In Which I Tolerate Eclipse: Chapter 12 -- Time · 1:40pm May 16th, 2018
Alice on a good day is amazing.
“By the way, I love my gift. You shouldn’t have.”
“Alice, I didn’t!”
“Oh, I know that. But you will.”
Bella, Edward, and Alice are walking to the car after school when Alice drops that the Cullens are having a graduation party for her. Bella’s surprised it’s so close to graduation already.
In theory, I was anxious, even eager to trade mortality for immortality. After all, it was the key to staying with Edward forever.
CM + 1
But now, it’s finally hitting home to Bella that she’s abandoning everything she knows, taking a leap of faith. Edward notices her shock and tries to reassure her that she can wait. Bella, however, wants to be a vampire so she’s not a burden on the Cullens anymore; her humanity and mortality makes them all go out of their way to protect her. The two of them have yet another discussion on how Edward doesn’t want Bella to become a vampire. The conversation shifts to how Bella doesn’t want to marry Edward so quickly out of high school. There’s an interesting bit on how Edward was already a man, culturally speaking, when he was turned, but like most interesting things in this series, it’s not followed up on.
The next morning, we get another reminder (via newspaper) on the killings going on in Seattle. Edward says Alice hasn’t seen anything and is worried her foresight is failing. He wants to talk to Jasper, as he has some experience with this sort of thing. Bella and Edward skip school and go to the Cullens’. A debate ensues, with the family mostly split on whether or not to act. Jasper decides that he needs to show Bella what happened to him. He rolls up the sleeve of his sweater to reveal that his arm is covered in vampire bite marks.
Clinginess Meter: 16
See that? See all that? Sixteen pages. These books really love to take their time.
One of the things I like about reading fanfiction is that the short length of a lot of the stories means that, as fanfiction writers write, they figure out what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes, you can get writers who squeeze out musings on war and a full character arc in less than two thousand words without it feeling rushed. Here, there’s virtually nothing that hasn’t already been covered in some way.
I know I said this before, but I’ll say it again. Chapters should have some element of change in them. There needs to be something different between the beginning and ending of the chapter. This is a clear example of self-indulgence; it could probably be categorized as “character development”, but “character development” is all it is. It’s like the backstory chapters; it offers nothing else besides its central purpose. This is a book unable to do multiple things at once.
It's like the rice cake of narrative progression. It exists, but there's so little to it that you have to wonder why.
Do you mean to tell me he was *gasp* BITTEN?! You know, like literally every other vampire?
So, Stephanie Meyers released a new book. It's called Life and Death, it's basically Twilight genderswapped