September 5th, 2011 § § permalink
People ask if I’m Team Jacob or Team Edward. Sometimes I respond I’m Team Carlisle, but most of the time, I say, “I’m team ‘Everybody hold on, grow up, and revisit this decision when you’re all adults.’”
I was a different person at twenty-seven than I was at seventeen. Not in core, fundamental ways, but in little ways that tweaked my understanding of the world and where I fit in it. I fully expect the same will be true at thirty-seven.
I’ve always thought Bella would choose differently if the right situation and the right maturity presented itself. To me, the relationship as it was presented in the saga never truly went beyond infatuation (whether this was due to SM not knowing how to characterize them more maturely or due to true faults in the characters themselves, I don’t know), and so the decision to base all of eternity seemed foolhardy at best.
So when A Different Forest ran another 1,000-word vampfic contest (love those, and love that they keep asking for vampfic!) with the prompt that the fic be set ten years after the end of Eclipse, I knew where I was going with it. What happens when a human changes, and the vampire can’t go with her?
Nothing good.
With “Souls,” I added to the story in the second draft, and I think it ultimately landed at 1,200 words. With “Seventeen,” I decided to keep the final draft at exactly 1,000. It’s a short foray into an AU that never should’ve happened–and which we can be glad did not.
August 26th, 2011 § § permalink
One of the things about good canon, in my opinion, has always been that there should be more going on than just a retelling of what might have happened to the characters in any given time period. It’s one of the reasons I don’t fault people who say they find canon fic boring; the truth is, much of it can be. The strongest canon fics have purpose unto themselves; the characters have a story arc and conflict and growth just as they would if they weren’t part of a larger story.
When I set out to write Stregoni, my challenge was to find what the arc was for it. Where is the story in Carlisle’s background? And, with the help of M, my friend of ten years who gives me much inspiration for my stories, I realized that the story of Stregoni is the story of turning Edward; that in some way, each and every bit of every chapter leads us closer and closer to that evening at a hospital in Chicago in 1918, when Carlisle makes the decision that will change his life forever. It’s not enough just to write Carlisle’s history—it’s too long and too circuitous for that. Plus, he is far too purposeful a man to tell his story without purpose.
Making that happen, however, continues to be a right sight more difficult than I thought. Despite that this novel has an outline more detailed than any I’ve ever written (if you’re familiar with Moleskine’s Cahier line, this story has a cahier all to itself), segments of it keep throwing me far off kilter. Chapters 10 and 11, the current one posting and the one just finished being penned, turn both the 1667 and 1918 plots to deeper conflict—Carlisle’s struggle with his father becomes more defined, and he now knows he has to make some decisions if he’s going to keep Elizabeth the way he’d like to. My beta was kind enough to throw this one “back over the wall” as I like to term it, i.e., she asked for some revisions to change the shape of the argument between William and Carlisle. All in all, I don’t know how much I tweaked it (I’m sure Openhome will tell me), but getting the movement between these two to feel right is complicated, to say the least.
A second reason for the delay, which I’ll put here as my site is a bit less public, is that I’ve spent much of the summer preparing a profic work to go out. Although SB is my seventh serious novel I’ve written (I put as much work into my fanwork as I do any of my other work, and therefore I number them among my novels written), I’ve never taken a novel through the process of final revision to get it ready to show to publishers and agents. It’s been an interesting journey, to say the least. I have zero intention of pulling back from fandom, as frankly, it’s too fun (and at this time, I’m choosing to largely keep my profic identity and fanfic identities separate so as to protect my fic postings from anyone who might ask me to take it down), but I’m still learning how to balance the two. I felt I owe you that explanation at least, and I thank you immensely for your patience while I figure out how to keep all these balls in the air.
At any rate. Enough of me rambling on about it. Go read it, if you haven’t already. I’ll be curious to hear what people think.
Also, many, many thanks to those anonymous souls who keep assuring that SB pops up on fanfic award nominations all over fandom. I am floored and continually humbled. Although SB didn’t win in its category for the Hopeless Romantic Awards, “Form 1040” took home “Best Renesmee” (which I find surprising, as I personally hated her before writing that fic), and it absolutely made my day.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
July 26th, 2011 § § permalink
Fic Pulling: I don’t get it.
And before you start in on it, YES, I understand that occasionally people have personal problems. And YES, I do agree that authors have the right to do with their fics what they want. For the life of me, I never understand why that’s the counterargument. Maybe some people are saying the author doesn’t have the right to take fics away, but that’s certainly not my stance. I’m simply saying taking fics down is a shortsighted move, and it makes me wonder if people understand the real beauty of fic writing is in the first place.
I’m going to start out with a true statement that is going to make people mad.
The word publish means ‘to make available to the public.’ There is no addendum that says, ‘to make something available to the public that is not based on someone else’s story’ or ‘to make something available to the public in a bound, printed volume’ or ‘to make something available to the public and get money for it.’ Fanfiction, like it or not, is published work. It is published the second you hit “submit” in that little form on FFnet.
There are no takebacks. For better or for worse, you’ve put it out there. Now, that’s not to say you can’t take it down. Of course you can. Again, I’m not arguing against an author’s “right” to take it down. But some people will have “bought” it, for free. They will have saved it for their safekeeping. And even if they haven’t saved it, they still can’t unread it.
And why on Earth would you want them to?
The beauty of fanfiction is that it is 100% free from the things that pressure professional fiction. You can do ANYTHING within these nonexistent walls. You can write the raunchiest porn that no publisher in their right mind would ever get behind. You can write disgustingly amoral stories with little consequence beyond a few disgruntled people writing impassioned livejournal posts. You can write fic that quotes Shakespeare and uses a vocabulary so big that every agent would think it’s way too esoteric to ever find a market.
And no matter what you do, for the most part, you’ll get readers. Maybe, if it’s truly awful, only a handful, but chances are, if you post a fic, at least SOMEONE is going to read it. Which is more than can be said for a most of the writing that is done the world over.
A really good sell-through for a first novel is about 10,000 copies. A fic which has about 6 or 7,000 reviews may get upwards of 20,000 unique hits for each chapter. That means that on average, two times as many people read that fic as read the successful debut novel. And yes, the first novel’s readership is improved by people loaning the book, or the copies that are bought by libraries, but still. Plus, the fic author gets the benefit of hearing from as many as 10-25% of her readers. Even in these days of author twitters, and blogs, and facebook accounts, I promise you it’s a tiny, TINY number of authors who could boast that level of feedback. Even the measly .5% or 1% that is the reported review rate for some high-review count fics is still more than the professional author can hope for.
And to get there? To the point where you put books out but hear from next to no one, except a few book bloggers and if you’re lucky, a few people on Goodreads? You made sacrifices. The book that came out of the editing process was probably not in the form that you first wrote it. The characters are changed, the plot is altered, you’ve edited the thing to within an inch of its life, and although all these things may make for a stronger book, they take what once was something that was very uniquely *you* and shape it into something else. This is nothing against commercial publishing, which, many of you know, I am a HUGE proponent of. But many writers write fan fiction in addition to writing fiction that is commercially published, because there is a purity in fan fiction that is unparalleled once a book goes through three rounds of edits.
If you’re writing, on some level, you’re doing it to reach people. Deep down, all of us write because we want what we put down on the page to strike a chord in someone else. When a fic is taken down, what is lost is the author’s ability to do that for anyone other than the people who originally read. Plus, no reader gets to have the wonderful moment when they go back to a work which touched them originally and have it speak to them again in a new way. And who does this hurt most?
The writer. Because it’s she who loses the ability to move people with her work.
If I don’t have my fics up, people will read other fics. They’ll simply find something else that moves them. It is I who lose out. I miss the wonderful experience of having someone read a three-year-old story for the first time and go, “Wow. This is just how I always thought these characters would sound.” I miss making a new friend because she’s read my fics tons of times. I miss finding other good writers because they popped up on my radar. I miss the unadulterated joy of freely sharing a piece of my soul (even if it’s just the piece that is madly in love with the character of Carlisle Cullen!) and seeing it accepted.
Fic pulling to me isn’t about who gets what, or who has rights to what. It’s not about google databases or copyright issues or DCMA takedowns. It’s about the sacred relationship between the reader and the read, and the way that the symbiosis drives the creative endeavor in the first place.
Please. Read my fics. They’re up now in six different places, and if you want, you can have a PDF or an ebook of the multi-chapters if you want. You don’t owe me a review, although I’d love to hear from you. I write fic because I want to share my deep love of these characters with you. Someday, I fully intend to publish a novel, probably several. But I will go down kicking and screaming if some agent or editor tells me to take down my fic (and if that ever does happen, go to Archive of Our Own–they will all be “orphaned” there). I write because I have to. For me, it’s like breathing. I can’t not do it for a long period of time and expect to keep living. But I write fanfiction because the joy of sharing it is so blissfully, exquisitely pure…and I refuse to take away my own joy by taking away others’ ability to read.
June 25th, 2011 § § permalink
It’s no secret that I am very, VERY against the practice of pulling fics to publish, and there are a lot of reasons for that. But pursuant to a discussion on A Different Forest last night, I want to clarify one of them.
If there’s one thing that I hope is always true of me, it is that I do legwork when I have an argument to make. I don’t believe in ad hominem attacks, straw-man arguments, or attacking a person when you can’t attack their ideas. So I’ve learned every thing I possibly could learn about publishing fan fic. I’ve talked to people in other fandoms, I’ve talked to publishing industry professionals, I’ve even, apparently, consulted the same fan fic IP specialist that Omnific’s legal counsel contacted.
And most importantly, I’ve had the opportunity to read the books. Through my part-time job, I’m able to read ebooks for free, so I was able to spend some good time with each of the Omni books (haven’t gotten around to TWCS yet, but I will) without breaking my promise to myself never to give my money to a company whose practices I don’t support. While me reading them isn’t a perfect test, because as someone who is staunchly against the practice, I’m inclined to find fault with the books, it is a good test, because as an almost exclusively vampfic reader, I had read none of the fic versions of the books and was coming at them as novels unto their own right.
There are a number of things I found problematic, but I’d like to point out one in particular, as this was the one that was the sticking point on ADF.
Characterization in fic is truncated. We ALL do it. It’s not an argument that an author is lazy, or an argument that the author didn’t work hard. I work my ass off on my fics. But I can still trust that simply by putting the name “Carlisle,” my readers will understand a number of things: compassionate, fair, intellectual, convicted. I may build a lot on top of that, and I try to, but the fact is that I’m able to shortcut a number of things simply by having that character name.
The argument is often made that characters in Twific AH are so OOC they’re “practically original.” And while they may be different in body, in behavior, in demeanor, the fact is that when you call a character “Edward,” you don’t have to justify “Bella” falling in love with him. That is the plot. It’s understood. To bounce off another hot topic this week, this is exactly why rapefic works so well. Simply by naming the rapist Edward, the author gains the reader’s trust, and she doesn’t have to justify why on earth a rape victim would fall in love with her attacker. He’s Edward. Of course she will. It doesn’t matter at all that this is unrealistic and abhorrent–he’s “Edward” and he’ll be forgiven.
In rapefic, or other types of fics where Edward is abusive and yet Bella never calls him on it, or when Bella’s “magic vag” as I’ve heard it called, transforms him from a bad guy to a good guy, the workings of this name thing is pretty obvious. But in other instances, in the fics that are more contemporary romance, the name=characterization problem is considerably more subtle. I brought up the example of Emmett, because his character is one that I’ve found to suffer the most from this problem. I feel I must further point out that I’m not in any way talking about the Emmett “jock boy” stereotype. This isn’t about stereotypes or stock character types or any of that at all. This is simply about fic-to-book transfer, and what happens when you take a character named “Emmett,” whether he’s a round, sensitive guy or the party-boy-jock stereotype, and name him something else.
In a book, if you bring a character in, and the first thing he does is insult the female lead, you lose cred with your readers. The guy looks like a douchebag. It’s rude, it’s shocking, and it’s unfair, and your readers will tend to dislike the character right off the bat. In a Twific, if you name that guy “Emmett,” instead of thinking “what a jerk,” your readers will tap in to their own understanding of “Emmett:” jovial, not malicious, big-brother-tease kind of guy. Of course he doesn’t mean it. He’s only teasing; it’s just his way of saying hello. So you get leeway for having him walk in and insult Bella on page 5. Your reader will still like him because she’s supposed to like him, and she knows this simply from his name.
When his name is changed, a new reader is no longer carrying that characterization. So unless you’ve already introduced “Joseph” (not a real name in any of the books) as a character who is this teasing, gentle, bear of a guy, you don’t get that grace from your reader when he starts to tease your female lead. Instead, Joseph comes off like an asshole, and now you have a character you have to redeem—but the redeeming probably isn’t built into the narrative, because it wasn’t needed in the fic.
This is not to say these kinds of edits can’t be made to a fic. It’s a matter of introducing the characters slowly, and establishing their personalities over thousands of words, and being aware of how a character’s behavior is perceived differently when their name alone doesn’t evoke feelings for them or against them. But these kinds of changes are very subtle, and they require a set of eyes who know nothing about Twilight, Twific, and the characters who might inhabit the book. In my experience reading the published fics, this is one of the biggest things that has been skipped, and it’s no wonder–the folks who are doing most of the editorial on the books are all avid fic readers. One of the very best ways to improve your comprehension of a book is to read it more than once. So an editor or a fic reader who has already read the fic is in an awful position to check for these sorts of characterization issues–they understand the story, they understand the characters, and their minds will readily fill in the blanks.
There are lots of wonderful, highly original concepts floating around in Twific. But from what I’ve seen, the kind of edits that are necessary to take the fic to published-novel ready are often so substantial that in my opinion, the author would often do better beginning from scratch.
May 21st, 2011 § § permalink
Here goes nothing.
I’ve been doing a lot of alterations to the backend of this site; upgrading the CMS and the theme, and making some small tweaks to some of the ways pages load. One casualty of the CMS upgrade was my notifying software, which apparently hasn’t been rewritten to work with the latest CMS version. (Which I noticed when I put up a new chapter of “One Day the Sun Will Rise,” so if you’re interested in that, you may wish to mosey on over there. 🙂 )
I’ve installed new subscription software which should provide pretty much the same functionality as the old–the ability to subscribe to notices instead of or in addition to becoming a “member” of the site. (I don’t really use the member feature at the moment, although I may in the future and will let you know.) At the moment, I pulled everyone who was on the old notification list onto the new one, but if you’d like to change your settings or unsubscribe, simply click on the “Get Update Alerts” link.
And thank you, as always, for reading.
–giselle
(who is crossing her fingers that notifications go out for this post)