Writings

So, Midnight Sun is being released at the end of this summer, and it happens to coincide with a major lessening in writing demands for my work. In 2015, I got a job that required me to massively shift my writing energy for five years. (Google “publish or perish” if you don’t know about how this works!) It’s a great job, it’s what I trained for, and assistant professor jobs are very hard to come by and I am lucky. But it’s meant sidelining things I really enjoy, sometimes for time reasons and sometimes out of just sheer exhaustion of not being able to stand being at the computer for a minute longer.

But now, with my probationary period behind me, and my first academic book on its way back to the publisher, I am hard back at work on One Day, writing the way I used to before academic writing became my job. Chapter 8 has actually been written for years, and I am several chapters ahead of it now, barrelling toward the turn into Act III. I hope to have it done toward the end of this summer, just in time for people to sink into the Cullens’ world again with Midnight Sun and then continue right on to some vampire fanfic. So I am posting Chapter 8 as a promise that more is coming, and more is coming soon. The earlier chapters of this fic have been revised, and there’s some new meat there setting up things I realized I needed in the middle of the work.

I am not going to post more of this fic until it’s done, and when it is done, I will repost it here from the beginning and post it in other archives as well. But I’m posting a full chapter as a taste of what’s to come, because for some weird reason, many of you have not forgotten me, and I want you to know that I have never forgotten you.

Sure enough, as I posted in my last blog post, the second I finished the draft of Patroclus Rising on Friday night, I turned to One Day. I’ve had this chapter in my head for over a year, and half of it written for most of that time, so the rest of it came when it was called. (Although Carlisle’s line at the end…well, I’m convinced he came up with that himself).

I *hope* that the next handful of updates to this fic should tumble pretty quickly—this chapter is really about moving to the following morning, but as it was nearing 5K already and I know I need a good 2.5-3 to hash the morning, I decided to stop Chapter 6 after the party. So, while I make no promises, Chapter 7 should follow on pretty quickly here—most of the dialogue is actually already sitting in a word doc. And then shortly thereafter we’ll hit some of the meat that I’ve been wanting to get to since I first started this fic, much of which is already on paper and just needs to be revised.

Thank you for sticking with me, and happy reading.

So, I know we’re approaching the year mark on the last One Day update. And people have been asking where, and when, and exactly what do I mean by “soon.” 

I know it’s the story everyone loves. I love it too. As painful as it is to inhabit Carlisle and Bella in that gut-wrenching of an AU, it’s also delightful to write. For me, it’s all the things that fic should be; a piece that unearths qualities of the characters that go unexplored because of the situation they’re in in the canon, that rips the rug out from under them but keeps them as in-character as possible to allow for a story that makes sense.

That sort of thing is why, after four years (and let’s not kid ourselves, various frustrations I’ve had with being in the Twilight fandom), I still  am immensely proud of having written, and still enjoy writing fic. It’s very different from writing something that’s wholly your own, and as far as I’m concerned, that difference is exactly what makes it so worth my time to do.

In 20…10? Has it been that long since Eclipse was released? I volunteered myself for The Fandom Gives Back: Eclipse. I auctioned off the rights to a prompt for two short stories.

But 2011 and 2012, as it turned out, would be the years the fandom turned in on itself. I wrote a post on tumblr about it awhile back, but I found 2012 an extremely difficult year to get myself to write anything. One thing I do that I really enjoy aside from writing and my academic work is that I’m a bookseller. Which means I’ve spent the last year with a lot of pulled-to-publish fanfiction in my face. (It also means I get the gleeful joy of being able to be certain that a couple of titles keep coming off the shelves in my store and being shipped back to their publisher, but that doesn’t always make up for it.) So with all that frustration inhabiting not only my online world, but also the place I spend 20-30 hours a week, I just found that Twific wasn’t something I felt much like doing.

As a result, it’s taken me a longer time than I am happy with to fulfill obligations that, even with all that has intervened, I am still excited to fulfill. I was finally able to put the finishing strokes on Stregoni, to nail Alice’s voice to my satisfaction and get Present Perfect out for consumption, and now, I’m working on the last 1/3 or so of Patroclus Rising, which, when complete, will undergo a good revision and then be posted.

At that point, I will be free of things I’ve promised other people I’d do, and things which, having been so postponed for so long,  make me feel a little crummy. Which is really silly, by the way, particularly in the case of Patroclus, as the people who bid on it are almost to a one close friends of mine, and if I said, “Hey, I’m not going to do it,” they’d all understand. But the truth is, I took it on because I enjoy writing prompts—they stretch me as a writer, and much of my best fic in Twidom has come from prompts for some thing or another. So it’s more the agreements I’ve made with me that I want to uphold—the agreement that I’d accept a challenge and turn out something I’m proud of in response. That I want to do…and if I happen to delight the people who were so gracious as to make a donation in my honor for the privilege of choosing that prompt, well, even more awesome.

One Day, though…One Day is my respite.  As I said, it’s my reminder of all the reasons I enjoy writing fic, and all the things that fic can be when it’s not being…well, all the things that make me mad about how other people seem to want to use it. So when Patroclus is posted, One Day will be my only WIP, and will likely be my last fanfic for Twilight (although I will never say never…these characters touched fire in me and if I feel I want to write more about them, I damn well will).  But I find that in order to maintain a clear head and a joyous heart, I’ve had to pull back almost entirely from the communal aspects of the Twilight fandom, and at that point, I become little better than the writer who is posting things expecting hordes of fans without truly being a fan herself. I would prefer to be a part of things. But when my best friend pinpointed within about two weeks the day when I deleted most of my fandom social media presence and said she could tell because I’ve been so much happier and more myself since then…well,  that says something pretty important, and I’m listening to her.

One Day will probably never post with anything close to a regular update schedule, but I hope to not leave multiple months between chapters once it is my only fic going. At this time, I’m going to choose to keep it off FFnet, and I will probably never post it there unless for some reason I ever have to delete gisellelx.com (but even then, I own gisellelx.wordpress.com, and could port this whole blog there.)

One Day is my private joy, but it’s a little private piece of me I’m happy to let my friends peer in at. Thanks for being patient while I get the more public me squared away.

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.

Edward, William John.

So I write like a method actor acts. To put myself in a chapter, I need to be there with my character, feeling what he’s feeling. And that’s why this one took so long. Carlisle’s shoes in this chapter are not ones I want to wear, for reasons that are very apparent, I think. He’s in a lot of pain. Yet at the same time, he’s a lot of fun to write because he’s changed so much in six years–and yet, of course, he hasn’t. At his root is still the caring guy that Bella used to know–it’s just going to take some time to ferret that guy out. In the meantime, she’s got “Will,” and he’s…different.

Anyway. I don’t anticipate this story updating quite this slowly throughout its tenure, although the fact that I know I can’t write it with due speed is the main reason it’s not on FFnet. A good chunk of it is written–this chapter took me up over 15,000 words in the document. But they’re disconnected pieces–a fragment of dialogue here, a description there. I know exactly where this whole story is going…thanks for hanging with me while I make it get there. 🙂