{"id":176,"date":"2012-06-17T08:38:02","date_gmt":"2012-06-17T08:38:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/?p=176"},"modified":"2012-06-17T08:43:58","modified_gmt":"2012-06-17T08:43:58","slug":"fairly-unimaginative-second-chances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/?p=176","title":{"rendered":"(Fairly Unimaginative) Second Chances"},"content":{"rendered":"

Second Chances<\/em><\/strong> by Lynn O<\/p>\n

Continuing with our alternate realities theme this month, we have another dream-inspired story. As 1950s Disney Cinderella sings to her little avian friends: “No matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true.” While Fitzwilliam Darcy would seem to make an unlikely Cinderella, Lynn O explores this lyric in a literal fashion. A month after the Hunsford debacle, an unhappy Darcy falls asleep in his London home one night only to awaken at Netherfield on the morning of his original arrival. Can he save himself and his friend unnecessary heartache with second chances<\/em>? (Spoiler: the answer is yes.)<\/p>\n

Why you should read it:<\/strong> You like alternate universe stories. You wish you could skip all the boring stuff and get straight to Darcy and Elizabeth being in love.<\/p>\n

Why you might not like it:<\/strong> You don’t like alternate universe or wish fulfilment stories. You resent being forced to wade through fairly average, unedited prose for an entirely predictable outcome.<\/p>\n

Regency,<\/strong> AU<\/strong>, General<\/strong>, at DWG<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Second Chances<\/em> begins rather promisingly post-Hunsford, with a Darcy struggling with his disappointment. The initial characterisations are quite good: Darcy isn’t contemplating hurling himself into the Thames, nor is he drinking himself into a stupor every night. While there were are a few things that jar in the Prologue, I actually allowed myself to be hopeful. Silly Oofy!<\/p>\n

In Chapter 1 we awaken with Darcy in this way:<\/p>\n

“Where am I?” he asked, suddenly panicking when he realized he wasn’t in his own bedchamber.
\n“You’re at Netherfield, Sir,” the servant replied.
\n“Netherfield?!?!” he asked, beginning to panic. What was he doing at Netherfield? Hadn’t he gone to bed in his London house? What was happening?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*sigh*<\/em> It’s not that it’s so<\/em> bad, kittens; it’s just that it’s not very good. And one always has the awful urge to try and fix<\/em> things as one reads along. One cannot escape one’s inner editor who sincerely desires to be helpful and improve the story so that one does not have to continue wallowing in banality.<\/p>\n

“But surely, Oofy,” you say, “you’re being much too harsh.”<\/p>\n

Perhaps I am, dear Reader. It’s possible that by allowing my hopes to flourish initially, I presaged their inevitable plummet to bitterness and regret. The injustice is that this could<\/em> be a very good story. The central concept hasn’t been written into clich\u00c3\u00a9 even now — and it certainly hadn’t been in 1998 when the story was first posted. Given a more thorough and less histrionic treatment, Second Chances<\/em> could be a satisfying and enjoyable read. It’s this possibility that causes the most disappointment.<\/p>\n

Alas.<\/p>\n

However, being a manly sort of fellow, I shall carry on.<\/p>\n

By the end of Chapter 1, Darcy has coped remarkably well with his time\/dream travel and decided to make use of this opportunity to woo Elizabeth properly, i.e. in such a fashion that she doesn’t hate him this time. (Well done, sir!) He develops A Strategy<\/strong> and there are some amusing incidents surrounding the Assembly. They dance, conversation is had, and further acquaintance is assured. Darcy’s foreknowledge of prior events allows him to manoeuvre around or thwart most obstacles (namely Caroline Bingley) until Mr Wickham arrives in Meryton.<\/p>\n

And that’s when everything goes horribly wrong. With the writing I mean. We’re expecting<\/em> the story to go horribly wrong, after all.<\/p>\n

Once again we have a writer who doesn’t quite know how to drive her plot forward and so is reduced to melodrama. We are supposed to believe that by this point Elizabeth is so much in love with Darcy that Wickham’s lies (the old “engaged to Cousin Anne” tale) literally send her prostrate with grief and unable to leave her room. In fact she spends most of the second half of the story crying.<\/p>\n

The horror. She has become her mother.<\/p>\n

Of course it all ends happily, as it must. Darcy proposes and Elizabeth says yes, which is the point after all. So that’s nice. Unfortunately, the story’s main conceit is never resolved or even addressed again. We never learn whether this has merely all been a dream of Darcy’s or if he has actually gone back into the past and altered all of their respective histories. Protip: if you’re going to use a particular narrative device as the impetus of your story, you must follow it through. It’s not something that will simply go away if you ignore it; more to the point, it’s not something that your readers will simply forget about if you distract them long enough.<\/p>\n

Second Chances<\/em> also suffers from several structural problems. The ‘chapters’ are far too short, which causes the story to limp along like a jerky train ride. The multiple POVs are distracting and not well-executed, not to mention rather out of place. Most fatally, long passages of Austen’s words are pasted directly into the narrative. This is never<\/em> a good idea, even for the best writers. Not only is it dull for the reader — after all, if we wanted to read Pride and Prejudice<\/em>, that’s what we’d be reading — it also exposes the writer to unflattering comparison. It’s a harsh light for Lynn O, I’m afraid.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, this reads like a first draft. It’s an interesting first draft that I’d be willing to look at again — give it a second chance<\/em> as it were — but one definitely requiring a lot of work.<\/p>\n

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Second Chances by Lynn O Continuing with our alternate realities theme this month, we have another dream-inspired story. As 1950s Disney Cinderella sings to her little avian friends: “No matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true.” While Fitzwilliam Darcy would seem to make…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[104,14,40,101,60,57,48,49,17],"class_list":["post-176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oofy-prosser","tag-author-lynn-o","tag-era-regency","tag-length-novella","tag-monthly-theme-alternate-realities","tag-plot-fantasy","tag-quills-two","tag-rating-general","tag-source-pride-and-prejudice","tag-type-au"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}