Writings

Carlisle doesn’t hunt humans, and he’s gentle, kind, and humane——pretty much the polar opposite of the brothers in Volterra. So why did it take so long for his time with the brothers to fall apart? Obviously, there had to have been something which drew him.

One of the most interesting challenges for me as I write this piece is striking the right balance between grappling with Carlisle’s decision to leave Volterra, and yet the oddly benevolent feelings he has toward the brothers, at least until the end of Breaking Dawn. Although there’s certainly love lost between them, the Volturi remain men whom Carlisle respects even two centuries later. In Twilight, Edward says that Carlisle found the brothers to be “civilized” and enjoyed that they were committed to the pursuit of the life of the mind. So in this chapter, I had fun imagining what it was that kept Carlisle in Italy for so long, and engendered goodwill toward Aro, Marcus and Caius.

And finally, we meet the intruder. I’ll be curious to hear folks’ reactions, as so far, no one has guessed correctly as to who it is.

This chapter also had an interesting little scene that I liked, but which ultimately didn’t add enough to the chapter to warrant staying in, given that the chapter came in several hundred words over where I wanted it. You’ll find that in the next post.

Happy reading,

g

Wow, okay.

So, behind the scenes on all these chapters is a buffer. I write a little ahead, that way as soon as I finish a chapter, I can have the joy of posting one that I’ve already spent time polishing, had betaed, etc. There is nothing more maddening (for the author and the betas!) than finishing a chapter, being ready to post it, and needing to sit back while your betas do their thing. And frankly, if you want great beta jobs (which I do, and which I get—thank you, Openhome and Julie!) you want the betas to take their time.

In April I fell behind in my schoolwork and in writing SB, so I posted one of my two buffer chapters because I didn’t have chapter 9 ready. That sucker would NOT go down. It’s first the major turn in the Volterra plot, and I couldn’t get it to work. So I put up 7, figuring I’d make 9 happen soon.

It still took another month.

So thank you for your patience. I hope 10 will be a quick write.

As for eight—ah, Edward senior. I actually confess to having taken some canon liberties here. Carlisle is unspecific as to whether or not he ever met Edward’s father; he says only that Edward’s mother caught his attention. Many fics of this period have him meet only Edward and Elizabeth, however some have him meet Senior at least in passing (“This is My Son the Beloved” by minisinoo, one of my favorites, is among these latter). One of the things that keeps sticking out to me as I write Elizabeth and Edward Sr. is how stalwart they are. Really, both Edward and Carlisle are the children of pretty stubborn parents, and they retain a good bit of that recalcitrance themselves as immortals.

Probably one of my favorite scenes in SB so far is the scene at the end of the chapter with Alma. One of the turns that I promised SB would take, but which it largely hasn’t yet, is that of grappling with Carlisle’s faith. He tells Bella of his steadfast faith in New Moon, but that’s some eighty-seven years after this moment, and at a time when he is secure in his profession, happily married, and surrounded by family. Backing up a bit with Carlisle, it’s pretty easy to imagine that he’s the kind of person who, at times, loses heart, wonders, and doubts. So this was an opportunity to write both those sides of him at once.

As always, thank you for reading, and enjoy.

Who is William? Canon doesn’t give us a whole lot to go on (including his name, which I’ve plucked from examining several ship and church registers of the era), and what it does give us isn’t terribly historically accurate. But a few things serve as good guides.

“He also believed very strongly in the reality of evil.” –Twilight, p. 331

“He had a rather harsh view of the world, which I was already beginning to question by the time that I changed.” —New Moon, p. 36

Yet what has to be reconciled about William is that Carlisle is his offspring. One thing I continue to learn as I grow further and further from the “Screw you all” knee-jerk reactions of adolescence is how much of who my parents are is often expressed in my own behavior. So creating William then, is a backformation process—taking the elements of Carlisle, both negative and positive, that point toward what his parent might have been like, and from that extrapolating the man who raised him.

Like Edward Sr., there’s much about William that is guarded. He’s driven by the overwhelming need to present the right “face” to his congregation and to his son (a habit which I think Carlisle inherited), but the result is a great distance between himself and Carlisle. At the same time, Carlisle developed into a man with the capacity to love deeply, and that doesn’t come from nothing. As far as I’m concerned, William, like most fathers, wants everything for his son—he just doesn’t know how to get it. So there’s a constant tension between what he’s trying to do, which is to protect Carlisle by eradicating evil from the world, and what Carlisle perceives him as doing. And of course, borrow the fact that one of Carlisle’s major problems is that he’s almost as bull-headed as Edward, and you get two guys who are bound to bump heads a bit.

So in this chapter, I wanted to show William on his own, without Carlisle, so that we can get a picture of what his worldview (and importantly, his view of Carlisle) looks like while we introduce a bit of his subplot. William is in a race against time, but of course, he’ll never tell his son.

As with all my chapters, but especially these 1667 chapters, I have to give huge thanks to my beta, Ophenhome. She keeps me very much on track with the history, down to the level of individual turns of phrase to make sure that the dialogue I’ve chosen fits with the time period I’m writing. I’m deeply indebted to her for her help.

Happy reading!

“I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life, or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

…

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.”

–Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird pp. 21-22

I did something in November.

I wrote a shitty first draft.

This is the seventh year I’ve done NaNoWriMo, and aside from the first year when I signed up but never really started, I’ve only failed to finish twice. Most of the time, what has come out has been passable, even though the format means it’s not my best. In fact, in two of the years, what came out was positively lovely for the most part. So I always figured, hey, my shitty first drafts are pretty good. I must be lucky.

Not this year.

I hated every word. Well, to be fair, some of the articles were okay, and I imagine most of the conjunctions and prepositions. But outside of that, there’s probably 47K of junk that’s going to go down the drain. Somehow, my concept found me writing women’s lit, a genre in which I feel out of my own skin, and as much as I tried to bend it back toward literary fiction, the damn thing wouldn’t go. I wanted to quit every second, even at 48,000 words when I knew one more hour would get me finished.

But I didn’t quit. Why? Because laying down the shitty first draft gives you something to work with. I have an idea where I’d like this novel to go, and now I have some characters to help scaffold it (even though several of those characters changed names and circumstances en route and I’ll have to go back and reconcile that). The conflict hit at about 40K, which will need to be shifted back a great deal to a more logical place for an 80-90K work. A lot of it is exposition and a bunch of drivel about mothers-in-law which is funny since I don’t have one. But I have a draft. I have something to which I can go, yank the characters forward, and write a novel. A good one.

I didn’t mean to ignore my fics for a whole month, and for that I apologize. Last year, I cranked out an entire 25K of fic–the longest chapter of Ithaca is Gorges and most of the chapter which followed, while writing my NaNo novel. I figured this year, turning out a chapter or two of Stregoni, which is only 3-8K would be a piece of cake.

Not so.

This novel fought me every inch of the way. The characters were dull. The plot didn’t make sense. The relationships developed too quickly and others too slowly. People spent pages dwelling on organic cotton, of all things. I kind of wanted to shoot myself, or at least spend some time snuggling with Carlisle instead. After fighting with Becca, Christine, Topher, and Matthew, I was too exhausted to write much else. I wanted to quit.

But I didn’t. And last night at 9PM EST, I hit 50,160 words.

How many of those words will last? Very few, I’m sure. I may just take one character and run with her. But I believe sincerely in using November to scaffold a little, to let myself come out of the month with something I can use. My fics are yours as much as they are mine—I don’t intend to pull them, even if that means that, if someone publishes one of my novels, I can’t tell the fandom—and I write them with the intention that I won’t do anything with them but give them away.

However, this was an eye-opening experience, and one by which I am humbled. I’m glad to know I can stick to a project I’m not crazy about, and that I can hold on even when I want to claw my eyes out. I know now that I can write 1667 words in an hour and not feel entirely frazzled by that pace, if I put my mind to it. (This bodes well for Stregoni, because that means I should in theory draft a chapter in two to four hours.)

And now I have a shitty first draft. It’s kind of a cool thing, really. Freeing.

So, thanks for not crucifying me while I abandoned you to do it.

Happy with what I’m working on right now, and thought I’d share a little. 🙂

—–

The rain kept the humans from the piazza, save those few whose business was dire or whose lives so depended on whatever meager trade they could manage even on a day like this. Heidi had been sent further today, to the shrine to St. Marcus. Pilgrims were the easiest—many of them didn’t make it back even if they didn’t encounter a beast like Heidi. No one suspected any wrongdoing other than the completely mortal kind, and that kept the secret well. Of course, they could break their own laws here, if they chose—they could turn the whole town into a safe haven for their kind and no one stood above them to stop them—but there was a certain humility in keeping the secret anyway.

Of course, the young one had pressed those boundaries a bit.

When he looked past the droplets, Aro could make out in the square the tailored black coat, the high collar against the porcelain neck, the shock of golden hair. It wasn’t that vampires couldn’t tolerate the rain, but Aro had always found it made him uncomfortable. The slickness made him feel uneasy in his own skin, and now that luxuries like indoor fireplaces and glass windows were a part of his everyday world, he tended to prefer the comfort they offered.

Carlisle seemed to feel exactly the opposite, which given everything else unusual about him, should never have surprised Aro. He confessed, however, that he had expected the younger vampire to grow tired of things like the rain. After a few years Aro had suspected he would break, join them fully, share in the spoils of their hunts. Or Heidi’s hunts, rather.

But it hadn’t happened. It had been nearly forty years, now, over a third of the younger one’s immortal life, and still he clung to his convictions, never partaking in their group feasts, nor hunting their prey on his own. And on days when the sun didn’t shine, he walked out among the humans. He even bought food in the market at times, especially imported spices, which he would leave lying about so that his quarters reeked of the mingled scents and his tabletops resembled those of an apothecary.

His behavior amused Aro as much as it puzzled him.