Writings

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.

So, my word count in MS Word tells me that there is almost 20,000 words written of One Day. I’ve posted about 14, maybe 15,000 of that. I confess–this story is running away both the one I struggle most with writing, and the one which I am most passionate about finishing (though it runs a close second to Stregoni, which runs a close second to my two long-overdue FGB pieces—I guess I just love writing about these characters.)

At the same time, I think in part because I *do* know where this is going, it’s hard to sift through these chapters of misunderstanding and confusion and hurt. Especially since I tend to get right in there with my characters and feel everything they feel. I thank you for your patience in this.

One Day is funny, because it’s a mix of both completely pre-planned scenes and often even distinct pieces of dialogue that were written in my initial exuberant rush of getting this down on paper, and inspiration and scenes which really are very much in the moment. It’s oddly organic–but not the easiest to write! I was surprised at some of the things which happened in this chapter (Bella’s hand, for instance). And one thing I was very surprised about was that the line from Carlisle which gives the title of this story found its way in. I had written just that single line almost after I wrote the first 2,000 words of this story (which have yet to post!), and when I wrote it, I thought, “Aha. There’s the title.”  I had expected it to come in far further down the line, but no, here it was, ready to slide in amidst the turmoil of this chapter. And it makes sense there. It’s strange how writing works that way at times.

At any rate. I know some of you would like to see things move quicker, to see where these two are going to end up. But, in my experience, walking one’s way out of grief is often a “one step forward, two steps back” kind of dance, and above all else, I want Carlisle’s and Bella’s experiences in this story to be organic to the AU which spawned it. Enjoy the chapter, and thank you for reading. And for all the pimpage and support and notes of, “Hey, we still want more of that!” It keeps me going. 🙂

So in real life, I get paid to listen to people talk.

Seriously.

Most of what I do for my academic work is talk to people, record them, and go back and figure out how they’re talking and what that might tell me about them. Do they talk more like me? Do they change the way they talk?

When you listen to a lot of people, and then go back and transcribe them, you get a sense for what makes speech sound different. As a writer doing this task, one of the things I often try to pick up is, what aspects of a person’s speech most render their way of speaking without significantly altering the way it appears on the page?

When I try to give a voice to a character, I think a lot about what kinds of subtle word choices they make. For instance, I’m often in Carlisle’s head, especially on the Carlisle tumblr. He’s fun, because he often reaches for the twenty-dollar words, or archaic usages (“flag” meaning ‘to tire’ has come up more than once).  In “Secondhand Rose,” I let Emmett switch object and subject pronouns and use some terminology from Appalachian English.

My first thought for the New Moon Canon Tour was, “Wow, it would be fun to write a fic that deals with how Jasper felt about having attacked Bella.” It’s a missing element in a lot of New Moon fic, including my own. But I was busy, and the idea hadn’t crystalized.

Then, with the deadline looming, I had this idea…to title the fic “24601,” after the number of Jean Valjean in Les Mis, and let that be the central allusion driving who Jasper feels he is at that moment. Of course, one of the things I really wanted to do was both let the allusion stand, but also let the story stand without it. If you know Les Mis, and you know Valjean, then the story has a layer of meaning that isn’t on its surface. At the same time, if you miss both of those things, I still wanted the story to ring true. Judging from reviews, that seems to have worked.

Jasper is, of course, very southern, and in my opinion, takes pride in his southern heritage, which would likely lead him to hold on to some of the features of his way of speaking long after he’d mastered other English dialects, which he no doubt would, as a vampire.  But how to get that across on the page? I reached for some words, like “reckon,” and “kittywompus,” but even more so, with Jasper, I reached for rhythm.

Short.

Individual paragraphs.

No-nonsense.

The words of a soldier.

Now, I have to say, while I put my own spin on Jasper’s speech, this fic, in both its way of presenting Jasper’s thinking and its way of presenting his talking, were heavily influenced by “Amputated at the Neck,” by minisinoo. She’s a fic writer I look up to a huge, huge deal, and the way she presented Jasper’s views of Edward in that short piece resonated with me a great deal and have for years. So this is me taking that a bit further.

I was very grateful to have two very last-minute beta reads on this, from malianani and sleepyvalentina, both of whom helped me put those final tweaks on the voice and on the progression and helped me sew back together the haphazard pieces that I generated as I frantically threw this one down. As always, it’s the eyes which aren’t mine which add the final level of strength to any given story.

Thank you to all who read, and especially to all who voted. And for those who weren’t following the contest, happy reading for the first time.

Not so long ago a friend of mine, kittandchips, commented, “I generally consider a fic on hiatus if it hasn’t updated in a month.”

She then added, “Unless it’s yours.”

I think there’s a fine line between writing extraordinarily slowly and hiatusing a fic, and I know it’s a line I tend to walk. Thank you for continuing to read.

On to the chapter.

So, Stregoni is, in addition to being my baby, the fic I started writing the day after I posted my first Twilight fic (it was then entitled Absolution and I planned to just mow through Carlisle’s history from birth through Breaking Dawn), a bit of an exercise for me.  I’ve tended, as a writer, to be more of a “pantser” than an outliner, one who writes as things show up. Over the decades, it lead to a lot of fragments of novels (sometimes even longer than  novels themselves–one of my abandoned works is well over 100,000 words), and it wasn’t until the last six years or so that I started learning to stick a plot from beginning to end.

SB is plotted in a relatively tight three-act structure, which is a bit of a new challenge for me. Although all my fics and novels adhere to that structure in some form, this is the first where the acts are nearly mathematical. SB will, at its finish, be approximately 27 chapters, with three chapters in each timeline in each act. Chapters  13, 14, and 15 are, therefore, the middle of Act II for all three plotlines, the point where the conflict for all the characters in all the arcs is intensified, where they get extra stuff thrown at them. I confess, it is taking me a little time to wrangle them.

My beta readers aren’t great testers of this, because they both know exactly where the plot of SB is headed (I refuse to have people beta blind, because continuity and foreshadowing is one thing I like feedback on). But I will say that the one person who pre-read chapter 13 didn’t quite see where the story is headed just yet, which is kind of exactly what I’d like at this point. So I’ll be curious who has guesses as to where the 1667 plot is headed after this chapter.

As always, I am deeply indebted to my beta readers, Openhome and Julie, whose feedback on everything from style to language to reactions of individual characters makes this story so much stronger than it is when it first comes out of my fingers.

And if you find yourself in a void and would like some more vampire writing, check out the New Moon round of The Canon Tour. As it happens, I was struck by inspiration and wrote a short piece for it…keep an eye out, and enjoy all that you read.

Happy reading!

So, ADifferentForest.com, which is one of my sometimes fandom haunts (I try to stay away because I tend to just end up arguing with people, but it tends to suck me in like a tractor beam), continues to host 1,000-word fic challenges. I find them fun, because it’s always very interesting to see what I can do in about 1,000 words. 1,000 words requires precision that is a great workout for my writing muscles. Present tense? Past tense? First person? Multiple scenes? One scene? Every one of those decisions has huge repercussions in short short stories in a way that it doesn’t in a longer piece, where the effect of any one of those is mitigated by all the other writing you do.

This one started because the prompt was “Edward’s Angsty Christmas.” It had to be Edward, it had to be angst (I hate that word, but–let’s say Edward had to be having a not-so-happy Christmas), it had to be 10 years post Eclipse and “canon, with no Renesmee.” Because wolvesnvamps is someone who I can tease publicly a little, I snarkily pointed out that, as obnoxious as she may be to some, Renesmee is canon 10 years post Eclipse.

She replied that I know she ignores BD (true) and would I please write something anyway?

So since I was being silly, I decided to see if there was a way to write the prompt exactly as written, and still with my defense of what is canon…and this little ditty came out. It’s not as polished as I like things to be , so it’s going to be one of these website-only pieces. Enjoy a trip into my twisted mind.

Last year at Christmas, I used the ADF challenge to turn out “Souls in Stillness.” That fic is titled after a contemporary advent hymn called “My Soul in Stillness Waits.” So for this one, I chose another contemporary advent hymn, “Each Winter as The Year Grows Older.” The chorus reads:

Each winter as the year grows older
We each grow older, too
The chill sets in a little colder
The verities we knew
Seem shaken and untrue.

The Verities We Knew

She never believed in Santa, but she did believe in us. And we came through every time. Until the day we couldn’t.