twilight-adamo

[twilight-adamo]

Author’s Notes: Brave New World, Chapter 6: Wake the Dead

https://archiveofourown.org/works/19709434/chapters/49726988

The part of the story dealing with the investigation into Alice’s past was meant to fit within one chapter. It ended up being three, because woman plans and the goddess laughs. I don’t regret it, though - I think it allowed me to cover a lot of territory that may become important later. Some of it came as a complete surprise to me; I would hit this point or that in the chapter, and I would have a plan for what came next, and then suddenly some part of my mind would go “oh, no, it’s this” and, well, what could I do but write it?

The history of Alice’s childhood home after her mother was murdered and the family left was inspired somewhat by the LaLaurie Mansion, which I namechecked in the chapter (though, whoops, I got the capitalization wrong). Nicolas Cage, the actor, did in fact own the mansion for a few years, and lost it to foreclosure when he ran into financial difficulties. He ended up suing his business manager, who countersued and claimed Cage had made a number of frivolous purchases against his advice. It’s widely believed (and may be fact) that Cage takes so many film roles today because he’s still paying off his debts.

During Cage’s ownership of the house, he did put a sign up on the LaLaurie Mansion (or it’s generally believed he was the one, at least), and it’s pretty much the sign I describe outside the Brandon house. The LaLaurie Mansion has an extraordinarily dark history - look up Delphine LaLaurie if you can stomach it; we are talking about a woman whose cruelty toward the people she had enslaved was so outrageous that other slaveholders condemned her and she was hounded out of town. Her story has been embellished over the years, and distorted by pop culture (American Horror Story, for instance, featured her as a recurring character played by Kathy Bates, and added elements of Elizabeth Bathory to her story), but she was certainly an extraordinarily horrible person. The mansion that stands today is not the original, which was burned down in the 1834, but it is still said to be profoundly haunted. A financial corporation holds it today. I’m not sure who, if anyone, it’s being held for.

I felt quite strongly as I started this chapter that Alice needed some time to herself. The little part of my brain that speaks for her had made it quite clear she was emotionally exhausted and inclined to withdraw. Naturally this leaves Bella worried half out of her mind, providing me with an opportunity to show Rose and Emmett looking after her. A few readers have told me that Rosalie and Bella’s relationship - the close friendship they’ve turned into sisterhood - is one of their favorite parts of the story; I suppose this makes it obvious it’s one of mine, too. But I don’t think it’s just Rosalie who cares for Bella so deeply; it’s Emmett, too. I tend to be a serious introvert in real life, and nervous about getting too close to others, especially physically. It’s probably left me rather touch-starved. But I do think touch is important, not just between lovers but between friends and family, and physical comfort can do more than words ever could.

I keep saying Bella isn’t me, that I’m making a deliberate effort as the story grows stranger to divorce her from the self-parody she originally was, and then I keep bringing in stories from my own life. Yes, it’s true: in my second year of college, I lived in a haunted women’s dorm, and the broad strokes of the haunting are largely as I describe. I left out some of the more specific details; it probably wouldn’t be hard for you to figure out where I went to college if you really wanted, but I didn’t want to spell it out. My first night there, I did in fact have strange, restless dreams that I interpreted as the ghost trying to figure out what to make of me. I did indeed mix herbs into water as part of a ritual and choked the mixture down, and I was left in peace after that. It was quite disgusting, frankly, but it does make a good story.

The dream was one of those surprises I’d mentioned. Frankly, a lot of stuff has just returned to Bella far earlier than I had planned. More than that, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to bring any kind of religion into it, but I found Bella’s spirit calling out and something answering and, well, here we are.

My personal beliefs are quite private. I’m willing to discuss them, to a point; I am completely uninterested in converting anyone to my way of thinking, and there are some elements too sacred to me to disclose. In broad strokes, the faith Bella describes agrees with my own. I do hold as a central tenet that the divine is infinite and beyond the comprehension of our finite minds. I do believe that the names by which we call the divine, the roads we travel to reach whatever understanding we can find, lead ultimately to the same place - and yet those names, the gods we cry out to, the commandments we follow, the stories we hold close to our hearts, all have a reality of their own. I do in fact worship seven goddesses whom I view as aspects of one goddess, and the titles and roles described roughly correspond to my faith. I would not invoke them in the way Bella does. I would not see them as she sees them. And if I ever do give them names in the story, they won’t be the names I call them by.

But yes: once again I’ve gotten deeply personal. Writing this story sometimes feels like writing an operator’s manual to my soul. Perhaps I keep turning back to these personal details, despite my best efforts to separate Bella from myself, because it all comes easier when I pour my heart and soul into the work. Even if that means I must submit to the horrifying ordeal of being known.

Does Bella have access to magic again, after that dream? I don’t think so - at least, I don’t think she could do magic on her own. She can help Rosalie, and presumably other witches; she can call out to her deities in prayer, but I’ve never viewed that as inherently magical. But her perceptions have broadened, just a bit, and sensation begins to return. She can feel the things she has been numb to, and see the light and color of spellwork.

Will she remember more of her old life? Not on her own, I think. I hadn’t really intended for her to recover any memories at all, and arguably she only recovered what she did due to divine intervention. Part of my long-term purpose in expanding Alice’s visions so she could look back on the past as well of the future was a vague notion that she could use this ability to help Callie and Bella work through their lingering questions about their personal history, and I certainly have further developments in mind. But I don’t see Bella becoming entirely who she once was. That person is part of who she has become, but otherwise lost.

Then again, I suppose I’ve allowed her to find other things I would once have called lost, so perhaps I can’t really say for certain until the whole of the work is done.

I really wanted to bring Leah into the phone conversation somehow - I do want more of her in this story, and an increasing number of these first chapters are focused on the BEAR world tour, meaning we don’t get much time with the folks back home. I just couldn’t see my way clear to it. This felt like a conversation between Bella and Callie and no one else.

We’re seeing some cracks in their friendship here, as Bella begins to understand that Callie is still holding back. There are likely more disagreements to come, and both Callie and Rosalie are growing more vocal about their mutual dislike for one another, which can’t make things any easier. I think things will be all right in the end, but if you’re getting the feeling the road ahead is a rocky one, I can’t say I disagree.

Six Flags New Orleans was still open during our heroes’ visit to New Orleans. A month later, at the end of August 2005, Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on the park, and it never reopened. Six Flags removed much of the infrastructure that once stood there (including some things that the city of New Orleans alleges they had no right to take), and though various development proposals have emerged over the years, none of them have led to the park reopening in any form. It stands abandoned, and though some urban explorers have gotten in, access is strictly forbidden.

I wanted to linger over dinner, but I couldn’t think of anything more to add, and I was eager, at long last, to get to the main event. So I wasted little time getting the gang to St. Charles Avenue, and into the old house, and then of course Luciana appears almost at once, as soon as Alice has gotten a good look at her past.

I think Alice saw more than she said directly in this chapter, and she’ll have more to say about what she saw as time goes on. It just wouldn’t all fit in this scene. Everything happened so quickly that I had to struggle to keep to what was immediately relevant. And honestly, I think we were all here for that last conversation between Alice and her mother more than anything.

Luciana is not, of course, La Llorona. That is a much older story that comes from farther south, in Mexico and Latin America. But as she is a weeping woman crying out in Spanish, some of the locals have confused the legends, and I did take some inspiration from the story of La Llorona in describing her behavior. In particular, some legends say that when La Llorona sounds distant, she is actually quite close - and so our heroes hear Luciana crying out distantly, and then, quite suddenly, she’s on top of them.

I had given some thought to Luciana speaking entirely in Spanish, at first - I had always imagined she was bilingual, but Spanish was her first language. Ultimately, I just wasn’t confident enough in my Google-augmented translation skills. I took Latin in school, not Spanish, and not much Latin at that. I can sometimes tell when things are really wrong, but I was worried it would come off as textbook Spanish, stilted and inauthentic, and things were coming so quickly and furiously that...well, it felt like it would take too long to find a fluent speaker willing to help me get the Spanish right. I hated to do it, I hate to say that - if I were preparing this for publication as an original work I would certainly take the time to get someone else’s eyes on the thing - but I’m going on vacation in about a week and a half and I really wanted to conclude this arc before dropping off the grid. All that said, if you’re interested in helping me with foreign languages or beta reading on this story in general, please do drop me a line; I’ve certainly made enough mistakes that I wouldn’t mind getting another pair of eyes on future chapters.

Alice’s family history was one of the first things I came up with for this book, along with the dream about the Volturi that opens the whole thing. Alice’s father was canonically a jeweler and pearl trader. Though I played a bit loose with canon otherwise, I decided to keep this, and had the notion that he married Alice’s mother for her family wealth and most importantly their access to jewels, pearls, and precious medals. When he suffered some reversal in fortune connected to her family, I figured - perhaps the mines drying up, or as I ended up describing, Luciana’s father dying and not leaving her what George saw as his due - he would become willing to throw her over for another woman, and more, to arrange Luciana’s death. The final details only came together as I was writing this chapter and the last.

Alice’s final conversation with her mother still feels short. To some extent, it’s meant to be. Once Luciana’s soul was fully restored, once she had some chance to find peace, I couldn’t see her lingering long upon the threshold between the living world and the next. I hope I got the important things down - above all else, that Alice now knows she had a mother who loved her, who loves her still and will be watching over her.

It’s not the end of Alice’s journey. But it is more or less the end of the gang’s time in New Orleans. Boston comes next, and then Ireland, and all the things that follow on from that. As I said, I’m going on vacation - I’m not sure whether I’ll get another chapter before I leave, and I have obligations to fulfill before the year is out. I hope, if there is a delay, that you all find this a decent stopping point.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

[twilight-adamo]

Author’s Notes: Brave New World, Chapter 5: What’s Past is Prologue

https://archiveofourown.org/works/19709434/chapters/49462937

As a bit of random trivia, this is the first thing I’ve written set in New Orleans that I’ve actually released publicly. It is also, due to the way I title chapters (their filenames are just the chapter numbers; I don’t decide on a title until I’ve finished), the only thing I’ve written set in New Orleans that never, not once, not even as a working title, borne the title “House of the Rising Sun”. I can’t help it: the song and the city chase each other endlessly in my mind. I’ve been to New Orleans once, about six years after Katrina, and fell in love with the place. I haven’t managed to make it back in the eight years since. I’d quite like to return.

I keep track of the timeline in my outline for the story. It’s late July 2005 in this chapter; in a little over a month, well after BEAR have left, Katrina will hit. I hadn’t remembered until I started digging into the city’s history, trying to figure out where the plotline would fit, but I’m brushing up against it here. The gang will undoubtedly hear about it. I’m not yet sure how it will impact them, beyond general sorrow, but I’m pondering it.

(About BEAR: a reader on FFN - MooNOrchiD, if you’re reading this, hi - pointed out the acronym for Bella, Emmett, Alice and Rosalie. I’ve been using it in my notes. It’s damned convenient, and it makes me giggle.)

Anyway, the chapter title ended up being another quote from The Tempest, one I’m not using as a book title in the trilogy or extended Tempestverse. I’d considered “The Past is Never Dead,” from the Faulkner quote - “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” - but when I remembered “What’s past is prologue,” and more, that it came from the play from which I borrowed the name of this AU as well as the titles of the stories within, well. It seemed a perfect match.

Once I hit last chapter’s reveal, I really couldn’t think of much reason why Alice would want to keep hanging around the site of her death and revival, and the slaughter she committed as a newborn vampire. And I was eager to get to New Orleans. So if it seems abrupt, well, it is a bit abrupt. It surprised even me. But the asylum has served its purpose, at least for the time being.

I’m trying to balance the episodes of cognitive dissonance and general weirdness Bella is experiencing against the fact that this isn’t really about her - as she herself acknowledges, and that’s why she tries to hide this latest one from Alice, though she doesn’t end up managing it. I also generally don’t want to have too many of them too close together. It’s part of a thread that will continue throughout this book, and there will be more to them in time, but this section of the story, for all that Bella is still narrating and this necessarily limits our perspective, is Alice’s first and foremost. It’s a tricky balance to strike, and I admit I’ve occasionally considered trading Bella’s perspective for someone else’s (not just in this part of the story). But that’s a narrative shift that should be used sparingly, if at all, and I would prefer to leave most of the other characters’ perspectives to These Our Actors. Besides, the very thought of writing from Alice’s perspective, with all her slipping between the present, the future, and now the past, gives me a headache.

I’ve played fast and loose with Alice’s visions of the future in the past, and more so since Bella started altering her powers - I had a reader early on tell me that wasn’t how her powers worked, and while I think Meyer’s descriptions are inconsistent, I can’t say they were entirely wrong about that. Still, in many ways, Alice’s power is one of narrative convenience, and it was inconvenient for me to have her instantly able to see everything. So I decided, and I think this is reasonable, that Alice needed time to learn to control her power to see the future (and still doesn’t have complete control, at that), and will similarly need time to learn to control her power to see the past. For now, she can follow threads, but there are shifting and vaguely defined limits that even she doesn’t fully understand. All will be revealed in time, or at least enough of a story to get along with.

I really want to make Alice and Bella’s relationship healthy, loving, and open, for all that they’re going to have their problems, same as any other couple. I hope I’m succeeding. It definitely seemed to me that she would pick up on Bella’s distress - there’s very little she fails to notice - and that she would expect honesty in their relationship, even if the truth is painful or difficult.

Bella’s relationship and history with magic is going to be a thread throughout both this book and the next, so I wanted to spend a little more time fleshing out her perspective, and with Rose being a novice witch, that afforded me the opportunity to do so. The conversation took a briefly maudlin turn that tread over a lot of territory from the previous chapter before I cut that bit and brought it to a different inclusion. The outtake will be under the cut at the end of this post.

5513 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans, does not exist. The spot where it would stand is a playground. I didn’t want to associate any real homes with a fictional haunting (and of course I could hardly resist throwing a thirteen in there when the opportunity arose). But it’s in roughly the right location, I think, for a double gallery home once owned by a decently wealthy family.

Now we get to some of the larger changes. I’ve already started altering Alice’s story substantially, as I discussed in the author’s notes for the previous chapter. Here we have another significant change: in the backstory established by Stephenie Meyer, Alice’s mother was murdered, but it was ruled an accident by the authorities. Only Alice’s visions indicated it was homicide. Here, it’s widely known to be murder, but there’s a scapegoat in the form of the Axeman of New Orleans.

The Axeman is a real serial killer from the early 20th century, and while there have certainly been suspects, his true identity is still unknown, as is his motive. There are those who believe he targeted women specifically, only attacking men when they happened to be around his intended victims. Because many of the victims were Italian immigrants (many, but not all), some contemporary commentators tied him to the Mafia. The letter he allegedly wrote demanding jazz bands playing in every house that wished to go unscathed, well, I tend to agree with those who think it was a hoax, though there are wilder theories claiming it wasn’t, and he deliberately launched his spree to expand the popularity of jazz music. Whoever he was, whatever his motives, he hangs over the city of New Orleans to this day.

Was Alice’s mother Luciana actually murdered by the Axeman himself? I don’t know if I’ll end up saying either way. I don’t know if it matters, to be honest. If she was, I would say he was not necessarily tied into the Mafia, but he was a hired killer, and his reign of terror had some greater purpose. It’s just as possible the Axeman was a convenient cover story. It was a hired killer either way, and he had accomplices - the identity of the actual killer is less important here, I think, than the identity of the people who hired and helped him. We’ll learn more in the next chapter.

The last chapter was over ten thousand words, and I briefly considered letting this one be a juggernaut as well, but I hit a natural break point and it seemed better to separate things. I’m working on Chapter 6 now. I’m going on vacation in a couple weeks, and I hope to finish at least that chapter before I leave, as it’s going to mean a hiatus (and I do have another writing project I need to keep working on before the year is out, to boot). I’d really like to get out of the dark place Alice is in now, and give the poor girl the opportunity to find closure and move forward, so maybe I’ll manage to squeeze in Chapter 7 as well. We’ll see.

And now, the outtake, purely as a matter of interest.

Rosalie must have seen something in my expression, despite my best efforts, because she reached out to take my hand. “From what she says, it sounds like you taught her everything she knows. Or close to it.”

“Yeah. Well.” I cracked a small, humorless smile. “I don’t remember any of it. And I can help with theory, but...I can’t demonstrate this stuff for you, and the magic Callie practices isn’t what I’m used to.”

“The spells you talked me through seemed to work just fine the other night.”

“They did. And I’m very glad, believe me.” My smile turned a little more genuine. “I guess I’m not completely out of touch.”

“What does it feel like?” Alice asked softly, glancing between us. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

“The actual spellcasting? Or…” Rose shrugged as she trailed off.

“Any of it. All of it.”

“It’s a little different for everyone, I think,” I said slowly. “There are things we have in common, but we filter the experience through our own perceptions of the world. When you cast, it’s like something moves through you. And when you’re just living in the world, then…”

“It’s music, for me,” Rose added. “I can tune it out, but it’s like there’s a radio playing down the hall. The songs and sometimes the volume change. It’s like the world is trying to tell me something, but I can’t quite figure out what. Sometimes I pick up general themes, but that’s about it.”

I nodded. “It’s never that clear. Not without effort, and - well, I certainly don’t remember divination being my strong suit. Callie says I tended to interpret magic visually, and I saw the colors of Rosalie’s spellwork, but mostly I remember these...whispers of sensation. Something that was almost visible, almost audible, almost tangible, but not quite any of those things. I perceived it all through my mind’s eye. It felt like...standing in the ocean on a hot summer day. The water is warm and your toes are curled in the sand, the seaweed fluttering against your legs. The sun warms your skin, and the sky is that perfect shade of blue, but there are clouds scudding across it, big, white, fluffy ones, the kind that come in elaborate shapes, castles and dinosaurs and starfish and whatever else you can imagine. The wind is whistling past, and you can halfway feel, halfway hear the way it whispers of the autumn and winter days to come. You can feel so keenly that you’re a part of everything around you that it’s hard to tell where your soul ends and the world begins. And losing it is...it’s not like going blind, or deaf, or losing a limb. It’s not that simple. But it’s still...it’s loss. It would be like - if you couldn’t see the future anymore, maybe.”

Alice shuddered at that, leaning against me. “God, I can’t even imagine what that would be like. Baby…”

“Yeah. It’s okay.” I turned, planting a kiss against her hairline. “I’m...fine. I don’t need magic to get by. Plenty of people do just fine without it, it’s stupid to…”

“You’re not stupid,” Rosalie interjected. “What you’re talking about - I’ve felt that for all of a day or two. I went my whole life without it, I don’t need it, but - you found a way to give me this gift and now the idea of losing it again is horrifying to me. You were used to perceiving the world in this specific, complicated way, and you lost part of that, and you’re still coming to terms with it. I’m not going to tell you to wallow in that feeling or throw yourself a little pity party, but I understand it now. Your feelings aren’t stupid. You just...can’t let them rule you.”

I shut my eyes, nodding slowly, letting out a long breath. “Still. I have a lot to be grateful for,” I replied, putting my arm around Alice’s shoulders and squeezing gently. “There was a time, long ago, when I didn’t feel the world that way, and I was fine. It’ll come back, or it won’t, and I’ll have friends and family and love and a power of my own either way. That has to be more than enough for anyone.”

[twilight-adamo]

Author’s Notes: Brave New World, Chapter 4: Through the Darkness

https://archiveofourown.org/works/19709434/chapters/48542555

Hoo boy. Where to begin.

We’re now getting at the core truth of some things I’ve been hinting at since Alice became a hybrid. I had always seen “Alice and Bella delving into Alice’s past” as a plot thread in this book, even when the “book” was still going to be a series of loosely connected vignettes I’d write when I could between the end of As Dreams Are Made On and the start of Forth The Mutinous Winds. I wasn’t originally planning to deviate too much from canon, but the more I delved into said canon, and the more I thought about it, the more I found I wanted to, for a couple reasons.

I guess this started when my heart sort of settled on Becky G as my ideal casting choice for this story’s version of Alice. (This has nothing whatsoever to do with my having a low-key crush on her since Power Rangers, I assure you, you know, like a liar.) I was thinking through what exactly that might mean and it ended up combining with one of my major issues with the Twilight series as written: it’s very white.

That’s not unrealistic for the Pacific Northwest. But it stands out when the Cullens gather their allies from around the world, and the vast majority were of white European descent to begin with. Even the vampires who are canonically not white are rendered pale by the transformation, maintaining an “olive tone” at best. (I think that’s bullshit - it was ignored for the films and I will be ignoring it as well.) And there’s a recurring issue where any characters who aren’t white...aren’t really given a great deal of consideration. Names are chosen with no apparent thought to their origin, the actual cultures involved are cast aside, and so forth. I’ve spoken before, briefly, about my discomfort with how the Quileute and Makah are portrayed - how I feel badly about going with the book’s canon when I started writing this, and how I want to do better by them in future Twilight fic. But that discomfort extends well beyond the bastardization of the local Native people, into how people of color are rendered invisible and/or not given respect or due diligence in general throughout the Twilight series.

So this is the start of a broader trend: I plan to expand on existing PoC in the books, to do what due diligence I can and try to write them more authentically. I also plan to add new PoC, particularly among the allies gathered in the course of the World Tour over the summer depicted in the opening chapters of Brave New World. And when I saw this chance to expand on Alice’s story, to change it, to add new wrinkles to the whole thing, I seized it.

The lesser motive here is that I’m trying to reinforce the idea that this world isn’t a carbon copy of Twilight. A lot of stuff went into making it, and sometimes that means the story won’t be perfectly predictable. That’s a good thing, I think, particularly in that it makes Alice’s backstory something new, something we can explore together, no matter how much Twilight lore we know.

What will it mean for Alice to be Latina, in the long run? I’m not sure yet. She has no memories of her human life. It wasn’t something that factored into her life as a vampire. I think it’s something she’s going to spend time thinking about, and exploring, and I’m going to do my best to do that respectfully. I don’t have all the answers yet, and even if I did, I would want to share them organically through the story. So...stay tuned.

On a slightly tangential note, I’m spending a lot of time in the writing of Brave New World grappling with the fact that even the kindest vampires from the books have killed human beings. Carlisle is the only one who never has. Alice’s history is painful, and she feels a deep and abiding guilt for what she did in her early days as a vampire. She probably should. I don’t believe it was her fault - newborn vampires are, with the exception of Carlisle and canon Bella, not remotely in their right minds, and Alice’s turn was particularly traumatic - but it still happened. That’s something I’ll probably continue to explore and try to work out in the story, along with grappling with the question of how and why the Cullens have good friends who continue to eat people without reservation or remorse.

Oh - and Alice gaining the power of postcognition? Something I’ve been planning for a while now. It seemed like a natural adjustment for Bella to make. Honestly, it probably should have happened sooner, but I couldn’t find a good place for it in the previous chapters.

Moving on: Rosalie is a witch now. That surprised me. Honestly, the whole ritual to protect the campsite surprised me. But the more I thought about it, the more it felt like Bull Bay would be haunted to some degree, and that was when the part of my brain that speaks for Bella insisted that the campsite be warded, one way or another. I considered a few different ways of making this happen. One: have the others help Bella with the ward, and it works because it’s pretty basic and even if she can’t do magic, anyone else theoretically can. Two: have Bella borrow power from the natural world to set up the ward. Three: just let Bella get some of her magic back. And, well, you saw four.

I rejected options two and three because I’m not ready to give Bella magic. Her inherent power is already potent, and giving her magic as well opens a can of worms I want to keep sealed for the time being. Stuff is going on with her. It will be revealed in time. In the meantime, no magic beyond the power she’s already got.

I rejected option one because it felt like “yeah, normal people with no prior magical experience can just set up a ward without building magical reserves or anything” was also opening a can of worms, I thought. I don’t think magic is restricted to those like Jessica who have a natural talent for it, but if you don’t have a natural talent, I think you have to work for it. (Even if you DO have a natural talent, I think you have to work for it, but it comes easier.) I just couldn’t see my way clear to Emmett and Rosalie being able to put up wards without natural talent and without practice.

Option four presented interesting possibilities. I could see the chain of logic that would allow Bella to extend Rosalie’s power (introduced in the Rosalie story that serves as Chapter 2 of These Our Actors) into a natural talent for magic. More, I could see how much pain it would cause Bella one of her best friends, her surrogate big sister, a talent for magic when she herself is still disconnected and can’t modify her own power the same way. Like most writers, I do occasionally find the pain and anguish of my characters to be a nummy treat. So I decided to go with that for now.

I’m a practicing witch myself, and much as I’m trying to set my vision of Bella apart from the self-insert she originally was...well, it’s true that wards were one of the first things I learned and practiced. The incantations Rosalie uses at Bella’s direction are not the incantations I use myself, though I did borrow some language. We will not speak again of the myriad tongues/mine own lungs rhyme. It served. My actual spells are a part of my personal religious practice, and I was unwilling to insert them verbatim.

(Incantations are not always half-baked rhymes, but we’ll get into those discussions as Rosalie learns and adapts to witchcraft.)

I think I have a somewhat better justification for Rosalie knowing how to pick locks, giving her canonical mechanical inclinations. But I’m probably going to refrain from giving her new talents after this.

The town of Bull Bay, Mississippi does not exist, but it’s based on a couple of towns, most notably the ghost town of Rodney, Mississippi. Rodney was abandoned because the course of the Mississippi river changed, not because of a vampire massacre, but I still drew some inspiration from it. I considered calling my town Magnolia, but of course there already is a Magnolia, Mississippi, so I went with one of the names for Magnolia grandiflora instead. The asylum similarly does not exist: there were no suitable abandoned asylums “two counties away” from Biloxi (where Alice was canonically sent), so I made one up. And I adore the Kirkbride Plan - look it up, Kirkbride buildings are awesomely creepy and evocative - so of course I made it a Kirkbride asylum.

I wanted to finish the exploration of the asylum in this chapter and start the next one in New Orleans (another choice that has a great deal to do with personal preference - New Orleans is one of my favorite cities on the planet), but it was getting very long. So Alice seeing her actual birth certificate in a vision is where we end things for now, and we’ll pick up from there in the next chapter.

As always, thank you for reading. I hope you’re all still enjoying the story now that it’s moving in unexpected directions.

[twilight-adamo]

Been a while since I updated this, I’ve been focusing on other projects but got some Brave New World time in this evening. 5,242 words. I think I have two or three scenes left in this chapter; there would be more but I think I’m going to end up splitting it for length.

Brave New World Chapter 4 Progress

1,811 words. First scene done, lots more to go. I should be working on something else but I ended up doing a bit of this.

[twilight-adamo]

Did some writing over lunch. Now up to 2,159 words.

Brave New World Chapter 4 Progress

1,811 words. First scene done, lots more to go. I should be working on something else but I ended up doing a bit of this.

[twilight-adamo]

Brave New World Chapter 4 Progress

1,811 words. First scene done, lots more to go. I should be working on something else but I ended up doing a bit of this.

[twilight-adamo]

Author’s Notes: Brave New World, Chapter 3: Dreams and Wishes

https://archiveofourown.org/works/19709434/chapters/47618575

Almost two weeks since the last chapter! I fear we’re slowing down a bit, and will be slowing down a bit more as I turn my focus to other projects and spend a little more time laying foundations for the chapters to come. I’ve said previously that I have roughly the first eight chapters of this story properly outlined, and a general sense of where the story will go after that. Well, I am now almost halfway down the path I’ve already laid for myself, and we are done with the fluff. The time has come to double-check my research, fill in the details, and make some difficult decisions. And, in the process, I had probably better lay a bit more road.

This is easily the most fluffy and self-indulgent chapter I’ve written so far. I tried not to make it sound too much like a travelogue, and I tried to hit some beats that will become important later, but even so, I let myself do the literary equivalent of drawing a hot bubble bath and sinking into the water with a generously poured glass of wine. This chapter was so self-indulgent, in fact, that I wrote part of it ahead of Chapter 2, because I was feeling down and I wanted to write something that would make me happy. What’s coming up next is a lot of work - delving into Alice’s past, meeting up with vampires, discovering new mysteries - and I just wanted to let these four have a good time for a little while. And, of course, there are plot developments, but I guess I should put the rest under a cut for the sake of anyone who hasn’t yet read the chapter.

I’ve said that I’m trying to push Bella somewhat off the self-insert mark I set when I first began writing this story. That’s still very true, but I admit I pushed more of myself into this chapter than I have in a while. Disney World is easily one of my favorite places on Earth, and despite my criticisms of the corporation itself, I am a second-generation Disney fanatic. My mother was a big fan, too - the office in my family home was once covered in Disney memorabilia - and so indulging my fandom makes me feel close to her. I suppose I’ve only become more obsessive since she died.

I do also Disney Bound as a hobby - I’ve found I really like devising and perfecting outfits inspired by my favorite characters. I started with Ariel, of course (and will be debuting the third iteration of my Ariel Disney Bound on my vacation this year), and have since added outfits inspired by Belle, Rapunzel, Maleficent, and Rey to my repertoire. I also cosplay as Ariel and plan to start cosplaying as Rapunzel next year, but Bella isn’t quite that far gone down the road of geekery yet.

And, of course, there’s the proposal, which is absolutely me indulging a fantasy. I don’t know if I’ll ever get married - I’m not even in a serious relationship right now. But I’ve definitely thought about how my perfect proposal will go, and since I have no idea if it’ll ever happen, I decided to go ahead and write it into the story. I expect I’ll be fitting some details of my dream wedding into the story when the time comes as well.

Of course, in order to write my perfect proposal, I had to grapple with the fact that there wasn’t really a set location to meet Ariel in 2005 - New Fantasyland and Ariel’s Grotto wouldn’t open for a few years yet. She appeared at various character dining experiences, of course, but that wouldn’t be quite the intimate experience I wanted. I didn’t want to deal with homophobic reactions to a public proposal - I really didn’t want to write a fully public proposal at all - and I know from my experience attending Gay Days at Disney World in 2004 that, while other guests can be assholes, the cast members (i.e. staff and performers) at Disney are usually cool. Ariel’s Grotto only admits a few people at a time, so it was perfect for my needs. It just...didn’t exist yet.

But there was nothing really preventing most of New Fantasyland from existing back then, and as I turned the idea over in my head, it occurred to me that this was another opportunity to show that the world Bella had found herself in wasn’t precisely the world she remembered. Fragments of her desires and her memories - and those of others - shaped this new world. Moreover, her cognitive dissonance over the resort being somewhat off afforded me the opportunity to show that all is not entirely well with her, not just yet.

I’ve dropped a few hints of this so far. First, there was Eleazar’s reaction when he examined her powers toward the end of As Dreams Are Made On. Then there was the dream that opened Chapter 1 of Brave New World. And now we have these little episodes when Bella runs into something that doesn’t quite seem to fit, something that nags at the half-abandoned, half-forgotten recesses of her mind. There is more to come, and this will feed into one of the major plot threads of this second book.

The Haunted Mansion is absolutely my favorite ride, and it is in fact a tradition of mine that it’s my first ride on any Disney vacation if possible, followed by a stop in Adventureland for a Dole Whip float. I wasn’t really going to write a scene there, but...well. I don’t want to say too much. Suffice to say that this world is stranger than even the Cullens realize, and this story will bring them in contact with things they never imagined. I wanted to raise the possibility. (And I did in fact live in a haunted house as a teenager. My experience wasn’t precisely as Bella describes, though I made use of the broad strokes. I’ve told the story before on other accounts - I don’t think I’ll repeat it here and now. Perhaps another time.)

The Adventurers Club was one of my favorite spots at Disney World, particularly when I returned as an adult. Sadly it closed in 2008, and has since been torn down and replaced with a restaurant - none of the old Pleasure Island is still there, really. Elements of the old Club have been woven into Disney lore across the world, and there have been reunions of the actors and inductions of new members now and then, but the Club itself is no more. Since I was doing a bunch of self-indulgent shit anyway, I figured it was a good place for our heroes to stop for a drink and celebrate the engagement.

I decided a while ago that Rosalie would be Bella’s maid of honor. This is partly for the reason she gives - she wants Callie, another experienced witch who is familiar with Bella’s own beliefs, to officiate - and partly because I think Callie and Bella’s relationship has grown somewhat strained over time. They’re still good friends and even sisters, but the simple fact of the matter is that Bella has become a wholehearted part of this world while Callie is still holding part of herself back. That’s a fundamental disagreement, and it’s hard to get over something like that. Multiple people have told me Callie is their favorite character, so don’t worry, she’s not going anywhere, and she and Bella aren’t about to break off their friendship, but it’s going to take time for them to rediscover who they are to one another. In the meantime, Bella and Rosalie have grown extremely close, finding a sisterly relationship that Rose doesn’t quite share even with Alice, so the maid of honor thing felt fairly inevitable.

If it feels like the chapter ends on a slightly ominous note, well. To some degree it does. Bella is trying to be realistic without becoming entirely pessimistic, and there are in fact dark and difficult times ahead. Next stop: Biloxi, and Alice’s past. It’s not exactly going to be another trip to the theme parks, I fear.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

[twilight-adamo]

annnnd reblogging to the fic blog where this also applies

I have writing asks in my inbox, don’t worry, I’ve gotten them and will answer at some point, I have just been busy with things.

[twilight-adamo]

Fanfic Writers: Director’s Cut

Reblog this if you want readers to come into your ask box and ask for the “director’s commentary” on a particular story, section of a story, or set of lines. 

Or, send in a ⭐star⭐  to have the author select a section they’ve been dying to talk about!

[twilight-adamo]

p, q, s

P: Are you what George R. R. Martin would call an “architect” or a “gardener”? (How much do you plan in advance, versus letting the story unfold as you go?)

I’d call myself a bit of both. I build very elaborate frames in anticipation of, oh, tomatoes or climbing roses or some such, but they are ultimately just frames, and I often have to rebuild them when it turns out I’ve accidentally planted, I don’t know, grapes instead and now I need a trellis. How I ended up with grapes is generally a complete mystery, but I’ll be puttering along in my garden and all of a sudden there are grapes where I’m sure I’d meant to put tomatoes.

The actual process of writing, as I’ve said before, is a sort of dialogue between me and my characters. I may have ideas for the story, but those ideas are subject to a general feeling of “yes, and” or “no, but” or “not at all” in the course of the actual writing. My characters can and do surprise me, shock me, and occasionally infuriate me. The course of plot can as well - I’ll see an unexpected turn ahead and sometimes find myself actively fuming for days over it.

Gardener, I suppose, if I had to pick a side.

Q: Do you have any discarded scenes/storylines/projects?

A few, though I’d say I’ll consider nothing permanently discarded until I’m dead. I’ve started including scenes I started to write but decided to abandon for one reason or another in my author’s notes on Brave New World and my do so on other projects as well.

I can tell you that As Dreams Are Made On, which was originally just going to be one story, was going to end in a much more meta place, in which my protagonist would discover she was just living in a story that yet another version of me was writing. There had been no body swap, everything was fine, she was a fictional character in a fictional world.

But readers responded poorly to my first meta joke, which I ultimately removed (though now it leaves a slightly ugly chapter that has drawn most of the outright hate I’ve gotten on the story), and by that time I was writing the story for other reasons anyway. So I dropped it and, ultimately, chose an entirely different deep backstory and grand arc to what had become a trilogy.

Out of the Blue, my Little Mermaid/Wonder Woman story, has been on hiatus for well over a year, but I commissioned an illustration for it via Fandom Trumps Hate and still plan to return to it. My Power Rangers fanfic, centered on an all-new Amazon-inspired team of female Rangers led by the original Kimberly from Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, is currently on life support and while I still WANT to do it I have had trouble writing it in an interesting way, and really only have part of the first chapter. I’ve not even done anything beyond thoughtwork on my “Harry Kim comes out as trans during Voyager’s trip through the Delta Quadrant” story and have serious doubts about going forward (namely that I know the feminization of East Asian men is a pernicious racist trope, and while I chose Harry because he seems the least comfortable in his own skin, in canon, I don’t want to feed into that), so I don’t know if I ever will.

S:��Any fandom tropes you can’t resist?

I am a sucker for found family. I also actively seek out femslash or genderbends. I’ll read stories about hetero romance and I’ll write some of them in off to the side but I vastly prefer to focus on wlw relationships in my writing. (I also cannot get into Drarry, specifically, without a genderbend of one or usually both characters. This is probably the wlw thing again but I have read some gay/bi romances with male Harry and other characters, and male Draco and other characters, so I don’t know.)

[twilight-adamo]

Fanfic Ask Meme

[twilight-adamo]

Of course I reblogged this to the wrong blog at first. 3,751 words following some lunchtime writing today. Still going, hitting the beats I expected.

Brave New World Chapter 3 Progress

2,599 words, around, oh, 1000-1200 of them new as I’d already written part of it before finishing Chapter 2. Things are going well, for the time being.

[twilight-adamo]

Brave New World Chapter 3 Progress

2,599 words, around, oh, 1000-1200 of them new as I’d already written part of it before finishing Chapter 2. Things are going well, for the time being.

[twilight-adamo]

Author’s Notes: Brave New World, Chapter 2: The Here and Now

https://archiveofourown.org/works/19709434/chapters/46906186

I rarely end up naming my chapters until I’ve finished them - this was no exception, and I ended up taking the chapter title from the last line. I considered it making “Now Was All We Had” or “Now Is All We Have” outright, but I felt that would be a bit too repetitive.

One week between new chapters! How long has it been since I last managed THAT? I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep that pace up, to be quite honest with you - I had actually hoped to spend substantially more time with my Fandom Trumps Hate commission this weekend. But that story is coming together, at least, and my muse wanted to talk Twilight, so here we are.

I’m not sure this chapter gives as much of a sense of Renée as I would have liked, and honestly poor Phil gets...no dialogue and next to no time in the spotlight at all. Still, hopefully it gives you some idea of who Bella’s mom is. I’ve read quite a few fanfics that portray her as chronically irresponsible and even abusive (not necessarily in a physical sense, but from a standpoint of neglect and overburdening her daughter with responsibility). I don’t necessarily oppose that depiction, and may use it or something close to it myself in a future story, but it wasn’t what I wanted here, and I don’t think it quite aligns with canon. She is depicted as absent-minded in the books, and as something of a free spirit, but she also canonically loves Bella very much and (I was surprised to learn) actually has a degree in elementary education and has evidently worked as a teacher. Honestly, as someone who has a decent job and maintains some aspects of my life well while being absent-minded in others, I sympathize with her.

So I wanted to show that Bella has two parents who love her very much, that Renée may not be a perfect parent but she tries and she misses her daughter fiercely. I also wanted to depict her as sex-positive and realistic about what her teenage daughter and said teenage daughter’s friends would be getting up to, something I touched on somewhat when I had Renée give Bella The Talk over the phone in the last book. That positivity, and Renée’s frankness in expecting it, ended up spinning into a few very raunchy scenes that I just couldn’t bring myself to cut. My characters got a little out of control for a while there.

(No, I have no idea how Rosalie and Emmett fit into one of those airplane lavatories at all, either. I barely fit into an airplane lavatory on my lonesome. But I have faith in their ability to manage it.)

In the course of writing this chapter, I spoke with a friend who’s familiar with Jacksonville, and researched the city independently. I ended up using next to none of it, aside from the climate in late June/early July, the name of Phil’s baseball team, and the fact that there are beaches and a zoo. Ultimately I’m not here to write a travelogue, there may be enough of that in the next chapter, and I didn’t feel I knew Jacksonville well enough personally to write any details convincingly. Besides, the emphasis was always going to be more on my characters than their surroundings.

The conversation with Renée on the beach consciously echoes similar conversations with Charlie in the last book, and of course prompts Alice to ask pointed questions as to what Bella wants to do about her mother. Bella’s answer, this time, is very different, precisely because of what happened to Charlie toward the end of the last book - but the prospect of getting married young, giving Renée one last milestone to witness in Bella’s life, emerges here, and, well, you can probably guess that will be relevant down the line. The Volturi are still looming over everything, even if they’re not yet aware of Bella, even if they’ve no reason to dictate her fate here and now. With so much uncertainty and danger ahead, I think it makes a certain amount of sense that even this Bella would want to celebrate and solidify what she has before she risks losing it all.

The sketchbook Alice filled for Ren��e was sort of a random notion that popped up once Bella had eaten the page of Rosalie/Emmett diagrams and breezed about a surprise, but I think it’s fitting here, and again echoes a scene from the last book, when Alice sketched Bella gazing up at the stars. (Incidentally, I did in fact have to stop and research whether pencil sketches are safe to eat. I still don’t recommend you do it at home, but I found that drawing charcoal is generally safe and graphite is minimally toxic, and I figured a hybrid would find it unpleasant but suffer no ill effects. The things I do for this story.) It provided a nice, touching scene to end this chapter on, and an opportunity for Renée to embrace Alice as one of “her girls”. I’m not entirely sure where I would have ended the chapter otherwise, so while Bella may be mortified by what happened on the plane, I suppose I should be grateful.

There’s a brief mention of Renée in roller derby gear, so I should say that, yes, one of the things I was considering for this chapter - before I realized I had more than enough to fill it - was a roller derby bout in which Renée would be one of the jammers. 2005 is a little early for Jacksonville Roller Derby to exist as the organization it is now, but I figured there might still have been people scraping together bouts before it was formally launched. Renée would have skated under the name “School Daze” and her gear would have been largely black, decorated with white paint forming the repeated “chalk” line “I will not jam in class.” I wrote a little of the scene, which I’m posting under the cut as another outtake, but soon decided I wasn’t really up for writing a bout in an interesting fashion, and coming up with names and other derby folks would have been too much work for a chapter that was already done. Something else I may have to work into side material or future installments in some way, I suppose.

As I’ve said previously, I’ve written a bit of Chapter 3 already - a scene or two that I’ve been looking forward to for some time - and I can’t wait to share it. But we’ll all have to wait, as I’ve more to write both before and after that section, and I don’t know quite how long I’ll be. Beyond Chapter 3, I’ve got the story properly outlined through approximately Chapter 8, and a vague sense of what happens after that. Here’s hoping things go smooth.

And now, the outtake I promised from Chapter 2. As usual, Tumblr doesn’t do the best job of preserving my formatting, so please bear with me.

The days flew by, filled with visits to local restaurants and landmarks and plenty of quality time with mom, my girlfriend and my friends. We didn’t see much of Phil, busy as he was, though he did end up spending a little extra time with us when a couple of his games were rained out, and we finally got to take in a Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp game around the start of the holiday weekend. I’ve never been that invested in baseball, but it was easy to cheer Phil and his team on as they beat the visiting team 4-1.

And then, on Sunday, it was time for the most unexpected part of this little trip.

“I still can’t believe you do roller derby,” I said, laughing, as we walked into the massive university athletic center where the bout was to be held.

“Am I getting cool mom points for this?” she asked, grinning.

“Serious cool mom points. Like...I don’t know, a thousand points, that sounds good.”

“Hey, I’ll take it,” mom replied. “It’s not a big deal. We don’t even have an official league yet, just a couple loose teams. We’re hoping to get more organized.”

“It’s still awesome,” Alice told her.

“Yeah, definitely,” I agreed. “I guess I just didn’t see it as something my mom would be doing.”

Mom smirked. “Advantages to being a young, hot mom. Thirties, flirty and thriving, baby.”

I stopped to stare at her. “Please don’t call yourself hot again.”

“What? I am a dish.”

“You’ve got a hot mom, Bells, it’s true,” Emmett offered from behind us.

“She is pretty cute,” Alice added.

“Hey! You know what we should do? Find our seats,” I said brightly, clapping my hands once, rolling my eyes as they all chuckled, then leaning over to hug my mother. “See you after the bout.”

“Definitely. I’ll introduce you to some of the girls, they’ve been dying to meet you,” mom replied, hugging me back. “Love you, Bella.”

“Love you, too,” I murmured back, and we headed up into the bleachers spread around the indoor track. It wasn’t a bad crowd for an amateur match, though the place was hardly packed full, and it looked like there were even concessions on sale.

“What do you think my derby name would be?” Alice asked, as we settled into our seats.

“Tinker Hell,” Rosalie offered. “Might as well work the manic pixie dream girl from hell angle.”

Alice’s mouth dropped open in mock outrage. “I think Bella would tell you I’m absolutely heavenly. And I am not a manic pixie dream girl. Bells?”

“Uh...you can be kind of manic. You’re definitely a pixie. And you’re my dream girl,” I told her, with a soft smile that widened as she beamed back at me. “Plus you’re just a little too wicked to be an angel, sorry, baby.”

“Hmph. Well I forgive you because you called me your dream girl,” she allowed, pouting.

“As long as we’re playing to type, though, Rosalie, you’d be Barbie Maul,” I added, smirking when Rose turned a level look and a slowly arching eyebrow on me in return. “Hey, you started it.”

“I also didn’t ask,” she sniffed.

“Well, fine, I will,” I returned. “I was thinking Terror Dactyl, or--”

“Murdermaid,” Rosalie interjected.

Emmett snickered. “Princess Scariel.”

“Tidal Rave,” Alice offered, laughing when I pouted at her. “They took the obvious ones. You have to admit you’re a little predictable, baby.”

“I have other interests!”

My girlfriend leaned into me, wrapping her arm around mine. “Yes. But you also have a very definite brand.”

“See if any of you are on my Christmas list this year,” I muttered, but I couldn’t help a small smile regardless.

[twilight-adamo]

Update, as I’m about to head to bed: 8,166 words on Chapter 2. I think I have one or two scenes left. Will it go up this week? Signs point to maybe.

Brave New World Chapter 2 Progress

2,541 words. I have at least two to four additional scenes in mind for this chapter beyond what I’ve written, so I can’t tell you how long it will be before I’m finished.

Just for fun, Chapter 3 stands at 1,018 words currently, but I’m not yet sure where those words will fit into the sequence of events. The scene I wrote WILL be part of Chapter 3 (or, if for some reason I have to split chapters, Chapter 4 or so), but it’s something I let myself write out of order the other day when I was upset about some family news.

[twilight-adamo]

Brave New World Chapter 2 Progress

2,541 words. I have at least two to four additional scenes in mind for this chapter beyond what I’ve written, so I can’t tell you how long it will be before I’m finished.

Just for fun, Chapter 3 stands at 1,018 words currently, but I’m not yet sure where those words will fit into the sequence of events. The scene I wrote WILL be part of Chapter 3 (or, if for some reason I have to split chapters, Chapter 4 or so), but it’s something I let myself write out of order the other day when I was upset about some family news.

[twilight-adamo]

Author’s Notes: These Our Actors, Chapter 2: Rosalie

I meant to start getting in the habit of posting a link back to my work on AO3 with my author’s notes for Brave New World Chapter 1, but I plum forgot, so I’m starting that practice now:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/14429865/chapters/46781116

As I’ve said, this was a particularly difficult installment for me to write. To understand why, you need to understand my creative process. I tend to view writing as something of a dialogue between myself and my characters, particularly my protagonist. It’s not that I’m literally speaking with them - I speak of my characters as having minds of their own, and they do to an extent, but they’re not fully realized people. It’s more of a mental back and forth. I have an idea for a story, I begin writing, and then I just get a sort of sense that, oh, no, things actually happened this way, or that character felt this and said that at a given point. The characters tell me their own story, in a sense, once I’ve set the basic framework of the story.

Sometimes a character doesn’t want to talk to me, and I get stuck, and have to find a way to move forward. That wasn’t the problem with Rosalie.

Rosalie just had too damn much to say, and was quite picky with how I said it.

Am I entirely satisfied with the end product? No. Is the part of my brain that got into Rosalie’s frame of mind, the part of my brain that IS my version of Rosalie, entirely happy? Also no! But at a certain point you have to call the work done and put it out there, and after over a year of struggle, I was ready to get the blasted thing out of my head.

Looking at the revision history, I see that I spent a lot more time actively working on it, with fewer breaks, than I did working on Brave New World Chapter 1. I did take a six-month break from September to March, and then another extended break from March until June and July. I wasn’t doing a lot of writing at all in those periods due to the major stressor I mentioned before, a troubled organization I got involved with last fall which ate up a huge amount of my energy and mental bandwidth. Only since resigning my position with that organization and taking a step back have I found myself able to write again.

I did have a fairly complete version of this installment last year, but I’d had so much trouble writing it that I felt I needed a few extra pairs of eyes on it. I’m part of a small local writers’ group that meets every other week to share and discuss our fiction. Mostly I show them my original work, but they had seen some of my fan work before, including pieces of Out of the Blue (my Little Mermaid/Wonder Woman crossover) and a Power Rangers fic I have not yet begun to publish. Only a couple of them had read Twilight and none, as far as I know, had read As Dreams Are Made On, but I felt their general feedback might help me figure out what I was still missing.

A lot, as it turned out. In the draft I submitted to the group, there were no flashbacks to Rosalie’s developing relationship with Bella. The story focused entirely on Rosalie talking about Vera, intercut with scenes of her vigil at Bella’s bedside in Denali. I made mention of Rosalie and Vera’s little blood sister ritual, but didn’t show it; and in fact the blood sister scene and the observatory scene were a single scene, when they were about ten years old, and Edward wasn’t present. (Edward was, in fact, a very late addition to the observatory scene.)

The group felt that the story might be better served with more emphasis on Rosalie’s memories, and less on what was happening in Denali. They also felt that they didn’t entirely understand the depth of Rosalie’s feelings for Bella, and would like to see how they had become close. There were other more specific criticisms and suggestions, but those were the main issues.

So I went back to the drawing board. Even though none of the These Our Actors installments are meant to stand on their own - they all depend upon As Dreams Are Made On (and will eventually depend on Brave New World) for context - I had to admit we had only seen Rosalie’s relationship with Bella from Bella’s side, and I wasn’t entirely sure I’d sold it. I wanted to get her perspective on things. As always, she had almost too much to say.

The revision that followed involved a lot of agonizing. A lot of hair-pulling. This is probably the most technically complex story I’ve written in a while. I tried to keep the order of events consistent, always shuttling between time periods in the same order - present-day, Vera flashback, Bella flashback. I wrote the flashbacks as Rosalie telling the story, and the present-day scenes as an inner monologue. I added dates and places to try and ease confusion. Edward turned up - he was originally mentioned, but not shown - and while I didn’t feel he really fit, he came off as a decent character and I’m trying to write him sympathetically so I let him stay. I found I wanted to include discussion of Rosalie’s power, something I couldn’t really fit into Brave New World right upfront, and again it didn’t really fit but I tried to make it work.

Did I succeed? I don’t know. The initial feedback I’ve gotten is that the story is still confusing in parts. But people seem to be responding well to at least one of the parts I’m proudest of, and perhaps that’s the most I can ask.

The scene in question - Rosalie visiting Vera near the end of her life - hasn’t changed much from the first draft, if at all. I wanted to bring closure to Vera’s story, beyond the night of Rosalie’s death. I found it hard to believe she would never look in on her best friend, her surrogate sister. And, well, I guess Alzheimer’s and dementia are becoming something of a theme in my work, and writing Vera as suffering dementia toward the end of her life gave Rosalie another point in common with Bella.

As this story has evolved, I have deliberately started divorcing Bella’s story from my own. When I started writing, she was a straightforward self-insert, and the only question the story asked was “what if I found myself dumped into the story, in Bella Swan’s body and role?” But as this has changed, I’ve been trying to see less of myself in Bella, to make her more of her own person. She still has some things in common with me; one of those is that my mother died, far too young, from early onset Alzheimer’s, or as near to it as to make no difference. We never got a definitive, final diagnosis, but I watched her lose her mind, go from a force of nature to a barely verbal shell, from an independent person to someone who needed full-time care, who drifted in time and place, and who ultimately lapsed into a coma and died.

It was agonizing. And among my many regrets is the fact that I didn’t get to have an exchange like the one Rosalie gets with Vera. I didn’t get to have that final moment where she recognized me, and we talked, and I got to say goodbye. I didn’t realize that I’d had my last remotely lucid conversation with her until it was already over and gone.

So it’s a little bit of bittersweet wish fulfillment, perhaps, and a road into Rosalie’s head that I didn’t have before I conceived and wrote it. I am glad that at least some people have found it moving.

On to other matters.

The story centers on two poems. “The Old Astronomer” - one of my favorites - was part of it from the beginning, and seemed like a piece that both Rosalie and Bella would find moving for their own reasons. Canonically Rosalie did study astrophysics at one point, and Bella (again, like me) has always loved the stars. “Autumn Chant” came later, but when I heard it for the first time, especially that final stanza, it seemed so very fitting, and it gave me some ideas for Rosalie’s unique qualities.

Even in the actual Twilight books, Rosalie seems to have a uniquely sharp recollection of her human life, compared to other vampires. I knew early on that I was going to give her a power, and I wanted it to be more complicated than “supernatural beauty,” so ultimately I decided to bring her supernatural charisma together with her unusually good memory and create a new power: a supernaturally resilient self-image, one that allows her to protect her memories and sense of self from outside influence, and even project her self-image onto others. She sees herself as uniquely beautiful, she was raised to believe first and foremost in her own beauty, so others still see her that way too. (Rosalie is naturally lovely, of course, but her power gives it a little extra oomph.) How will that power change as Rosalie begins to master it and Bella helps it along with her own ability? What relevance will this have to the plot? I can only say that time will tell. But it was important, I felt, to get it down. I’ll have to find some way to work the explanation into the main story as things go forward, of course.

Overall, I sincerely hope you enjoyed most of Rosalie’s story. It’s not perfect - I don’t know if I can ever make it perfect, even if I do eventually loop back around to making an author’s preferred text out of all the Tempestverse stuff - but I hope there’s more good than bad. I have much more straightforward ideas for Callie, Angela and/or Edward, and Jasper and/or Jessamine cooking on the back burner, so we’ll see who ends up getting to go next.