WRITING ECLIPSE: Edward and Alice Plan A Graduation Party

“Alice, are you going to pick through CDs all day? Do you really think people will be paying attention to the music?” Edward asked.

“I'm going to make them,” Alice said. “Jasper is 'borrowing' a PA system as we speak.”
Edward sighed and went back to cutting sections of scotch tape.
“I feel a certain responsibility to these people, Edward.” Alice said. “This party is my last shot. I like to make a good final impression.”
“People are just going to want to dance. Don't overthink it.”
“Be happy I'm not playing the song I recorded with Jasper. That's real music.”
“Alice, you just screamed in Latin while 'California Gurls' played in reverse. That hardly qualifies as music.”
“Because I used 'California Gurls'?” Alice joked.
Edward laughed, even though he kind of liked that song. And now it was stuck in his head. Perfect. He looked around, already frustrated. “I had some red crepe paper earlier. Where did you put it?”
“Oh, I used it for the orgy room.” Alice said nonchalantly.
“The orgy room?” Edward stared at her in disbelief. “Where is the orgy room?”
“My room, naturally.”
“And, er... why do we need an orgy room?”
“I've already got the masks and whips and condoms laid out, you don't need to worry about it at all.”
“I'm not concerned with the logistics, Alice,” Edward hissed. He paused and tried to contain his temper. He had certainly known his sister would have some strange ideas for this party. Really, he knew he should count his blessings that she'd been thoughtful enough to restrict potential orgies to one room. “I don't think an orgy room would be appropriate for this occasion.”
"No fair." Alice pouted.
“I'm not saying you can't independently organize a...spontaneous orgy,” Edward sighed. “I just don't want it to be a part of the party's infrastructure. Can you leave that for the night of?”
Alice paused, staring far away for a moment. “Yes, that will work.” She licked her lips unconsciously.
Edward tried to block the deluge of images and ideas coming from his sister's brain. Alice shivered delicately and went back to work.

For a while they toiled silently. There was no need for Edward to check with Alice regarding any of his decorative decisions – she'd already pre-approved them weeks ago. Edward smiled to himself. He'd forgotten how much fun it was to pass the hours with his sister. Before Bella had come along they'd spent more time together, and as much as Edward missed it he also had to admit they'd been running out of activities. They used to go to comedy clubs, but eventually got banned from most of the local ones thanks to Alice's bad habit of laughing uproariously before the comedian could get to the punch line. They used to go to the movies once a week, but Alice would always lean over and ask Edward for clarification on plot twists that hadn't happened yet. It was more than a little irritating. Maybe it was good that Bella had come along and changed his world.

“How much cocaine do we need?” Alice asked, snapping Edward out of his reverie.
“Cocaine, Alice?”
“I've got plenty of weed, some X, and even some crystal meth if anyone wants some, but I'm not sure how much cocaine to buy,” she said.
“None!” Edward snapped angrily.
“Oh,” Alice looked hurt and confused. “You think this crowd would prefer crack?”

BLOGGING ECLIPSE, pt. 18: Get Your War On

Last time we heard Jasper's over-long but otherwise entertaining origin story, which had an endearing and cute happy ending FOR FUCKING ONCE. Alice and Jasper (Jalice? Alsper?) pretty much won my heart already, but now there's really no going back. For the first time in what feels like a century, I'm feeling hope! And yet, instead of hearing more about the compelling characters in this book, we're heading back to spend some time with the assholes. I feel like as this story goes on we're going to come to appreciate chapter 13 more and more. That's a bad sign. With New Moon we didn't peak until chapter 17, and it can be argued that the best section of Twilight comes at the very end. This is a disturbing pattern. Previous entries can be found in the directory (updated 9/13).

Chapter 13 (con't): Newborn

Edward wraps up Alice and Jasper's back-story, since we were growing to a point about the present murder spree in Seattle a few HOURS ago and he's trying to get us back on-topic: When Jasper met Alice she had already “seen” meeting him and subsequently finding the Cullens. So the two of them just showed up on the doorstep one day. Edward, who was away on a hunting trip, says it “scared the hell out of” the rest of his family.

“Jasper shows up, covered in battle scars, towing this little freak” – he nudged Alice playfully – “who greets them all by name, knows everything about them, and wants to know which room she can move into.”
Alice and Jasper laughed in harmony, soprano and bass.
“When I got home, all my things were in the garage,” Edward continued.
Alice shrugged. “Your room had the best view.”

Okay, I'm picturing Jasper with this ridiculous James Earl Jones laugh for some reason, but otherwise it's kind of nice to see someone other than Alice having a damn chuckle for once, especially Edward “said darkly” Cullen, the Pope (Benedict to Morrissey's John Paul) of Mope. I know vampires have to avoid the sun, but lighten up, guys, get it? Sorry. But it's nice, isn't it?

One of the reasons I really loved reading Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince was that it seemed like we got to spend a lot of extra downtime with the characters we'd grown to love so much – Slughorn's parties and all that. These moments with the whole Cullen family kicking it are too few and too far between. That's part of what drives the impulse for fan-fiction; I'd wager a guess that the metric tonnage of Twilight fan-fic outweighs Harry Potter fan-fic, simply because the former leaves so much to be desired. Shit, I've almost totally given up writing MY fan-fiction as separate posts – at this point I've gone so far that I'm writing it into my fucking recaps, so great is the urge to add some depth and shading to this book.

“An army,” Alice whispered. “Why didn't you tell me?”

Having just knocked the depth and shading, it's interesting to note the little character beats we get in this scene – I'd go so far as to say it is well done. Alice speaking in a whisper tends to signal insecurity, in the above quote and later. Bella and Edward moan and mutter and hiss all the time, but Alice is usually chirping and wind-chiming and fluting and all that. Here she's on the defense; she hasn't seen any of this coming and naturally feels like shit about it.

Edward starts articulating a theory that the newborn army has been created to attack the Cullen family, and Carlisle expresses disbelief and denial while the more cynical and world-weary Jasper seems to accept it immediately. For the rest of the chapter Jasper is forcing Carlisle to deal with the truth (because obviously Edward's theory is correct). Alice says she's been seeing flickers of plans for (what she now knows is) the army - “not enough to make sense of.” She thinks whoever is in charge is being indecisive. Edward thinks someone is consciously exploiting the holes in Alice's vision.

“Who would know that?” Alice whispered.

Again with the hurt whispering. Someone give her a hug! Esme where you at? Edward and Rosalie (who breaks into the conversation suddenly, maybe S. Meyer was bored) suspect the Volturi; Edward says Aro feels vaguely threatened by their clan, he saw it in his thoughts back in Italy. Well, thanks for keeping that to yourself, dipshit! Regardless of who is pulling the strings, Jasper says they're going to have to get ready for some KILLING. He's slipping into that again awful quickly, huh?

This chapter has vaguely Bush-sympathizing themes. “No one hated violence more than Carlisle,” Bella says (Not MLK? Gandhi?), but Carlisle's peace-loving, pie-in-the-sky ways are actually to his detriment. He's pained and indecisive here, while Jasper is the fucking DECIDER. And Mr. Whitlock has effectively seized control of the Cullen family in the space of one chapter. I imagine Alice getting this little Lady Macbeth twinkle in her eyes about now.

Carlisle tells Jasper he's going to have to train everyone; Jasper says they need to call in re-enforcements. Dr. Cullen tentatively suggests Tanya's gang – the oft-mentioned but never-present family from Denali (my dad had a friend who always made reference to his wife but never brought her around; we all started to suspect she was fictional until he did finally bring her around. Turns out she was just hot and he was trying to keep that locked down) – and Jasper immediately puts a phone in Carlisle's hand, telling him he has to ask NOW. Booyah! Go Jasper! Damn, this shit works. He might as well be standing on top of a pile of rubble with a megaphone right now. Rock, flag and eagle!

Let's just hope the rest of this plot doesn't mirror George Bush's presidency: in two weeks Jasper will bring everyone's attention to another army of vampires a few states away, and the Cullens will be like “what do these vampires have to do with anything?” And Jasper will be like “I have intelligence that these vampires pose an even greater threat to us, and were probably involved with the vampire army in Seattle anyway.” And everyone will go along with it for a while and the Cullens will find themselves spreading their resources too thin, trying to manage two different vampire wars at once. And they'll bomb the living shit out of Seattle and Moab or wherever, killing literally thousands of innocents, and after a few years they will not even be able to remember why they invaded Moab in the first place, because the anger they all felt when they discovered Jasper had been lying about his “intelligence” and supposed “Weapons of Vampire Destruction” will have long sense dissipated too – in some ways the time will have flown by, and in others their protracted double-war will seem infinite, like it never began and will never end. And it will be and have been too easy to give in to that inertia. When Alice and Jasper withdraw from power and go essentially into hiding, leaving Jacob and the wolf-pack in charge, everyone will feel a brief moment of hope that the wars will finally end, only to succumb to that fucking inertia again before long. Eventually it will get exhausting to watch the body count rise in the paper, so everyone will stop reading the paper until the paper goes back to reporting about whatever vampire celebrity just got busted by the Volturi. So when almost two years later Jacob Black announces that combat troops are finally being withdrawn from Moab, everyone will breath a sigh of relief and feel a surge of guilt that they hadn't been thinking about it much lately. And then people will keep dying in Moab anyway, nothing having been learned or gained.

I seriously doubt that will happen, though.

Anyway, the Cullens get refused by Tanya's clan, because as you may recall, the late Laurent spent some time up there before he met his end via the wolf-pack. Tanya has a sister named Irina, and it turns out Laurent was hitting that shit. In a perfect world, Laurent would be played by JB Smoove. In a perfect world, JB Smoove would play everyone.

“God damn Laurent and his wandering dick!” Edward exclaimed.

What's weird is that Edward seems to glean this information from Carlisle's thoughts and share it with the rest of his family – you'd think their vampire-hearing would allow them to catch both sides of the conversation, but whatever. Jasper doesn't like having to face an even fight. “We'd have the upper hand in skill, but not in numbers,” he says. Bella realizes this war could have casualties, and she looks at the faces of her “family” wondering who might die. Probably Rosalie, right? It'll be Rosalie.

Chapter 14: Declaration

A day or so later, Bella is sitting with Alice and Edward in the cafeteria, and Alice is maintaining that the party must go on – approaching vampire army or not.

“Say whatever you like about me,” Alice answered. “The party is still on.”
“You have pretty eyes!” I shouted. “You said to say whatever I like about you.”

Alice likes to party – life imitates art for Ashley Greene. But Bella says a party is “hardly appropriate.” This conversation could literally be taking place between Greene and Kristen Stewart, really. “Graduation is what's going on right now, and a party is so appropriate it's almost passe,” Alice says. Alice perfected her teen girl impersonation in the 90s and she hasn't revised it since.

Bella pries some specifics out of Edward and Alice: Carlisle is tracking down some old friends, doing some recruiting. Jasper is doing the same, seeking out Peter and his wife Charlotte. Redshirts, in other words. Jasper is even considering getting in touch with Maria, so great is the need for extraneous characters for S. Meyer to kill off.

Alice shuddered delicately.

Ordinarily I'd object to such a bizarre turn-of-phrase, but with Alice it works. I can imagine what that would look like. I'd say Emmett and Alice are S. Meyer's greatest successes, character-wise. Their internal universes are coherent – even though neither of them has much in the way of a back-story. Huh. What does that say about S. Meyer's writing?

The plan is to launch Operation Enduring Vampires in one week, and Bella suggests she be vamped now in order to help. Edward almost has an aneurism, but Alice very calmly tells Bella that as a newborn she wouldn't have the self-control necessary to be of any use. Bella realizes Alice is right and drops it immediately. Was that so hard, Edward? You don't have to lose your shit every time this comes up! He whispers “Not because you're afraid” in Bella's ear like he's trying to take credit for Alice's little moment, the fuckward. Maybe Edward, like the rest of us, is realizing his sister is a better match for Bella anyway.

“Oh,” Alice said, and a blank look crossed her face. Then her expression because surly. “I hate last minute cancellations.”

She sees the future, folks! Renee cannot attend the graduation party, and Bella, who did not even know her mother had been invited, is relieved. What? You don't want to see your mother, Bella!? Ungrateful bagascia! I don't think Bella deserves Alice. I mean, Jasper might be a racist with a totalitarian streak, but he would never disrespect his mother like that.

By the way, it's Bella Swan's birthday today. I mean, it obviously isn't really, because she is not a real person, but people are celebrating it anyway. So that's happening.

BLOGGING ECLIPSE, pt. 17: The Union Forever

Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 12 (cont'd): Time

Edward shows up and Bella tells him about the article she just read – he makes it sound like the Cullens have been monitoring the situation closely (finally!) but the fact that the police are considering a serial killer is news to him. So, not that closely. He explains that Alice can't seem to see anything; she's afraid she's losing her power. Edward thinks it's more like they are trapped in a feedback loop: “We keep waiting for Alice to see something so we can go...and she doesn't see anything because we won't really go until she does.” That's a kind of clever conceit. I know people complain about the inconsistency with Alice's power, but it's essentially the same situation as Inception – the exceptions to the rules drive the plot action in interesting enough ways that S. Meyer and C. Nolan can get away with it. (Similarly: people complain about the exposition-heavy lines Ariadne has to issue throughout Inception, and out of context some of her them do seem ridiculous, but the end justifies the means. Inception is an incredibly complicated movie that is incredibly easy to understand. That's a tough thing to pull off.)

Edward suggests they skip school today – he wants to talk to Jasper. Bella re-introduces Alice's man in narration, noting that she'd always assumed he was “on the fringe” of the family because the only thing keeping him there was Alice. “He would follow Alice anywhere,” Bella says, but the Cullen's lifestyle does not seem to be his "first choice." When exactly Alice and Jasper came to the Cullen family is unclear – that's a back-story I'd like to read: Alice and Jasper as roving killers in the 50s and 60s! Badass! Bella realizes she knows very little about Jasper, and that Edward has been reluctant to say anything in the past. “I'd always been too intimidated by the tall, blonde vampire who looked like a brooding movie star to ask him outright.” That's a sentence for the S. Meyer Clunky Description Hall of Fame (opening 2016 in Forks, WA) right there.

They get to the Cullen manse where the family is again in various stress poses. When I write it that way it sounds like an interrogation technique out of the Army Field Manual. Carlisle, Esme, and Jasper are watching TV with the volume turned so low Bella can't hear it; Alice is sitting at the bottom of the stairs with her face in her hands. That's why the TV volume is down: Alice is hungover.

“Did you see that they're considering a serial killer now?” [Edward] asked.
Carlisle sighed. “They've had two specialists debating that possibility on CNN all morning.”
“Can you two keep it THE FUCK down please?” Alice groaned.

They're watching CNN instead of reading the paper? Well, there's your problem. Edward doesn't want to let it go on any longer; Emmett agrees. As Carlisle tries to argue with them (so he's the difficult one) Edward turns to Jasper and says “I didn't think of that. I see. You're right, that has to be it. Well, that changes everything.” Get it? Because he reads thoughts? Everyone turns to Jasper, but he indicates that he needs to tell a lengthy story before he can say whatever it was he was thinking. Emmett sighs and walks away, the rest of us think about doing the same thing. Except Alice - walking would take like, way too much fucking effort right now.

“How much do you know about me, Bella?” Jasper asked.
“Can we dim these fucking lights?” Alice moaned.

Jasper pulls up the sleeve of his “ivory sweater” and Bella eventually sees a bite scar much like the one on her hand. As he pushes the sleeve back, Bella sees that his arm is covered in scars. (“Where are all of Edward's vampire scars? Oh, that's right he doesn't have any because you're dating a PUSSY.”-Alice Cullen)

Chapter 13: Newborn

Bella stares in awe at Jasper's “subtly ravaged skin.” (Just how I like my women: subtly ravaged.) “You should see his dick,” Alice says.

“I didn't have quite the same...upbringing as my adopted siblings here. My beginning was something else entirely.” [Jasper's] voice turned hard as he finished.

I'm trying to sort out that “hard” and “finished” into a TWSS, but I just can't make it happen. Jasper says there are much more violent parts of the vampire world, that some vampire sects wage war for territory. Jasper has a bad habit of employing multiple paragraphs to explain very simple concepts.

“You see, there are places in this world that are more desirable to us than others. Places where we can be less restrained, and still avoid detection.
“Picture, for instance, a map of the western hemisphere. Picture on it every human life as a small red dot. The thicker the red, the more easily we – well, those who exist this way – can feed without attracting notice.”

Uh-huh. One would think that New York City would be a sectarian-vampire-violence hotbed, but apparently these vampires prefer Central America. Mostly because it makes S. Meyer's weird civil war parallel work better (not that it works very well). It's “constant war” in the South, Jasper says.

“But what are they fighting for?” I asked.
Jasper smiled “Remember the map with the red dots?”

The one from 50 words ago? Yes, we remember the fucking map with the fucking red dots. “They fight for control of the thickest red,” Jasper says. I can't believe it took two pages to explain that. And we've got 19 more pages to back-story to go!

There was a vampire named Benito who basically took over all of Mexico and Texas in a few weeks. He has a Mexican name so we can remember he is the Mexican vampire. It's nice how S. Meyer is thinking about us with these names (at least it's not "El Draculo"). Benito and his Chinese side-kick Ping Pong were so powerful because they'd created an army of newborn vampires. Newborns are very strong, but so volatile that Benito had to keep making new soldiers because of all the friendly-fire deaths. So it was Vietnam, basically. Other vampire generals followed Benito's lead. “All hell broke loose,” Jasper says. “And I mean that more literally than you can possibly imagine.” But still not literally, right? Because I feel like we can literally imagine hell breaking loose, Jasper. Hole in the earth, demons running amok – what do you think is wrong with our imaginations, dude? Eventually the Volturi showed up, killed Benito and Ping Pong, and then spent the better part of a year killing all the vampires in the South. When armies started to rise again, recruiters were more cautious.

“That's how you were changed.” My realization was a whisper.

Jasper confirms it. “When I was human, I lived in Houston, Texas. I was almost seventeen years old when I joined the Confederate Army in 1861.” HOLD UP. Dude is a Confederate? Alice, I thought you had better standards than that (“I've been with a lot of black men to compensate”-Alice Cullen). Jasper rose quickly through the ranks, in part because of his “charisma.” Still, I'm not sure if you want to brag about helping to lead the team that LOST. “I was one of the best at losing the Civil War.”

One night Jasper was tasked with “evacuating the women and children” (If Gus Haynes were here and a real person he'd point out that you evacuate cities, not people. Women and children evacuating has an entirely different meaning, one that probably would not have been Jasper's responsibility) from his city, and on the way out of Galveston he met “the three most beautiful women” he'd ever seen. (“Ahem”-Alice Cullen) In the movie version I hope this scene is scored with “Corrina, Corrina.”

The women turn out to be recruiters, basically, and they size up Jasper. By now this story has devolved into normal narration with an extra set of quotation marks.

“'Oh, yes,' Nettie quickly agreed, leaning toward me again.”

Quite the raconteur, that Jasper. Two of the vampires leave – they are too tempted to eat Jasper to be sure they can convert him – and he introduces himself to the remaining (lead) vampire, Maria. Jasper's last name is Whitlock, by the way! Why does he go by Hale now? “Whitlock” is infinitely more dusty and grizzled. The only name more dusty and grizzled than “Jasper Whitlock” is “Clint Eastwood,” and that one is already taken. Jasper gets vamped and joins up with Maria's army. Bella senses that he is editing out the pain of transformation as well as other key details for her sake.

“She taught us to fight, and she taught us to be invisible to the humans. When we did well, we were rewarded...”
He paused, editing again.

So Maria was handing out BJs like they were going out of style, eh Jasper? “He was a soldier,” Alice shrugs. Jasper was the best soldier, and it's implied that he iced a lot of motherfuckers. “I was rewarded often,” he says (“Ahem”-Alice Cullen). Jasper's ability to control emotional climates was helpful with the newborns, and he eventually became Maria's partner-in-crime. “In some ways, I worshiped the ground she walked on,” he says. I conceive of “worshiping the ground someone walks on” as a binary condition. You either do or you don't. How do you worship someone “in some ways”? Jasper was a lapsed Catholic for her love.

Eventually (and I mean EVENTUALLY, Jasper says this takes place after decades, that is a lot of MURDERING) Jasper got tired of being a ruthless killer, and struck up a friendship with a newborn named Peter who went AWOL from Maria's army and came back years later (this story takes place across such a long fucking time-line, how long ago does S. Meyer think the Civil War was?) to tell Jasper about the civilized North, where he could be free. Peter put Jasper in touch with the vampire Harriet Tubman and he walked out on Maria “without a backward glance.” Well, that was easy. The vampire Abe Lincoln didn't have to issue any Vampire Emancipation Proclamations or anything!

He tells Bella that his emotion-manipulating power is a two-way street, that he'd been influenced by the hatred and violence that surrounded him for years. He had difficulty adjusting to life in the North (what passes for North is unclear – in a minute we'll hear about Alice, who theoretically would have been kicking around Red States at the time – it might be that the entire United States & Canada is the civilized “North” and the South is everywhere where people speak Spanish, which kind of makes me uncomfortable) where vampires coexisted peacefully. His ability to feel his victims' emotions intensified his guilty conscience. Mired in depression and sick from starving himself, he wandered into a diner only to be approached by Alice.

“It shocked me. I was not sure if she meant to attack... but she was smiling. And the emotions that were emanating from her were like nothing I'd ever felt before.”

Pure animal lust. But seriously, this story is kind of sweet. The punctuation can be hard to follow out of context, but Alice and Jasper quote each other:

“'You've kept me waiting a long time,' she said.” [Jasper said]
I didn't realize Alice had come to stand beside me again.
“And you ducked your head, like a good Southern gentleman, and said 'I'm sorry, ma'am.'” Alice laughed at the memory.

AWWWWWW.

Jasper smiled down at her. “You held out your hand, and I took it without stopping to make sense of what I was doing. For the first time in almost a century, I felt hope.”

Edward and Bella are so fucking lame! They don't have shit on this! I'm flashing forward a hundred years to when vampire Bella and Edward are recounting their “how we met” tale to some other new vampire: “Uh, we went to the same high school, and I really wanted to kill her at first and eat her, but I didn't, and then we had a protracted, years-long fight about her mortality and virginity.” And that new vampire will be like, “shit.” And he or she will look around the room for some other vampire couple to re-inflate his or her confidence about this new life, please, someone tell me it gets better than this! But Alice and Jasper won't be there to help, because they will be too busy fucking.

BLOGGING ECLIPSE pt. 16: I Will Bury You In Time

Previous entries can be found in the directory (updated 9/6).

Chapter 12: Time

Bella, Edward and Alice walk to the parking lot after school, and Alice tries to very gently inform Bella that the Cullens are throwing her a graduation party. “You're such a bitch I figured I'd tread lightly,” Alice laughs, her voice all silver and wind-chimey and shit. Alice wrings a lot of jokes out of her fortune-telling abilities; the Cullens are probably sick of her Tight Five but Bella's a fresh audience.

“By the way, I love my gift. You shouldn't have.”
“Alice, I didn't!”
“Oh, I know that. But you will.”

Ha ha ha. Tip your waitresses! (“So how you doin'? Where are ya from?”-Alice Cullen) Bella complains about getting such advance notice – now she'll have to dread the party for a few weeks. At which point Alice slaps her upside the head and says “You so crazy, Bella!” Graduation is in “exactly one week.”

Exactly one week!? Graduation isn't on the weekend? Also, how would Bella not know this? Doesn't she have any final assignments? A term paper? No, of course not. Forks High is the worst fucking school in America. They need this guy to save a few of the trouble kids with promise:

Mike Newton is basically Forks High's Namond Brice. But who will save him?

So okay, it's good that we're not going to drag this graduation thing out for too long. I admire the current trend of TV shows resisting the urge to make themselves into self-perpetuating mechanisms where the end of every episode is a reset button and nothing ever changes from season to season. I just finished Dexter season 4 (no spoilers) and it ends with a serious game-changing twist. Weeds has made a habit of doing that every year – ending each season with “where the hell could they go from here?” and then actually making good on that promise, radically altering the tone and content of the show from year to year. That impulse has even trickled down to network shows. I haven't caught up with The Office, but how awful would it be if Jim and Pam still hadn't gotten together? If The Office had come out in 1996 that would probably have been the case. It never happened for Tim Taylor and Wilson on Home Improvement after all of those years of “Will they or won't they?”

Bella's head spins – she's put off worrying about how to separate herself from her parents and her human life for so long that she doesn't have time to worry about it anymore, she just has to DO IT. She zones out with worry in the car while Alice jabbers away, but once they drop her (Alice) at home, Edward asks what's going on. It's generally implied that as Bella's “best friend” Alice is just as good at reading her as Edward, which makes her behavior in the car seem strange and insensitive. I'm interpreting it to mean that Alice is taking a day to not give a fuck about Bella's problems. (“Honestly, this whole family can be such a buzzkill, dude. Sometimes Jazz and I need to just lock the door, put on some some Grateful Dead bootlegs, smoke a few bowls and just shut out all those vibes.”-Alice Cullen) Bella tells Edward how she feels, and he immediately offers to delay the transformation. Bella (obviously) doesn't think that's a good idea. She enumerates the threats on her life: “Victoria, Jane, Caius, whoever was in my room, Venom, Sandman, Harry...”

Edward tells her that's all the more reason not to do it. How counter-intuitive! Does Edward write for Slate now? He says he wants her to have a choice. “We've all struggled, trying to reconcile ourselves with something we we had no control over,” he says. Isn't it easier to regret something you do have control over? If becoming immortal is such an agonizing decision (it isn't, but you know) wouldn't it be better if you felt like you had no choice? What is there to regret then? What is Edward struggling over? “I kind of wish I'd died of the flu at age seventeen.” He would wish that, wouldn't he? Bella will always have to take a backseat to Jesus. (“No regrets. God is dead.”-Alice's lower-back tattoo translated from Japanese)

Bella moves on – she can't remember what she'd been planning to buy Alice as a graduation gift. (So that wasn't just a joke?) S. Meyer continues to deftly avoid mentioning band names. Just kidding, she's deft like a virgin at an orgy.

“It looked like you were getting us both concert tickets -”
“That's right!” I was so relieved, I almost smiled. “The concert in Tacoma. I saw an ad in the paper last week, and I thought it would be something you'd like, since you said it was a good CD.”

I can only imagine what awful noise Edward and Bella are going to drag Alice to.

“Linkin Park and Nickelback with special guest Fred Durst? Oh, you shouldn't have. I mean, really. YOU LITERALLY SHOULDN'T HAVE.”-Alice Cullen

I can't wait for the concert scene. “The band played the title track from their album that we liked and I concentrated on the pulsing lightshow while they transitioned to another song that the audience reacted to because it was the single which played all the time on our favorite radio station.” It's going to be epic.

One of the most irritating things about New Moon was the way so many plot developments were driven by misunderstanding. One has to wonder why, or if, Bella and Edward are right together since they never seem to be on the same page. More misunderstandings come to the surface and are cleared up here, but there's always more! The rift between these two is like something out of a Roland Emmerich movie. There's what's (maybe) supposed to be a big reveal when Bella asks Edward why he's so reluctant to vamp her. She thinks he's afraid he won't like her after-the-fang (ex post fango?) but he confesses that rather he wants her to be a vampire SO BAD, it feels too “selfish.” Are you kidding me? Religion is the worst thing ever. “This feels good, so it must be bad.” Bella is nonetheless touched.

If he really wanted me, I could get through the rest...somehow. Selfish suddenly seemed like a beautiful word.

Bella's self-worth is too indexed to Edward's desires. And don't tell me Bella's going to get all Ayn Rand-y on us now. Maybe that would be good for her, actually.

Edward asks Bella why she doesn't want to marry him. This again? Haven't we been over why no one's motivation makes any sense whatsoever? Edward and Bella need to read this blog. They are both going to be immortal vampires living largely off the grid – you can't tell me that any of the Cullens are carrying around legit forms of ID. A marriage certificate is just begging for a joint investigation from the IRS and INS. And we all know what happens when multiple federal agencies get together. David Koresh knows what I'm talking about.

But that doesn't make Bella's reasoning any less petty and retarded:

“I'm not that girl, Edward. The one who gets married right out of high school like some small-town hick who got knocked up by her boyfriend. Do you know what people would think?”

Bella, you are LITERALLY getting super powers. If Mike Newton's mom looks at you sideways, you can come back to her store when she's closing up alone and mail one of her body parts to each continent!

Edward counters that he always was “that boy” and he tells a Froggie Went A-Courtin'-style tale of how he would have “endeavored to secure [her] hand” if he'd met her back in his day, and it gets Bella so hot she actually has a little historical fantasy.

I saw myself in a long skirt and a high-necked lace blouse with my hair piled up on my head. I saw Edward looking dashing in a light suit with a bouquet or wildflowers in his hand, sitting beside me on a porch swing.

Shudder. Why is Edward holding flowers in this fantasy? Are they getting married while sitting on the porch swing? Bella snaps out of it and uses a line of reasoning I've tried before – if the Cullens are supposed to keep up with the times, shouldn't Edward drop it with the old-timey values? (Also, he ceased being human in 1918. Gatsby was written 7 years later. S. Meyer's grasp of the moral values of early 20th century America could use some tuning up. Does she think we all used oil lamps until WWII?) Edward is relieved that Bella isn't “more eager for immortality than just [him]” - I'm beginning to think insecurity is the only thing these two have in common. But he points out that Bella's current modern values are fleeting. “So why should the transitory customs of one local culture affect the decision so much?” EXACTLY, YOU MR. DARCY WANNABE MOTHERFUCKER. Marriage itself is a transitory custom! Fucking romantic love is a transitory custom!

A day or two later Bella picks up a newspaper. GASP. But don't worry, she doesn't suddenly give a fuck about Haiti, she's just looking for the ad for that Hoobastank/3 Doors Down concert. But her eye is caught by the headline (“Seattle Terrorized By Slayings”) of the most badly written fake newspaper article in the history of literature. Has S. Meyer ever read a newspaper? I mean, let's start with basic inverted-pyramid journalism 101.

I apologize in advance for anyone who is bored to death by the next section.

You will be missed, and I will pay for memorial services.

Your first sentence should get as much of the who/what/when as possible. At the very least that stuff should be in your first paragraph. SO:

It's been less than a decade since the city of Seattle was the hunting ground for the most prolific serial killer in U.S. History. Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, was convicted of the murders of 48 women.

OK. Is this a story about Gary Ridgway? It isn't? Well then what the fuck are we doing? We're going to start with the history lesson to prove you did some research? We need THIS GUY:

That's multiple Wire references in a single post. I think it's my brain's defense mechanism – start thinking about things that are particularly well written when I'm confronted with something particularly shitty. This “article” doesn't even get to the objective facts of the current case until the third paragraph. We learn that there have been at least 39 homicides so far. There's also an allusion to gang activity. But then we quickly devolve again into what reads like the Wikipedia page for “serial killers.”

From Jack the Ripper to Ted Bundy, the targets of serial killers are usually connected by similarities in age, gender, race, or a combination of the three.

I kept expecting to read “Webster's dictionary defines 'homicide' as...” The killings in Seattle, it is noted, seem to be completely random. And then S. Meyer seems to forget she was even trying to write a fake article, unless the by-line credits this article to “Bella's Swan's subconscious.” The resemblance is uncanny, otherwise.

The selection appears to be random. The motive seems to be killing for no other reason than to kill.
So why even consider the idea of a serial killer?

That last sentence is its own paragraph! What? Henry Mencken just rolled in his grave so hard he's technically buried in China now. Finally we get to some more information about the case – a real editor would slash the first eight paragraphs of this article, not that S. Meyer has a lot of experience with real editors – and our author tries to sneak a few too many details in. I know that a fake article is a great way to get some exposition out of the way fast, but we musn't be greedy. How would a reporter (and clearly a shitty one) know, for instance, that the crime scenes are “perfectly clean of evidence”? Why would the police release that kind of information? Later, a description of the ways victims have disappeared gets far too ridiculous:

30-year-old amateur boxer Robert Walsh entered a movie theater with a date; a few minutes into the movie the woman realized that he was not in his seat. His body was found only three hours later when firefighters were called to the scene of a burning trash Dumpster, twenty miles away.

So David Blaine is doing this, then? Is that the twist? Here's the kicker:

Only one conclusion is indisputable: something hideous is stalking Seattle.

That's right: the Pulitzer prize committee! “It took me three tries to read the last sentence,” Bella says. “Because it was the dumbest writing ever.”

BLOGGING ECLIPSE, pt. 15: Werewolf Bar Mitzvah

Chapter 10 (cont'd): Scent

At Bella's house, our heroes lament their sorry lot.

“What a mess,” I mumbled.

That's what she said! Bella, I mean.

“It does feel that way, doesn't it? Like it's coming at us from all sides these days.” He sighed.

SHOW DON'T TELL, S. Meyer. Edward asks if Bella has anything she'd like to ask – he's alluding to the party at La Push. Bella says she figured he had enough to worry about as it is. “You don't have to ask my permission, Bella,” Edward says. She doesn't?

“Bella,” Edward said. “I told you that I was going to be reasonable and trust your judgment. I meant that. If you trust the werewolves, then I'm not going to worry about them.”
“Wow,” I said, as I had last night.

THAT'S ALSO WHAT SHE SAID. Bella says she wants to bring her motorcycle back to La Push for the next few weeks, as in her last few weeks of being human, after which she will insist that Jacob sell it and make some money. Edward seems disappointed, which Bella assumes is his inner father-spirit disapproving of motorcycles. That was the OLD Edward, Bella, get with the times! At the Cullen garage, she learns the truth – Edward has gone and got himself his own bike so they could ride together. Bella's powers of description totally abandon her looking at what we can only assume is either Edward's bike or an Anish Kapoor sculpture. Try to visualize this:

It was big and sleek and silver and – even totally motionless – it looked fast.

?

But Edward realizes the bikes are Bella's thing with Jacob, and immediately backs off. He says he'll give the bike to Jasper. “Perhaps it's time he discovered a new way to travel,” Edward says. “After all, Alice has her Porsche now.” Yeah, because those two need yet another thing that makes them cooler than Edward and Bella.

“More sexual chemistry”- The Atlantic

Edward brings out a few things he bought Bella – a helmet for her motorcycle, and “one object that was black and shapeless.” (There's probably another Anish Kapoor sculpture for this.) It turns out to be a riding jacket, but it takes Bella a RIDICULOUS amount of time to figure it out. (What is wrong with her brain? The head protection might be too little, too late Edward.) She puts on the helmet and jacket for him – this is the least sexy fashion show ever, you're supposed to do it with lingerie Edward – and she says she feels “bulky.”

He seemed to be struggling for the right word. “You look...sexy.”

Edward totally gets off on safety precautions. Someday when their marriage starts to lose the spark he's going to get Bella to dress up in a flight attendant uniform and show him what to do in the event of a crash. Creepy, but true.

And then he pulled the helmet off so that he could kiss me.

That's like a stupid, awkward, nightmare version of the last sentence from Twilight, “And he leaned down to press his cold lips once more to my throat.” That one I liked. This I hate.

Edward drives Bella to the La Push border to hand her off to Jacob, which Bella likens to custody trade-offs when she was a kid. Sure, this is like, the most perfect divorce parallel ever. Assuming your mom is a vampire and your dad is a werewolf and their divorce resulted in the drawing up of a highly specific treaty that necessitated hand-offs of children across what is essentially a real DMZ, of course.

Edward and Jacob have a little pissing contest where Edward kisses Bella goodbye really hard and then when she gets to Jacob he hugs her really hard and then she goes back to Edward who goes down on her for a long time and then she goes back to Jacob who totally bangs her senseless and then she goes back to Edward who has constructed a sex-contraption like George Clooney in Burn After Reading and... well, okay, some of that happens.

Chapter 11: Legends

SPOILER ALERT: This chapter is incredibly fucking boring. Bella attends the werewolf bonfire where Billy Black tells the longest, most pointless story anyone has ever told. Last weekend I had dinner with my wife's family and her step-grandfather recapped for us the plot of the movie Shooter starring Mark Whalberg, seemingly in real time and without the help of any proper nouns whatsoever (including the title; Shooter was everyone's best guess). It was more entertaining than this.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Around the bonfire, Bella takes in the wolfy milieu. Jacob and Paul have each consumed ten or so hot dogs and are jokingly fighting over the last. Jacob is dipping said hot dog into the flames with a bent wire hanger, which is too richly symbolic an image to delve into here. And they're not even really joking; when Jacob refuses to give Paul the damn hot dog the guy's hands ball up into fists! But whatever, hair-trigger tempers are the least of the pack's worries these days. Speaking of which, Quil greets Bella with a kiss on the cheek, a gesture she returns with three bullets in his chest. Just kidding, I can only wish.

The remainder of the Clearwater family is present for what turns out to be a tribal council meeting and new werewolf induction ceremony. Bella realizes that Sue Clearwater must have taken her husband's place on the board of directors. “Did that make her children automatic members of La Push's most secret society?” Bella wonders. Are there other, less secret secret societies around the Rez? Also, how many people are on this damn reservation? How secret can the werewolf thing be? They are meeting on top of a cliff with a huge bonfire!

Bella is in top form tonight. First she stares at Leah Clearwater, searching for some hint of the rage she must feel with Sam and Emily present. Failing that, she turns her withering glare on Jared's imprint victim Kim, who she immediately deems ugly.

She had a wide face, mostly cheekbones, with eyes too small to balance them out.

Hey, fuck you Bella. But then she watches the way Jared watches Kim. And it is definitely the way guys look at girls. Just kidding, it isn't that at all.

It was like a blind man seeing the sun for the first time. Like a collector finding an undiscovered Da Vinci, like a mother looking into the face of her newborn child.

UM, MAYBE WE WANT TO RECONSIDER THAT LAST COMPARISON? Maybe we want to reconsider imprinting in general? Maybe we want to reconsider this whole book? I don't buy this love for a minute. If S. Meyer had said “it was like a 15-year-old seeing tits for the first time,” then I would have understood. But it doesn't stop Bella from basically falling in love with Kim.

Her skin looked like russet-colored silk in the firelight...the shape of her lips was a perfect double curve...

First of all: moratorium on “russet-colored.” S. Meyer feels like she has to qualify everything about Native Americans with the fact that they have dark skin. (“Jacob walked russet-coloredly toward me, a russet-colored smile crossing his russet-colored face.”) WE KNOW, THEY ARE ETHNIC. (“And this part is really important: this character is a non-white.”-S. Meyer)

Jacob says it's time for the stories; Quil and a few other recent wolf-converts have heard them before, but never knew they were true until now. So okay, they tell these stories at every meeting. Oral tradition is important after all (“Very important. Wait, what are you talking about?”-Alice Cullen). Why does Emily whip out a notebook and start writing everything down, though? Can't you just use the minutes from the last meeting?

Bella is surprised by the majestic Native-American qualities of Billy Black's russet-colored voice. Were it that his story was as interesting. I'll summarize:

Blah blah blah Quileutes blah blah small race blah blah lots of enemies good land blah blah one day the Quileutes learned to make their souls leave their bodies. Then one day one guy left his body and another took it and he was a bad guy. Blah blah the good guy's soul joined up with a wolf and defeated the bad body-stealer and then from then on they were wolves.

I could go on, or we could all listen to this adorable French girl tell a fairy-tale. I think the choice is obvious.

After Billy Black finally shuts up it becomes clear that the story was only one performance on the setlist. Quil Ateara's grandfather speaks next.

“That was the story of the spirit warriors,” Old Quil began in a thin tenor voice. “This song is called 'Sunday, Bloody Sunday.'”

This is the vampire story (finally) and it basically recounts the history of werewolf run-ins with vampires leading up to the Cullens' time. Once there was a particularly bad vampire attack, and the main character from Billy Black's story, Taha Aki, almost got killed. But his wife saved him by stabbing herself in the heart, which distracted the vampire long enough for Taha Aki to gain the upper hand. This story profoundly affects Bella. So much so that she falls asleep pretty much immediately; this girl is seriously sleep deprived, and she's not even getting laid! But before that happens, she thinks about the wife “with no special gifts or powers” who saved everyone – by killing herself! leave it to Bella to see heroics in the most passive-aggressive act possible – and laments that Quileute oral tradition is so lacking in specifics.

I wish they'd remembered her name...
Something shook my arm.

Gloria Steinem. Just kidding, it's only Jacob. She's suddenly in his car – some time has passed – and she briefly panics because she hasn't called Edward yet. But Jacob did it for her. Awwwww. Hey, wait – what is wrong with this story (and Jacob) that such a tiny gesture feels like a monumental act of kindness? Jacob brings Bella to the DMZ where Edward is waiting, pacing back and forth in front of his car. Cool your jets, buddy!

It's been a while since I've been very nitpick-y with S. Meyer's prose. For one thing, I feel like I've covered that, but there's also a great new tumblr-blog that has been picking S. Meyer apart with microscopic precision for the last two weeks or so. It's called “Reasoning With Vampires,” and if you're fuming about comma splices or split infinitives I recommend it wholeheartedly. Though at the rate they seem to be going they won't get to Eclipse for another 20 or 30 years.

I will take a minute to say, however, that S. Meyer's treatment of Native-American “dialect” is kind of vaguely insulting, since it essentially amounts to making them sound like the above French girl. I get that phrases like “And then the greatest magic happened” feel intuitively authentic, and maybe they would be – if Twilight was set on the American frontier in 1816. But it isn't. Native Americans sound like the rest of us, S. Meyer. But maybe in the hands of a less oblivious-seeming writer this wouldn't feel as offensive. And maybe we should count our blessings Billy Black doesn't fucking talk like The Hulk.

“Taha Aki no like Cold Man. Wolf smash face!”

Edward takes Bella home and puts her to bed; she has a Tony Soprano-esque dream in which Rosalie is an evil vampire attacking a wolf she “instinctively” recognizes as Billy Black. S. Meyer doesn't come right out and say the wolf is in a wheelchair, but how else would Bella be able to figure it out? Bella finds her dream-self dream-running toward the dream-conflict (I was holding out hope that Edward would tip the bed while she was sleeping, throwing off the dream-gravity, but no dice), wielding a knife and ready to kill herself, Quileute wife-style. Well, we certainly didn't wait too long to draw that comparison!

This chapter is full of transparent symbolism, actually. The next morning Bella wakes up and sees that Edward has been reading Wuthering Heights, this book's supposed inspiration, while she slept. I'm glad he's finally doing something constructive. Listening to Bella talk in her sleep had to get old sooner or later – it's bad enough when she's AWAKE. Imagine having a window into Bella's raw subconscious. On second thought, don't.

She quotes a long passage from the page Edward was on – Heathcliff is talking about another man whose heart he would very much like to rip out and whose blood he would very much like to drink. I haven't read Wuthering Heights in a while, but I'm pretty sure Heathcliff isn't actually a vampire, right? But his figure of speech is lost on Bella; she sees the scenario as very similar to her own. And we know that because she basically says “it was a lot like my situation.” Well, there is no better way to articulate the parallels between two works than to have a character just say those parallels out loud. Except for, you know, all of the other ways. And then, it was well deserved for the lion.

Previous entries can be found in the directory.