs. Enjolras. As in, I presume, Mrs. Mary Sue Enjolras. As if the character, even if he were real, would come within seven leagues of them....
But I digress. After thinking on this awhile I thought, is it possible to prove my figuring of their ages? Not beyond a shadow of a doubt, unfortunately, but I can, reasonably, show that it is in fact plausible for their ages to be what I wrote them to be. No one has to believe that this is what Hugo wrote, or even intended; all that matters is that I did the math and can show my work, as it relates to my work. So:
1) Valjean is easy to figure out. He is definitely 55 at the end of 1823, as he rescues Cosette at Christmastime. Unless his birthday falls in the last week of December, his birthday has already occurred. This means he was born in 1768. However...
a) in the beginning of the book, depending on which version you read, Valjean is "46 or 48" (Hugo, original French), "46 to 48" (Wraxall translation), "in his late 40's" (Denny trans.), "46 or 47" (the new Fahrenstock/McAfee trans. as well as an uncredited older translation I possess), and "46 or 48" (Hapgood trans.) Nevertheless, in October of 1815, when we first encounter Jean Valjean, he is somewhere between 46 and 48. However, at the end of 1823 he is 55. So, this would make him 47 in 1815, but 64 in 1832 (making him in fact twelve years older than Javert... heck, I'm going the wrong way!)
b) The question becomes, why was Hugo so imprecise regarding Valjean's exact age in October 1815? The most reasonable explanation would be that Valjean had not yet had his birthday in October 1815, and so is 46, going on 47. This would mean his exact birthday falls between Oct 1 and Dec 31, 1768. According to Hugo, Valjean was named for his father, also named Jean Valjean, but it is equally possible his birthday fell on a feast-day for a St. John, of which there are six between October and December. I would like to think he also shared the day of St. John of the Cross (December 14), because of the similarities in their temperaments, so I have decided that for the purposes of my book, that is his birthday. Now for the rest....
2) Javert, we know, is 52 years old in June of 1832, when he is taken at the barricade (I am refusing to admit the possibility that Javert is older and that his identification hasn't been updated... as if he'd ever let that happen!). This means he was born either in the last half of 1779 or the first half of 1780. In order for him to be 10 years younger than Valjean it would have to be the first, meaning, the last half of 1779. But how to figure out the date?
Within Pont-au-Change I have explained how Javert managed to get a baptismal name, so I won't go over it here. Once I decided that he had to have one, and thus a patron saint of his own, I went looking for a Saint Émile (having previously decided to accept the name given Javert in the 1935 Charles Laughton version). And, lo and behold, I found one... and he was canonized five years before Javert was born. Perfect timing. And even better, the description of the saint in question is one of those things that makes you go, "Hmmmm..."
note: to find these pages, I recommend you go to the search site I went to: http://saints.catholic.org/index.shtml. There's some interesting information on some of the names that crop up in Les Misérables—for example, St. Medard, whose church served as the site for that lovely moment of "is he or isn't he?" between Javert and Valjean, or St. Fiacre, outside whose church stood the first taxi-stand and for whom the fiacre (carriage) is named—and if you look this up you'll see a reference to Bossuet, the bishop of Mieux—and the patron saint of France, St. Denis, and the patron saint of Paris, St. Genevieve.
However, his feast day currently is February 8, the anniversary of his death. Much as I would love to be able to prove Javert is an Aquarius, I can't, because originally his feast day was July 20 (which in and of itself isn't a bad day, being the date we landed on the Moon in 1969). Which fits in with my little plan, anyway, because it means that although Javert was 52 in the barricade in June, in another month he'd be 53. So, the value of 1832 as far as Javert is concerned is in fact 53. We have already established that Valjean's birthday will make him 64 in December, but until then, he is 63. So they are, in fact, ten years (and some-odd months, but less than six) years apart.
The only downside to this is that this proof does in fact mean that the opening section of Pont-au-Change is in fact incorrect, insofar as their ages, but it's a simple matter of increasing them each by a year.This will be corrected, along with all the other typos and misspellings and edits, after Resurrections is completed in April. This way I can correct the entire section at once and put it into archive (yes, the links will be changed, so please update your bookmarks). However, though the ages are changing, the difference between them remains at ten years.
In other news... work on the outline progresses slowly; I had to take some time off sick from work which would have been ideal except for the fact I couldn't sit in front of the computer long enough, so when my vacation comes up around Easter week, I will be forging ahead on that.
One last thing: it would be very easy for me to publicly humiliate said überfan, who, it seems to me, has nothing better to do than to pick nits on other peoples' sites, but I don't have to, as there is a great big 18k mother of a mistake right on her front page that makes me giggle every time I look at it, and I don't mean a typo, I mean a blunder of the first magnitude. So, people, remember the next time you present yourself as the all-knowing, all-seeing super-SMOF of Les Misérables or any other media genre... instant karma will get you.
2/15/99: *sigh* I really had hoped to get to Marius and Cosette's wedding in time to post on their anniversary, Feb. 16th. Which is also Mardi Gras again. And Lunar New Year for most Asian cultures (year of the Rabbit, btw... unless you're Vietnamese, in which case it's the year of the Cat, which, I'm sorry, is much cooler). But I decided to post what I had ready and edited, rather than rush chapters that aren't ready, which isn't fair either to the story or to the readers. Besides, it's not like anything will happen to prevent the wedding... (insert dramatic pause) or, will it? (heavy organ chords) Bwa ha ha ha ha....
Okay, enough of that. I anticipate two more posts to finish Book One (Resurrections), sometime in or at the end of April. Then I will take a month off (sorry, but I have more research to do before I get too deep into the second book), and resume afterwards roundabout Junish, and the first anniversary (which as some people have noticed, is an auspicious day as well. And, to answer the question, yes, I actually stayed up until one o'clock in the morning on the 7th of June and uploaded the main page for the site. You think I'd lie about a thing like that?) But the page's other bits and pieces will continue to update in the meantime.
On the book front (see below), the status is unchanged. They want to see a full outline of the whole thing, start to finish. Well, I'd give them my outline but they'd never decipher the notation. I mean, I know what I mean when I write "the bit about the spoons", but no one else does. By the way, that's the notation for an entire chapter, roundabout Book 6. Writing the whole thing out is taking awhile. But that's okay... again, I'd rather do it slow and right than quick and haphazard.
A final thing: many many typos and errors are cropping up in the earlier sections, many of which are my personal typing foibles. After three years of French in high school and one in college you'd think I'd remember how to spell "mademoiselle", wouldn't you? *sigh* Serves me right for not utilizing the stupid spellchecker before I convert my .doc files to .html. But the first sections are being proofed right now, by three different people, so hopefully I will have the corrected posts up later this month.
That's it for this posting...
2/4/99: I have begun this editorial log so that I don't have to keep writing the same things over and over in individual emails. This should update with every new posting, or even more frequently if something comes up. After the next post (2/16, I hope!) this section should be found in with the other items, not at the top of the page.
Now, the reason for this notice: there may be some changes in the administering and content of this page. Namely, the party of the first part (moi-même) is in the preliminary stages with the party of the second part (publisher) with regards to the party of the third part (book). Now, before anyone gets excited, a few things: first, I am already more excited about this than the rest of you put together, so let me do the ecstatic vibrating and squealy happy noises for the group. Second, things are, I repeat, in the preliminary stages. Meaning, I can't even tell you who it is that I'm dealing with, because I don't want to muck this up. So, please no emails asking me when it's coming out, will Amazon.com have it, etc. Third, these things take awhile. Generally, unless you're a White House intern or a member of the 1980 US Hockey team, a book does not have a 72-hour turnaround time; it may take a year to 18 months for a book to hit the shelves from start to finish. And that's if it's finished. Which, you may have noticed, Pont-au-Change (i.e that party of the third part we were talking about earlier) is not. Think of it this way: you do not ask a couple who has just announced they intend to try and have a baby what college the child will be attending. It's just too darn soon. But I will update if and when I can.
Meanwhile, the party of the first part will continue churning out the party of the third part and posting it on the site, unless and until the party of the second part makes it extremely lucrative to cease doing so.
BTW, allow me to point out that publishers who read websites also read the letters that come to the website. So if you like what you've seen so far and haven't said, so, say so! You know where to reach me: blotter@jps.net.
Now, let's start concentrating on that party of the fourth part, wherein, we party like it's 1832! Woooooo!