Gloaming: Author's Notes

Here we go: my notes on Gloaming and how it compares to Twilight. How much did I pull from the stories besides “girl meets mind-reading vampire”? Probably more than you think.

MAJOR CHARACTERS

• Swan Dive: Obviously the Bella equivalent — viewpoint character, moving to a new town, immune to mental powers — but with large dashes of her father Charlie — single parent struggling to relate to their moody teenage daughter, investigating series of strange murders — since I didn’t think Bella’s basic story hook was all that hooky. However, whenever Bella did something terrible (which was often), I had her do the opposite. Bella doesn’t listen to other people except for Edward, Swan does listen. Bella lies to people close to her without a care in the world, Swan’s lies tear her up. And so on. Obviously, her name comes from the “Swan” part of Bella Swan, with a little bit added to make it more pony-like. I tried to come up with a solid reason for her mental shields besides “because”, but everything felt forced.
• Levanta: She has the remaining characteristics of Bella that I don’t find disturbing — withdrawn teenage girl, depressed, cooks. I probably should’ve tried for a more Twilight-based name for her, but I was lazy when starting out, so she’s named for an easterly wind (that is, blowing from east to west) over the Mediterranean. Her initial depression comes from Bella’s depression over Edward leaving her in New Moon, although with a more plausible source. I toyed with the idea of putting her on her school’s track, field, and cloud team, in reference to early drafts of the first movie where Bella was a track star, but couldn’t find a good place for it.
• Crooked River: Based on James, who you probably haven’t heard of if you haven’t read the books. He’s a vampire who appears out of nowhere in the last couple of chapters, decides he wants to snack on Bella in spite of the Cullens immediately moving to protect her, and eventually gets killed by them after shenanigans. Sound contrived? You have no idea. I put him right at the beginning to give this conflict more buildup. I couldn’t get a good-sounding name from the meaning of his — “James” means “supplanter” — so instead I took it from the name of his actor, Cameron Gigandet — “Cameron” means “crooked river”, a decently ponyish name.
• Cascadia: Almost entirely an original character. She fills the role of “small-town police chief” of Charlie’s that Swan hadn’t filled yet, but that’s it. Her name comes from the Cascadia bioregion that makes up part of the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada, which is more commonly known as the Pacific Northwest. She was originally Olympia (from the Olympic Peninsula on which Forks, WA is located), but then I got greedy and decided I wanted to use that name elsewhere.
• Homeguard: Obviously the Edward analogue, what with the mind reading, but also with shades of the Cullen patriarch, Carlisle, in his early days as a vampire and his experience as a preacher and doctor. I specifically gave him (what I hope is) somewhat archaic speech patterns because old-style speech is supposedly one of the ways Bella knows there’s something up with Edward, even though his voice is perfectly modern. Like Edward, he’s nervous that his vampirism means he doesn’t have a soul, but I tried to play that up a bit more. I gave him a career as a firefighter (which I wish had come up a bit more) because, in his mind, it’s solely about protecting people and he can put his strength to work without it being obvious. “Edward” means “rich guard”, but I thought that while that wasn’t a good pony name, “homeguard” was decently close while still being pony-ish.
• Clearwater: Technically takes up the role of Bella’s friends, but since they were space fillers, mostly an original character. She’s named for a friend of Charlie’s, Harry Clearwater, who dies in New Moon as a contrived way to kick off the climax. Fun fact: the 190 proof alcohol she likes (Everclear in the real world) is illegal in Washington. I imagine it’s illegal in that part of Equestria, too, and Cascadia simply looks the other way because Clearwater isn’t hurting anypony and it doesn’t interfere with her police work.
• Speckle: Based on Victoria, James’ vampire girlfriend. After James gets killed, she seeks revenge on Edward by killing Bella — eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, mate for a mate. She also set up an army of vampires to attack the Cullens, although without the help of Crystalline’s equivalent, the Volturi (see below). While Speckle shares the red hair/mane of her inspiration, Victoria appeared so little that she didn’t have much characterization; I extrapolated a little based on what her actions said about her. As with James/River, I couldn’t get a good pony name from hers (guess what “Victoria” stands for?), so I took her actress’s name, Bryce Dallas Howard, and got “speckled” from “Bryce”.
• Hailey: Probably the closest to her main inspiration, Alice Cullen/Hale, who’s legitimately great even in the original. She keeps the same “Pinkie Pie lite”ness of a bubbly personality and seeing the future, as well as the lack of memories as a human/pony, but I also added in Emmett’s and Jasper’s love of fighting (them being other vampires in the Cullen coven). Her full name, Hearty Hail, is half reference to Alice’s last name, half pun on “hale and hearty”. I made her a sexton so she’d be Sexton Hail. No, I’m not sorry.
• Esteemed Rebirth: Based off of Bella’s and Edward’s child sociopathic, egocentric, immature demon spawn from Breaking Dawn, Renesmee Nessie. Her name means the same thing as the sources of Renesmee’s Nessie’s name: Esme means “esteemed”, Renee means “rebirth”. The fact that it happens to line up with her goal is just a lucky bonus. Her portrayal is primarily based on a more negative view of Renesmee Nessie, rather than the rose-colored glasses Bella sees her through: Rebirth’s behavior towards ponies (dismissive and condescending at best) isn’t that different from Renesmee’s Nessie’s behavior towards humans (albeit exaggerated a bit and more open) while Rebirth’s power is simply a rewording of Renesmee’s Nessie’s power (she can show anyone she’s touching the truth and they can’t deny it, and that’s near-verbatim; it’s supposed to be a sweet form of telepathic communication, but… look at that description). In Breaking Dawn, Bella isn’t immune to Renesmee’s Nessie’s power because potatoes. This didn’t make sense to me, so Swan is immune to Rebirth’s.
• Tributary: Based on Aro, leader of the Volturi (see right below). “Aro” means “tributary”, which was a sufficiently mini-equine name. Aro was originally friends with Carlisle Cullen, so when he needed to oppose the Cullens in Breaking Dawn, it felt horrifically contrived (even moreso than it already was, I mean), so Homeguard and Tributary harbor visible, if restrained, animosity towards each other in their first meeting to make Tributary’s later villainy more believable. Aro’s view towards humans is roughly the same as Tributary’s. In Breaking Dawn, Aro is supposed to suddenly have been an evil villain all along, dastardly plotting to control vampires, but his actions don’t bear that out. A lot of Tributary’s personality, a devious but controlled plotter who always has a plan, is based on what Bella thinks Aro is like.
• Crystalline: Based on the Volturi, a group of vampires led by Aro who oversee vampire society and enforce the laws that keep them secret. As with Aro, they’re made out to be conniving bastards in Breaking Dawn (apropos of nothing) who are trying to control vampires, but nothing they actually do lends any credence to that. As with Aro, I made Crystalline actually be conniving bastards who are trying to control vampires. I considered calling them the Colturi, but decided that the pun wouldn’t make sense to anybody who hadn’t read suffered through the worse Twilight books. As the Volturi are named after their hometown, Volterra, once I’d based Equestrian vampirism in the Crystal Empire, naming them was just a matter of finding a good word derived from “crystal”.
• Bay Vanner: Based on Bree Tanner, a young vampire girl turned by Victoria in Eclipse who surrendered to the Cullens in the final battle. She was killed by the Volturi, but since Crystalline wasn’t around when Bay was introduced, they never got a chance to kill her. Bay’s name is a horse pun on Bree’s: bay is a horse coloration — arguably the stereotypical horse coloration, with a brown coat and black mane — while a (Gypsy) Vanner is a breed of horse. I thought about having her die during the final battle, in keeping with her dying in Eclipse, but killing a 14-year-old didn’t really fit in with the rest of the fic (not to mention the psychic ignorance I gave her making targeting her a bit tricky).

PLOT BY BOOK

• Twilight: The bulk of this book is the romance between Bella and Edward. Considering I threw out the romance (which I’ll get to eventually), there goes most of the book. Instead, I played up the antagonism from James/River; James doesn’t appear until the last 20% of Twilight, and even then, he appears out of nowhere, while River appears in the first chapter. Moreover, Edward reveals the truth about himself to Bella when he saves her from random thugs in a city’s abandoned warehouse district, so I simply replaced the thugs with River and his hunt. However, I was still able to get a few “romance” scenes from this; Swan and Homeguard discussing vampirism over a meal comes from this book, as does their bonding in a clearing in the forest. The specific method with which Homeguard’s secret came out, with River killing a bear and then deciding to kill her, came about because Edward kept going on about how dangerous he was, and yet (due to the limitations of first-person narration, admittedly) we never saw it. This was a way to actually have vampires be dangerous on-screen, even though Homeguard has enough control over himself that he doesn’t go on about the threat he poses.
• New Moon: Even more of this plot is about wuv: Edward leaves and Bella’s sad about it for two dozen chapters, then she learns that Edward’s trying to commit suicide because he thinks she’s dead and she has to run to save him. With no romance, there goes most of what passes for the plot. The only real things I kept are Bella’s depression (planted onto Levanta, and even then, Swan tries to talk to her almost immediately when Charlie let Bella wallow for months), Charlie investigating strange deaths (which we never get to see, sadly), and a meeting with the Volturi at the end over what to do with this human who knows about vampires. But the Volturi seemed to bend over backward to make it easy for Bella, so Crystalline wasn’t swayed by the same arguments the Volturi were and Swan had to do some arguing of her own. I tried to take the scene where Bella jumps off of a cliff into the ocean because it triggers her hallucinations of Edward (sound fucked up? It’s worse) and rework it into Swan jumping off of a cliff to escape a pursuing vampire (and also show that her name isn’t just a name), but it always felt contrived. Victoria is technically trying to get to Bella for the death of James, but she never appears.
• Eclipse: Probably the closest to the original, mostly just faster-paced and without a love triangle. The very basic plot — Victoria creates a vampire army to get back at Bella and Edward — is the same, although the Cullens were much slower on the uptake (they didn’t realize Victoria was behind the army until near the end because I don’t know) and they were content with letting a vampiric serial killer run wild across Seattle as long as said serial killer didn’t hurt them. The book ended with Victoria bringing her army out to take on the Cullens, rather than the Cullens going to her. A small break-in scene, where Victoria grabs one of Bella’s shirts for another vampire to get her scent from and Bella freaks out when she realizes what happened, was tweaked to have River break into Swan’s home earlier on as a threat. Victoria didn’t kill anyone close to Bella and rarely seemed all that dangerous, so Speckle killing Clearwater tied the story’s events together a bit more tightly and served as a reminder of how little she cares about pony life.
• Breaking Dawn: Considering 75% of this book is back and forth over Bella’s and Edward’s baby little monster, that’s gone. Don’t worry, you didn’t miss much. Most of the bits that aren’t about the monster go nowhere. I bounced around making Swan a vampire, as Bella becomes a vampire in this book, but the faster pace meant there wasn’t a good opportunity for it to happen. The Volturi come to look into Renesmee Nessie towards the end of the book, thinking she violates vampire laws against turning children, but leave after three chapters of talking in spite of building up a colossal smackdown. I actually included the smackdown. Basically the only thing this “plotline” has in common with mine is anxiety over the Volturi/Crystalline coming.
• Romance, lack thereof: You’ll notice that there’s no romance between Swan and Homeguard. This actually isn’t because I thought the romance was unworkable, far from it; romance is a bit outside my usual stories but even as late as halfway through writing, I was considering having Swan and Homeguard fall for each other in the end (although not until the end). But since I’d decided Levanta’s depression was partly due to Thunderhead’s death, having Swan fall in love again so shortly after her husband had died would seem weird, so I dropped it entirely.
• Werewolves, lack thereof: You’ll also notice there are no werewolves or werewolf equivalents anywhere to be seen. For the most part, they only added pointless love triangles and TEH DRAMAZ to the original stories, with Jacob being one of only three to get any real characterization, so I just removed them without a thought. However, I did stick some of the less abhorrent aspects of Jacob — getting Bella out of her funk by working with her on a hobby of his — onto Levanta’s friend Babbling Brook; just replace “amateur artist” with “amateur mechanic” and you’ve got the early parts of their relationship. I wanted to give Brook a larger role but couldn’t find a place for her.

OTHER RANDOM FACTS

• Several scenes were reworked specifically to give Swan more to do than Bella, primarily the confrontation with Speckle/Victoria. In Eclipse, Edward was around, so Bella just sat and watched as they fought rather than taking a nailgun to the psycho who wanted to eat her. In fact, the nailgun scene was also one of the first scenes I came up with when writing. Also, I will fully admit that I made Levanta an artist solely so she could stab a vampire in the eye with her pencil.
• The quick, simple death of Swan’s husband — just happening to die in a bad storm during a normal day of work — was a deliberate response to big, complicated backstories that can take chapters to explain fully and are usually given in lengthy infodumps (which are particularly bad in Twilight, and yet not even the worst instance of them I’ve seen). Aware that Homeguard had just given a long infodump of a backstory, I also tried paring his down as best I could, but ultimately couldn’t reduce it more without him sounding out-of-character. I settled for Swan pointing out how long he’d been talking.
• The real Forks was named for the forks in several nearby rivers, so Delta took its name from a vaguely similar feature of a river. I thought about naming it “Spoons”, but decided that was too silly. Fawkes, the city Swan was in before she had to move, is a multi-series pun; Bella is originally from Phoenix, Fawkes in Harry Potter is a phoenix, so Phoenix, Arizona became Fawkes, Equestria (Fawkes, Marizona?). I didn’t go with “Philomena” because that would be a bit too obvious.
• I got the idea of crossbows shooting stakes as anti-vampire weapons from Daybreakers, where they’re the main weapon of the human resistance on vampire-dominated Earth. A realtor sign as an improvised stake comes from the remake of Fright Night; it was less successful there, since it missed the heart, but did slow the staked vampire down.
• In longer, multi-chapter fics like this, as opposed to one-shots, my chapters tend towards about four or five thousand words, give or take. I deliberately wrote these chapters shorter and faster because a major problem with Twilight (and some other books/fics I’ve read) is long chapters where nothing happens.
• Swan telling the truth about vampires to Cascadia, the latter immediately accepting it, and that solving all secrecy problems is a dig at two tropes. Bella refuses to tell Charlie about vampires until she has to, even though him knowing the truth would smooth out their relationship considerably, and never feels much of a twinge at lying to him (hence also Swan’s anxiety about lying to Cascadia). Cascadia’s “yeah, that sounds about right” reaction is a swipe at urban fantasies that have the magical world hidden from the human world because of some vague “humans don’t notice what’s around them” bullshit (as opposed to actual effort on the supernaturals’ part, like Harry Potter or Artemis Fowl), even though humans are so attentive they create conspiracy theories about things that aren’t really there. This hiding can even continue when the magical world is responsible for a terror attack that kills more people than 9/11 and humans don’t look into it at all because that would break the masquerade wide open (cough Dresden Files cough). I’ll admit it’s not the best analogy, since magic is already proven to exist in Equestria, but it was satisfying to write.
• I envision Fluttershy as sharing Swan’s job as a ranger: a government land specialist whose focus is in animals. However, while Swan sometimes has to deal with animals violently, Fluttershy’s kindness and sweetness are so all-encompassing and genuine that she can persuade animals to stop whatever they’re doing simply by asking nicely ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
• I wanted to write Homeguard, Hailey, and the other vampires to be closer to folklore and mythology, even down to needing to be invited to enter homes, but decided that since I was rewriting Twilight, the vampires had to be reasonably close to Twilight vampires. However, I still removed the sparkling (I couldn’t make it meaningful or scary, so FUCK THAT) and added stakes to give normal ponies a chance against the vampires’ OP-ness. Twilight vampires also have rock-hard skin because… so I instead gave them the consistency of corpses: you can stab them easily, they just won’t feel anything.
• Speckle was originally going to mail Swan a picture of Clearwater’s dead body rather than a vaguely ominous note, but that created all sorts of little time issues that bugged me, even though they weren’t that important.
• I have no idea where “Sombra as the father of vampires” came from. I think I just wanted to use him more, since the show’s writers certainly didn’t. I considered having him actually return in the end only to get staked, but considering Crystalline was examining Delta as a source of equine sacrifice, the requirements for that turned too dark too quickly.

Overall, while I’m not proud of this fic turned out — to start, I think following Twilight severely limited my creativity and I could’ve characterized the side characters a bit better — I’m not ashamed of it, either. I feel like I did well with what I had, it was a learning experience for me, and it got my creative juices flowing. It’s not bad, it’s just one of my lesser works (in my opinion).

Besides, if nothing else, when somebody with thin skin responds to my criticism with, “Let’s see you do better!”, I can respond with, “I rewrote the entire Twilight series out of spite. Don’t tempt me.”

If you’ve got a question, drop it in the comments, and I’ll get to it ASAP!

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

"Track, field, and cloud" is a wonderful ponification. I'm going to have to remember that.

I was expecting Clearwater to be a werewolf up until she died, associating her more with Leah.

I made her a sexton so she’d be Sexton Hail. No, I’m not sorry.

Nor should you be. You should be sorry because you never gave her a chance to shout "PROPERTY DAMAGE!" or suchlike during the climax.

I never made the Nessie-Rebirth connection, but now that I'm aware of it, it's fantastic.

Honestly, I felt like there was a decent amount of chemistry between Swan and Homeguard. By the last scene, they've bypassed the Meyerish simpering and have comfortably nestled themselves in "old married couple" territory.

I call Fluttershy's occupation "ecosystem manager." Ranger is an admittedly much more succinct term for that.

In all, again, fantastic work all around. Thank you for the rundown on how you transmuted crap into gold.

[River Babble]

Besides, if nothing else, when somebody with thin skin responds to my criticism with, “Let’s see you do better!”, I can respond with, “I rewrote the entire Twilight series out of spite. Don’t tempt me.”

HAHAHA XD That is AWESOME

Whether you feel proud of it or not, I am happy to say that I THOROUGHLY enjoyed this fic. If that doesn't mean too much to you, I would like to reiterate that I TYPICALLY HATE VAMPIRES. They make me uncomfortable, with the blood-drinking and all. But you drew me in, first with interest over how you were going to rewrite the Twilight series (which I've never read, although I saw some of your journal entries while reading them), then by some genuinely likeable characters (I REALLY like Homeguard, and his struggle as a preacher worried over whether or not he still has a soul, and Luna's comment that he must if he's worried about it... I'm a Christian and that just in general really endeared him to me), and really just overall with excellent action, build-up, splashes of quality humor (because any story that cuts out the humor entirely in order to be TEH DRAMAZ is doomed), and a happy finish made me SUPER EAGER for new chapters and put this in my Favorites pile. Thanks for your work on this! And congratulations on making a really neat story purely out of spite. XD

[Bugsydor]

I made her a sexton so she’d be Sexton Hail. No, I’m not sorry.

You should definitely not be sorry. I'm just sad I didn't notice sooner.

And it's also fantastic that "Nessie" got the villainous role she was clearly gunning for.

You didn't go where I was expecting with the story. Heck, I didn't even expect you to rewrite the entire series as a single work.

You may not feel proud of it, but this work is an accomplishment. You took a smoldering sack of turds and polished it into something I enjoyed reading, if nothing else. I really need to get around to reading more of your works.