Writings

I’ve written before about my love of, and my firm conviction of the possibility of, the Edward/Carlisle romantic relationship. It’s something that I feel is a tension that underlies everything they do–that the reason they became father and son in canon is because that was what they both needed and desired, but that it could’ve easily gone another way. So it was easy for me to write “A Very Different Gift,” implying that Edward was with the Volturi, and miserable there, at least in part because he suffered unrequited romantic feelings for his sire.

I also embraced the pairing for an FGB piece still in progress, “The Last Days of Socrates.” This one is set in 1918-1921, which I’ve always felt was the canonically appropriate time where a relationship might have bloomed between the two of them. But “Socrates,” it turns out, is a very difficult piece to write—one of the commissions I was given by those who donated on its behalf (and one of the facets I wanted to stick to myself) is that it meld as closely as possible to canon. To write a Carlisle who is sexually involved with his young charge, and eventually will drop him for a female mate, while still keeping him as a redeemable character is a difficult task, to say the least. It’s happening, though, in slow bits.

So needless to say, the CarlWard contest, sponsored by  caught my eye. And I thought, “Hmm. This would be fun to write for.” I asked on A Different Forest if Cap and Deelovely, two of the judges who are also contributors to Team Socrates, would forgive me if I wrote a CarlWard for this, knowing that the piece for which they donated is still coming. Their response was enthusiastic, so I set out figuring out what to write.

When I sit down to write an AU, the key piece is exactly what the “alternate” part of the “alternate universe” is going to be. My goal in AU writing is never to bend the characters to what I want them to do, but rather to find the moment where, if one or two things in canon went differently, the characters would naturally have changed course. In this instance, I ran into an issue—the first place where I think canon could’ve diverged to produce an Edward/Carlisle story is already underway in “Socrates,” so I was going to have to find another moment to set this AU.

There was one other moment I thought *might* work. Several months ago, malianani asked me a question on Formpspring: “What would Carlisle do if he ever lost Esme?” I found I didn’t have a good answer then, but as I turned this moment over in my head, I thought, “Hmm. Maaaaybe.”

So as I’m wont to do, I tested the idea. I turned to sleepyvalentina on gChat and said, “What do you think of a BD-AU where Bella and Esme die?” And she was excited, which cemented it in my head. I liked the idea; it’s a true challenge. It’s one thing to write Carlisle/Edward before Esme, before the father-son relationship ever took root; it’s quite another to move them from a father-son relationship into a romantic relationship without triggering the “incest! incest! incest!” alarm in the minds of my readers.

In order to do make it work, this was going to have to be very clearly Carlisle’s journey. It would have to ring his voice so true that there would be no question that he could possibly have feelings for Edward, even given their background of relating to each other as family. I knew that what I pulled out of this story had to be the deepest exploration of Carlisle I’d ever done. It would have to go beyond Ithaca, beyond Stregoni, beyond “Socrates” or “Sensitivity” or any of the other stories I’ve used in my attempts to unravel him. I turned to Carlisle and said, “My friend, I am giving you the reins.” And I did. I gave him his first-person voice; I gave him control over every piece of dialogue spoken and how it was interpreted. I asked him to share with me his sorrow, and to tell me about what his life is like if Esme and Bella are killed.

And so he did.

We flew through this story in four days, which is practically unheard of for me. There were moments when things went down on the page that I firmly believe I had nothing to do with—the memory of all the music, for instance, was almost a free-write. I know next to nothing about these musicians; but Carlisle remembers standing next to Edward as he screamed at a CCR concert. Much of this story didn’t come from me, it came through me—it was Carlisle answering my call to give me the best he had. When I finished, it left me breathless, surprised, and very pleased.

As a writer, you learn to judge your own writing, to look at it with at least somewhat of an objective eye. Without learning that, it’s nearly impossible to edit well—you feel that everything you’ve written is so good, or that it is so dear to you, that it’s hard to cut the parts that don’t work. At the same time, when you’re able to look somewhat objectively, it becomes easier to tell when you’ve written one of the best things in your personal repertoire. I say with confidence that this piece is one of those.

What I set out to do here was not to write Carlisle and Edward getting it on hot and heavy; in fact, I nearly cut the sex scene entirely. But the sex itself is less than 3% of the entire story—228 words, to be exact. The story here is not about sex, or gay sex, or even a coming out—it’s the story of two men grappling with their own grief and learning to love again with someone with whom they’ve always been able to share everything.

In the end, Carlisle and Edward come full circle—back to the one who has always loved them, and the one who always will. miaokuancha in her review said in only a few words what it took me almost 8,000 words to say in the fic, so I’ll leave her poetic commentary here as the end to my own as-usual-too-lengthy ramble:

I love the ‘and’ instead of ‘either or’, that in the end we all are beings and love is our highest calling and families can be woven in many kinds of ways. A very Cullen thing to do, actually.

It’s a very Cullen thing to do, indeed.

I hope you enjoy “Season,” and thank you, as always, for reading.

–g

(And yes, it won. 1st place judges, 2nd place popular vote. Many, many thanks to all of you who participated in advertising the contest and voting.)

Sometimes, I write slash.

Slash is where modern fan fiction got its roots; the bringing forth of queer themes into works which lacked them. It filled a need for writers and readers alike. There’s something uniquely subversive about slash—it’s causing a reader to stop and think about the character she fell in love with from the canon and to see them as someone other than the heterosexual she knew him as (see bookshop’s post on this for a much better discussion of this topic).

I like that about slash. I’ve always been a reader of gay male erotica, and to a lesser extent, a writer of it. I think in the realm of fanfiction about characters who were presented as heteroexual, slash poses one of the most interesting what-ifs. And I like how especially challenging it is in this fandom. Bella Swan is first and foremost a cipher for the reader, hence why she is so nondescript and without many defining traits—the reader is invited to be her, and to love Edward…and by extension to get angry if Edward loves anyone else.

To pair Edward with another man, then, is to challenge that to an incredible degree. It’s more jarring than another woman, because it doesn’t only say, “Edward likes so-and-so better than you,” it says, “Edward would never like you because you don’t bat for his team at all.” Yet at the same time, it opens a door to possibilities for exploring who Edward might be as a character that move way beyond how we see him in canon.

Is Edward gay? In canon, I don’t think so. And I certainly think Meyer didn’t mean to imply so. Yet at the same time, the things which one could read as signs of simply delayed sexual interest could be interpreted as indications that Edward could be queered a bit, in the right circumstances and by the right writer. Minisinoo writes about this in “The Actual, the Implied, and the Imagined.” Of the Twilight characters, I think the two easiest to push in the direction of at least bi-curiosity are Edward and Carlisle, a topic which a thoughtful person asked me to expound on via Formspring. (One of my FGB stories has asked me to tackle this pairing, and I may also do it for a contest in the near future.)

Now, one reason I haven’t written slash in this fandom is precisely because if I were to ship a slash pairing, it would be Edward/Carlisle, for the reasons in the post I link to above. At the same time, I’ve written (and become known for) a fic that explores the intensity and complexity of their father-son bond. There’s a difference in the way I write Edward and Carlisle in Ithaca versus “Socrates,” and I’ve stayed away from writing E/C before this precisely because I didn’t want people reading things into IiG that I wrote very carefully to keep out. But then, of course, perhaps I am a hypocrite to even try to control the reading of one story, for the very act of writing fic is my taking away Meyer’s control over how her story should be read.

So, relinquishing that control over my own work, I wrote some slash. This piece was done for the Make the Yuletwi’d Gay fic exchange for 2010, and was written for mothlights, the author of the vampfic Bronze. Getting this prompt was a lot of fun for me. It let me go back to a genre I’ve always enjoyed, and let me into the head of a character I’ve never written before. As with all of my fics, it has its roots in a different interpretation of and different events springing from the canon—in this case, that Demetri apprehended Edward during his rebellious years. It was a fun dance in on a different dancefloor, and there will be a bit more to come from this particular pipeline. I hope you enjoy it. 

Last Christmas I really wanted to write a piece that would be more deeply meditative than my usual fare (even though I’m not exactly an author of lighthearted stories on any day). And I had this idea. At the time I was working on “Sensitivity to Initial Conditions” and harnessing the power of telling several short stories about the different characters, and I thought, “Boy, it’d be fun to do one in the same vein of where all the Cullens are before they meet each other.”

And then I was busy, and I let it languish. A fic like this requires a certain headspace that I couldn’t manage to get in. But the idea stayed with me, and I knew it was a piece that I would write, at some point.

Enter A Different Forest. They decided this year to run several small contests for Christmas, one of which was to write a 500 to 1,000-word canon Christmas-related story. There were lots of wonderful entries, which can be read here (http://adifferentforest.com/Campfire_Comment.aspx?ID=9663). The small word-count limit, and the 24-hour deadline forced me to get into the right space. Importantly, it made me get rid of the other four Cullens and focus just on Carlisle, Esme, and Edward–and the moment I did that, I knew exactly what shape the story needed to take.

One of the things that always drives my writing of the Cullens is the idea that family isn’t something they get to take for granted. We humans get stuck with parents, siblings, extended family that we didn’t necessarily intend to have. But the Cullens are constantly in the process of choosing, day by day, to remain together, to continue loving one another. To them, the presence of a family is a blessing and one they don’t easily take for granted. This fic is about that blessing.

A few borrowed things: The idea that Edward’s mother is Irish Catholic and that he is Episcopalian are both taken from Minisnoo’s “Beauty, Shining in Company.” The title is from “My Soul In Stillness Waits,” an Advent hymn by a Roman Catholic hymnist, Marty Haugen. Openhome provided me some small, but very vital, feedback on the penultimate draft.

Thank you, as always for reading.

Merry Christmas!

–giselle