Writings

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.

Ages and ages and AGES ago, a reader by the name of sigh_for_sigh made a comment in one of her reviews on Twilighted that my one-shots were mostly very happy and not very angst-filled. Of course, this was back when my one-shot repertoire was “The Talk,” “Form 1040,” and “The Family Cullen.”

This made me think. I don’t consider myself as one who leans one way or the other when it comes to drama or cheer; I try in my writing to balance whatever is needed for that particular story and that particular character in that moment. But it made me realize that the reason for the cheerfulness was the nature of the character I was writing. My comment in return was that I was writing Carlisle, and that one, these one-shots take place when he is at his most content, surrounded by his family, and two, it takes a very long time to crack Carlisle up.

Carlisle is one of the steadiest characters I’ve ever written. In a way, even though I find Edward’s voice harder to channel, he is a bit more like the young adult protagonists I usually write. Impetuous, mercurial, easily agitated. As an author, this makes life easy—if your character is easily worked up, you can throw them curve balls and let them make decisions which alter the plot quickly.

This is not so with Carlisle. Carlisle is an over-thinker, a man who examines every angle, and who tends to simmer before becoming too angry, or sad. So to take Carlisle on a journey that results in his making a rash decision—even when his journey begins nearly at his breaking point!—takes time. And of course, one of the issues with this decision is that while it is rash in a way (even to the point that he will describe it as such to Bella almost ninety years later) it is also completely inevitable.

But it takes time to take him to the brink.

I owe great thanks to Openhome on this one (I always do, but this one especially) for helping me trim this one down to something with actual flow.

As an extra, I found myself listening to a single song while doing the edits on this chapter. I don’t usually have soundtracks, and I’m easily annoyed by authors who suggest songs that go with their chapters, so this is somewhat hypocritical of me, but if you so choose, you can hop over to my tumblr page and experience it for yourself.

Happy Reading.

(This note may be vaguely spoilerish, and so you may wish to read it after you read the chapter.)

You don’t go from a normal existence to hopelessness overnight.

This week, I finished a book, Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher. I highly recommend it; it’s a fabulous and very quick read. Its premise is that there is a teenage boy, Clay, who is sent the thirteen tapes recorded by a girl he crushed on, explaining her reasons for committing suicide, in thirteen stories revolving around thirteen of her peers. It’s a fascinating chronicle of how small things lead to terrible despair, and a highly addictive read. And, I think, this notion of how small things build feeds nicely into what is going on Stregoni.

Certainly, a number of things in Carlisle’s vampire existence led to the enduring loneliness and depression which he carries really all the way through the Twilight Saga (I believe it’s still evident in his actions in the four  canon books, despite his having gained his entire family by that time). But in order to understand Carlisle fully, we have to take time to stop and imagine what his human life was like as well.

Some other fanfic writers have chosen to give William Cullen (or whatever they choose to name the character, as “William” is my own invention) the burden of leading to Carlisle’s self-loathing, making him abusive and hateful toward his son. While I haven’t spared the character the kind of hatefulness that comes from narrow-minded thinking, I wanted a more multidimensional portrayal of who Carlisle’s father might have been—after all he was Carlisle’s role model of how to be a parent, and although he certainly changed many things, some he picked up from his own father.

But without William being deliberately a monster, then how did Carlisle’s human life contribute to the melancholy in which he lives the ensuing three centuries?

One reader of mine who has become a close friend over time, upon reading the first chapter in the 1667 timeline gchatted me shortly after she finished the chapter. When she was done reading the chapter and its tiny mention of Elizabeth Bradshawe, she told me exactly where this storyline was headed. One might think that when someone guesses your entire plot after one chapter it would be frustrating, but on the contrary, I was completely giddy. Because it was always my intention to lay the groundwork for this in such a way that the reader could see it coming…

…but that Carlisle never would.

The Fourth Brother was the original title of Stregoni Benefici, well, at least after I decided my fic Absolution, which was to barrel straight through from 1644 to 2005 would not work as a single coherent narrative. It all began when someone in the Ithaca is Gorges Twilighted thread (man, remember those days? It’s a ghost town over there now) mentioned the extraordinary similarities between what we might assume Carlisle’s father was like, and what Aro is like.

Both of them want Carlisle to be something he’s not, even though all the while, they are fascinated by and even want to on some level protect who he is. And for a time Carlisle feels comforted in both their shelter, but as he grows more into himself, what once felt like protection begins to feel like a vise.

I have a friend, M, with whom I talk over a lot of my writing, both profic and fanfic, and way back in early 2010, as I finished Ithaca and was starting on Da Capo, I talked to her about this theory, and how I wanted to intertwine the story of Carlisle leaving his father with the story of Carlisle leaving Aro.

And she said, “Yes, but why would either of those stories matter? In what context do they make sense for him to bother to even recount them?”

And that was when I realized Stregoni needed a third narrative, and that to tie those two together, I was going to need to show how they resulted in the man who, on a cold October night, snatched a dying seventeen-year-old out of a hospital in Chicago and turned him into the vampire we all grew to love through Bella Swan’s eyes.

That’s always what this is about for me. There are, I think, vast similarities in all three storylines, and I’m dong my level best to make them all surface as makes sense.

I said in the author’s note to my last chapter that I was disappointed in my own posting speed and would do my best to change that. So I took advantage of Camp NaNoWriMo, and this work is now drafted to within three chapters of its end. Starting with this post, Stregoni will post weekly, every Thursday, until its completion. It is written out to within three chapters of the end, and I expect to finish one of the three chapters tonight. If I feel I’ve gotten ahead on the editorial work, I’ll try to post a chapter on a Monday as well. If you’d like to re-read, or if you’re reading for the first time, I’ve put together a quick-and-dirty PDF version of chapters 1-14 for you to download and read at your leisure.

Thank you for reading, as always.

I love long car trips.

I’ve always had this theory that all my fiction ideas are out there floating in the air, just waiting for me to grab them. And that the harder I smack into them, the better they stick. This was why, as a very young child, I was somehow perfectly content to ride my bike no further than one driveway to either side, so that my mom could look out our front window and make sure I was zipping by with some regularity. I would pedal that same 200 yards for hours, making up stories and talking through dialogue. Then, I would come in, boot up our MS-DOS machine, and write it all down.

When I was allowed to go further, I would do the same thing, but throughout the neighborhood, sometimes pedaling the same hill over and over again because with the rush of the downhill side came characters and dialogue and plot.

From ages 13-18, I had a season pass every summer to the amusement park near my home. I would get my mom to drop me off (and later, drive myself), and arrive with a water bottle, a notebook, and a pen. I would spend the day riding the coasters and inevitably leave the park with material for story after story. If riding downhill on a bike caused story ideas, hurtling through the open air at seventy miles an hour was an even better idea.

Nowadays, my “smacking into ideas” happens mostly during long drives (though it’s been a few years since I’ve gone to an amusement park, and I think a visit is in order). Fortunately, I drive a lot by myself. So even though I’m hard at work using Camp NaNoWriMo to get as close as possible to finishing STREGONI, when my drive this week yielded a chapter of ONE DAY, I dropped everything to get it down.

This story, I’ve mentioned before, is one of the oddest and most organic writing experiences I’ve ever had. Ask me when a plot point is going to occur in STREGONI, and I can tell you almost to the paragraph, even if it’s unwritten. Not so for this story. I know exactly where it’s going, and even almost every single step they’ll take along the way (at some points down to the actual dialogue—the exchange about Ann Arbor home prices was written probably a year ago), but I don’t know always when a particular piece will fit, or when these two are going to make a particular stride. For instance, on my drive, along with the scenes in this chapter, I also talked my way through the conversation Bella and Carlisle will have about his divorce…but when I came to put it in the chapter, I found they’re not ready to talk about that yet.

Much to my chagrin.

So, I’m just going to buckle my seat belt, and go for the ride.  Thank you for coming along.