wolffyluna

... is ticking along nicely.

I've been doing >1k words a day for the past few days, and the main draft (not including outline) is about 8k at the moment. I remember the days when 500 words was impressive from me, and 5k was a long fic :,). I think this'll end up around 20k, considering I think I'm slightly less than halfway through.

It's going fairly well. Tolkien's timeline is messy, but I think part of my problem is that I forgot Autumn existed. Even so, I think I'll fudge a few things here and there.

My current main tricking thing is torture.

So, one of our main characters (Beleg) is tortured in canon. I am not skimming over this, partially because I am trying to follow canon, and because it's important for the later relationships between the characters. (Beleg ends up... forgiving but not forgetting, what the torturing characters did.)

But I have some tricky things to balance:

I want to portray what happened as serious and painful and I don't want to flinch away from the gross details
I don't want to go way over the top re: the details, because sometimes less is more.
I want to keep things reasonably accurate, both because this is a real thing that happens to real people and I want to keep things accurate for those reasons, and on a harder to articulate note... while I generally roll my eyes at the concept of creators having some Special Responsibility for the Moral Growth of Their Audience... misconceptions about torture that come from media (because often the only 'source' of info about torture someone would have is media) and I really don't want to play into that. Especially because the kind of torture used in canon is often thought of as 'not really' torture, and whoo boy do I not want to play into that at all.
Canon leans hard of "He's an elf" and frankly the canon length of torture and healing times are absurd. As much as I try to follow canon, I am ignoring that because no, it will not take less time to heal from restraint/stress position torture⁺ than the torture itself took. That doesn't make any sense. (Heck, I'm fudging the canon timeline a bit so that, assuming elves are remotely like humans, he isn't at risk of dying.)

My current plan is to deliberately go a bit too gory and detailed in the first draft. This seems like the sort of thing where it's easier to rein it in later drafts than to add it. But we'll see.

⁺ I'm aware those are different catergories, I'm just not sure which catergory the canonical torture falls under.