The Halfway Point. After too, too long.
This is a terrifying thing for me to do, posting this, but I’m going to do it anyway, because the guilt that I have a chapter in the bag and haven’t posted it is weighing on me. I hate, probably more than any of you do, that my posting speed with this story has dropped off as precipitously as it has. I had sort of an insane spring which marked several major hurdles in my professional life—I began writing fanfiction three and a half years ago as a happy-go-lucky student on her first winter break of her graduate career, but as of March, I now sit as a Ph.D. candidate with only a dissertation standing between me and the title of “Dr.” It blows my mind that so much time has passed…but I also find my world is different as term papers have given way to articles and taking courses have given way to teaching them.
I’ve been careful throughout the writing of Stregoni to keep at least one chapter ahead of where I was posting (back in the beginning, it was two). But I’m posting my buffer chapter. Most of the next one is finished, but I will resume posting when I have a more solid buffer, and perhaps when I’ve written out to close to the end. And given the size of my last break (I’m sorry!) it’s entirely possible that it actually won’t be any longer than it has been before I post next. If anything, I’ve tended to find that when I acknowledge that it’s taking me more time than I thought, I tend to start writing like a madwoman. This is the exact halfway point of this novel, but the more I write it the more I realize it’s meant to be read as a novel, not as a serial. I know where everything is going and of course I remember everywhere it’s been, without needing to re-read. But of course, you don’t, and I would rather give you something that allows you to experience it as a whole.
I wrote in my first author’s note to this piece that this is my magnum opus of sorts-I began writing a draft of the story which would become Stregoni the day after I posted my first one-shot, “The Talk,” even though it took me over two years to actually solidify what its plot would look like. Carlisle’s story has been the story I’ve yearned to tell since I first read the words “He just celebrated his three hundred-and sixty-second birthday” the very first time I read Twilight. I can no more leave it unfinished than I could kill a member of my family. I have to tell this story, and I thank you, again and again, for coming along on the ride.
As always, I owe a great debt to Openhome and Julie for their feedback on the chapter (and advance thanks for the ones to come). Any remaining flub-ups are entirely of my own doing.
Thank you for your continued readership. It means the world to me.
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