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.

When I started writing Stregoni Benefici, I wanted desperately to have a ten-chapter buffer. I made it to three, if you count the prologue. With the help of June Camp NaNoWriMo (I won! By the skin of my teeth, and these last 7,000 words are crap, let me tell you), I’ve finally gotten ten chapters up on SB, which puts me in clear striking distance of the end. I’m finishing chapter 24, and then there will be 25, 26, 27, and 28, and a short epilogue.

I haven’t decided yet whether I will finish out to 28 before beginning to post again. Of course there’s a part of me that wants to get to showing people the rest of this RIGHT NOW but there’s also the part of me that loves cohesion and wants to make sure that every piece fits together perfectly at the end of this fic.

Of course, with 50,000 new words in SB, most of them laid down very fast, there’s a lot of work to be done on the editorial side. I hope to start posting in the next week or so, and then will maintain a regular posting schedule if it kills me.

In the meantime, for your amusement, here’s a compilation of editorial notes from SB. During a NaNo, forward momentum is of utmost importance, so often, when I need to look something up or take more time deciding something, I throw myself a note to go back in for it later.

Isn’t it the insane who are known for talking to themselves?

Here’s a peek into my head…

Stregoni Benefici: The Draft Notes

(brackets are the notes, outside the brackets are text that the note refers to.)

» Read the rest of this entry «

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!