Notes to Stregoni Benefici, Ch. 21

September 20th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

A bit of a personal story interlude:

When my father turned 40 (I was 2, he’s now 68), his sister bought him a copy of the Tao Te Ching, He read it every morning for 20 years, so basically the entire time I was growing up. So it was always something I knew of, and something he quoted frequently, both in public and in private.

Not too long ago, I was complaining about something, and he told me that according to the Tao, I was a perfect daughter. I stammered a bit, and then he said, “In the Tao, to be is to be perfect. You are perfect because you are.”

One of the things that fascinates me about Carlisle, and one thing that continues to draw me to him (and where I felt SM gave him particularly short shrift), is this idea of his feeling of utter inadequacy as a result of his Puritan theological upbringing. Puritanism is a belief system of constantly falling short, of being born into a nearly irreparable state of original sin, of constantly needing to work to better oneself and to prove that one is worthy of God. I see this in Carlisle’s profession and his attitude toward it: in a way, vampirism becomes a new kind of original sin for him, a state of disgrace which he finds himself constantly working to be better than.

So as I thought about how Carlisle would react to a piece of philosophy/theology (I’m never quite sure where to put the TTC on that continuum, if indeed there even is one) like the Tao, I realized that it must shake him to the core—and for that reason, speak to him rather sharply. It’s a different forgiveness than the forgiveness he was taught. A forgiveness that rather than “Work hard, pray hard, and hope it’s good enough,” says instead, “Allow yourself to be. Be in harmony. And this is perfection.”

One of the beauties of Volterra is that it is this place where Carlisle does a ton of growing and learning and changing. For this reason, it is a place with which he is reluctant to sever ties. He associates it with a bit of his own personal renaissance as a vampire. Yet the very nature of such growth is that it tends to take you away from the place where you experienced it, as you desire to stretch yourself beyond the boundaries you now know are able to be broken through.

Growing pains, I suppose you could call them, though I’m sure Aro would have a more insidious interpretation….

As always, I owe great thanks to my beta, Openhome, who always helps guide these chapters until they are pinpoint precise on what I wanted them to be.

 

Happy Reading.

 

Notes for Stregoni Benefici, Chapter 20

September 7th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

“Unto whomsoever much is given…”

I admit, that’s what I wanted to name this chapter. Because I think that quote captures Carlisle so well. Vampirism is, to Carlisle (at least as I write him), as much a blessing as a curse. It gives him superhuman power and strength, and he is determined to use those attributes for good. Rather than see them as a means to destroy humans, they give him all the more fuel to hold himself to the highest standard. He has more gifts than humans do, and since he’s not going to use those gifts to eat them, he’s going to use those gifts to save them.

But of course that creates conflict, too. He can’t save everyone, and the added high standard simply puts more pressure on him (as high standards are wont to do). So instead of seeing his gifts clearly, and acknowledging to himself when he’s done as much as he’s able to do,  he keeps pressing, and becoming more and more depressed as he does so.

Carlisle needs people in his life who offer him the forgiveness he’s unable to. Later, that will be Esme and Edward the rest of his children Which is of course, why there’s Dorothy here.

This chapter went from 2,900 words to 3,200 at beta, and then as I revised it, I would add two hundred words here, only to delete two hundred more later. But as always, there will be more to come next week.

Many thanks to Openhome for being the person who both forgives me for holding myself to ridiculous high standards…but simultaneously makes sure I produce a chapter that meets them.

 

Notes for Stregoni Benefici, Chapter 19

August 30th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

Originally, I’d envisioned Stregoni as 27 3,000-word chapters–a perfect split. Three stories, three acts, three chapters per act. It will come amazingly close. The finished work looks to be shaping up to be 28 chapters plus an epilogue.

But I’ve deviated from the 3,000-word chapters a bit. Yet this one is one, and it feels strangely short to me, even though it is but a few hundred words shorter than last week’s. I keep looking for places to collapse this story a bit, and yet I keep finding each piece necessary, and too long to justify appending to the next. Carlisle and William need their time to have it out, but perhaps this is short for no other reason than that Carlisle, even as a human, is never capable of sustaining anger for long.

 

One of the most fun parts of writing Stregoni is getting a chance to explore Carlisle at twenty-three, when he had less wisdom and more fire…

 

…and could be a bit more of a tempest.

Since the chapter is short, I’ll leave my note short as well. As always, thanks to Openhome for her astute direction.

Happy reading.

 

Blog maintenance

August 30th, 2012 § 2 comments § permalink

Last week, I got a slew of spam registrations from one particular domain. No harm done; the users were deleted (along with several others that have sneaked in over the last year), but I did install a new Captcha to the registration page to discourage bot registrations to the site.

In the process, I updated all my plugins and broke the slideshow I was using for my front page. If you’ve been to the site in the last week or so, you may have noticed. As this was the first week of school, I haven’t had a chance to fix the slideshow yet, but I will find a new plugin that will work. In the meantime, enjoy the Johnson quote. There is no quote that better encapsulates my feelings about my own writing, especially my fanwork, and I carry it proudly on the cover of my nook and for the meantime, use it as my sole representation on this website.

Look for a new plugin (and maybe new quotes and photos? I might go crazy!) some time next week.

Notes for Stregoni Benefici, Ch. 18

August 23rd, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

I distinctly remember where I was when I decided how to structure Stregoni Benefici. It was the summer of 2010, I was living in a tiny studio apartment across the city from where I live now, and as I do now, was working retail for the summer. We closed the store at 11, which meant that I regularly was walking home from the bus at midnight or later. And I don’t remember why I was thinking about Stregoni, or what else was going through my mind, but I remember distinctly being about three blocks from home, in front of the apartment building where one of my friends lived, when I realized that in order to make the story work, I needed to give Carlisle a foil in each of the three timelines, and that to do that would mean I would have to write Aro.

Aro is the hardest of these six POVs to write (because I consider Carlisle in each of these periods to be a different POV–twenty-three-year-old human Carlisle resembles the two-hundred-seventy-four year old vampire in many ways, but in some ways they are different). Some have said that he seems almost split-personality, and it’s taken me two years of writing him, and some careful conversations with close friends, to figure out why.

As I see things, power is Aro’s primary motivation, and anything he does which seems benevolent (sparing the Cullens at the end of Breaking Dawn, for instance), is about the preservation of power and his ability to mete out punishment. Carlisle, who desires nothing but peace and companionship, throws a complete wrench into Aro’s understanding of how the world works. As B, a friend and reader pointed out in a review, Carlisle “seems like he came from outer space” to the brothers, with his different views.

Yet I think his purity of heart is infectious, and draws Aro in, both out of Aro’s curiosity, and out of Carlisle’s generosity of spirit. But for someone who doesn’t feel very often, being jerked around by suddenly not wanting to kill someone doesn’t sit well with Aro. And so you get a guy who ping-pongs back and forth from anger to what is almost a fond affection back to anger.

And while in my opinion, this personality whiplash is perfect for his character, none of that is particularly easy to write.

I wrote this chapter in June, revised it before sending it to Openhome, asked her to shred it, which she did because she’s wonderful, and then I shredded it again, rewriting the Aro POV from the ground up. So I apologize for the brief delay, but hope you find it worth the wait.

 

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