Deathly Hallows uberwank: Chapter 27, The Final Hiding Place
You'll be interested to know that the HP Lexicon, in its synopsis of this chapter, refers to the Trio spending most of the day "riding the dragon". I know the phrase I'm looking for is "chasing the dragon", but nonetheless I enjoy the mental image of Harry, Ron and Hermione abandoning the horcrux hunt in favour of becoming heroin addicts.
But yes, that is all they do in this chapter - ride on the dragon they freed last time around. They can't steer it, and it's almost blind, and they don't even dare move in case it eats them, so all in all, JK Rowling has somehow managed to make riding on a dragon boring. Why, Jo, why? You're not this bad a writer, really you're not. But this bit is dull, to the point that I can't even manage a proper reference to, say, Eragon (which I have never read, not have I seen the movie, but I know anyway that it is the worst book ever written and the worst film ever filmed). This is one of the points in DH that I get the overwhelming feeling JKR's heart wasn't really in it any more.
After many hours of this, the dragon flies lower in order to drink from a lake, and the trio jump off its back into the water, like kids on one of those old double-decker buses with stairs at each end, running up and down each set of stairs in order to avoid being seen by the conductor, and then leaping off at the right stop, thereby getting a free bus ride. I have no idea if this actually happens/happened anywhere - conductors were a thing of the past even when I was a small child - but my mother swears that she and her sister used to do it all the time in Swansea as kids. You know, I'm not sure this metaphor or simile or whatever it is really works.
So, yeah, the Phoenix Crew fall off the dragon and into the lake, which presumably hurts like hell given their third-degree burns, and swim to the shore. They change into dry clothes and put Wizarding Savlon on their cuts and burns. Man, the action just keeps on coming, doesn't it. Voldemort seems to sense my ennui, and throws Harry an extended Voldevision sequence. It shows Voldemort randomly killing a goblin and a whole bunch of death eaters (extras, though, rather than those with speaking roles), for he knows that the cup is gone, and therefore that our intrepid trio are looking for horcruxes, and this pisses him off. Following this, Voldemort talks some bullshit about how the ring and the locket could not possibly have been discovered, but he'd better go and get the Hogwarts one, just to be safe. And he may as well check the others, although it's not like anything could have happened to them. Because nobody could possibly have discovered his secret hiding places, bwah ha ha haaaa! It is all extremely IRONIC and also extremely STUPID, or rather it shows exactly how much Voldemort SUCKS as an evil overlord - it's one thing to be so convinced of your own brilliance that you fail to notice the hero sneaking up on you from behind, but Voldemort has just received undeniable confirmation that Harry is seeking and destroying the horcruxes. And he's only just worried, even though his hiding places for the most part border on the ridiculous (in particular, hiding the ring at the Gaunt hut). At one point he throws off a passing remark on how Dumbledore never trusted him and knew his middle name, so there is a slight chance he might have guessed that some kind of clue might be at the Gaunt house etc etc.
Harry comes round from his trance or whatever it was, and reports back to his homies, and they decide to go directly to Hogwarts, via Hogsmeade, so they can find the horcrux before Voldemort can move it.
And that's it. Seriously. Nothing else happens.
Shit, what do I do now?
...
Seriously, I really feel I ought to be writing more here, even though I really have nothing much else to say about the chapter - because this instalment is nowhere near as long as the average. Saying that, it's well over 600 words by this point, which is the same sort of length as the first few chapters. It's just that as I've been writing the Uberwank, the purpose of it has changed and what I've felt happy to include has changed too; partly this is because my original reasons for writing it barely apply any more.
I've probably talked about this before - the original, original plan involved pretty much one post of all the Star Wars moments in the book, strung together with very brief explanation, because some of what was to be included was more metaphorical. That developed into one post per chapter. Like I said already, the first few chapters were 500 or 600 words, and that was fine, but as I wrote and found myself adding in snarky remarks and the rest, I realised there was still a whole lot of tl;dr I wanted to say about the book that had nothing to do with Star Wars and things grew. If you've been reading it, you know already that the later chapters are much longer - chapter 23 is around six times the length of, say, chapter 2, at 3,085 words. (Yeah, I've been keeping a word count. I'm a massive, massive dork.)
Moreover, I find myself re-reading chapters of DH I've already written about, and thinking of things I really should have mentioned. For example, when the trio were running about the ministry, why didn't they use a system of communication similar to the fake galleons the DA used? Alternatively, way back in chapter 1, there's a line which goes something like, "Voldemort stroked the angry snake", and I can't help but feel I really missed a trick in not sniggering like a schoolboy over that.
So, I've found that as I've been writing, the structure and purpose and everything else has changed - something I wasn't familiar with before, because regardless of the topic and format I've only ever written what you could term one-shots (I'm including stuff like my undergraduate dissertation in that), where I could make changes to the entire thing right up until the last minute.
I'd be interested to know if other people who've written WIPs have experienced a similar phenomenon, of wanting to go back and re-write stuff after it's been released into the wild, so to speak. (Hell, I'd also be very interested to know whether JKR ever thinks that about her books, given the substantial difference in tone between the first and last books.) Then again, the difference between the 'Wank and an ongoing fic is there are a set number of chapters in the original book, so the end has been in sight from the very beginning.
Ah, dammit. Apologies for the navel-gazing. The next chapter is where the action really kicks off, and that action is sustained more or less all the way to the end of the book, so things should be less tedious next time around.
... Macros?
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