#i need to study it anthropologist style for awhile

[goldeneyedgirl]

Twificathon: Runaway

For @volturialice​, because she is way too sweet and excited about this fic. (I also found a chunk I have 0 memory of ever writing, but I like it.) This part is really old, and most likely going to be rewritten, especially the part of how mate-bonds work in this ‘verse, because I’m not at all happy with how its discussed here. And with that note, voila!

I could hear Jasper talking to the Cullens as Carlisle examined me.

“I found her wandering in the hills outside L.A,” Jasper said in a low voice. “She seemed to know me, from her dreams, and … begged me, to come with me.” He chuckled humorlessly. “I don’t know why I let her.”

“How long ago was this?” Carlisle asked.

“Three years,” Jasper said.

“Nomadic, I presume?” Carlisle continued. Jasper said nothing, but I felt movement – he must have nodded.

“Pneumonia,” Carlisle said finally. “One of the worst cases I’ve seen. She needs I.V antibiotics. She’s also malnourished and dehydrated. She needs food and bed rest.”

I could feel misery and shame rolling off Jasper. He couldn’t blame himself. It wasn’t his fault. He had protected and cared for me.

“Jas,” I managed.

“Alice.” I felt him take my hand and stroke my face. “It’s okay. We’re with the Cullens. They’re going to take care of you.”

//

I woke up to daylight flooding the bedroom I was set up in. I was tucked into a giant bed, the softest I had ever been in. I was propped up on a pile of cloud-like pillows. Machines were sitting beside the bed, and an I.V. was threaded into my left arm, oxygen tubes threaded into my nose.

I was wearing a soft blue cotton nightgown and socks. My hair had been brushed and braided.

The bedroom was beautiful – the bed was a white timber creation, made with yellow sheets and a floral duvet. Pretty damask white-on-white wallpaper covered the walls, and the paintings were all lovely watercolours.

A woman stuck her head around the door, and looked at me, beaming when she saw my open eyes.

“Hello, Alice. Edward said you were awake,” Esme said sweetly. “Carlisle is at work but should be home soon. I’m Esme.”

“Hello,” I croaked.

“You’re quite ill, Alice. A bad case of pneumonia. We’ve got you on antibiotics, but you need some rest.”

//

“I lived with my grandmother,” I said, my voice hoarse, as I picked at my lunch. “When she died, I was put into foster care.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Esme stroked my hair. “How on earth did you end up with Jasper?”

“I had a vision. I couldn’t stay,” I said simply.

“You were travelling with a vampire, kid,” Emmett’s voice is kind.

“My foster father was going to hurt me,” I said softly. “He thought I was retarded because of the visions. He… he would have killed me. When I saw Jasper, there were lots of choices he had to make. He could have killed me, he could have changed me or he could have protected me. I had to take that chance. Once… once I met Jasper and he didn’t kill me, I started seeing all of you.”

Esme was staring at me with horrified eyes. “I wish we’d known.”

“She can’t stay here,” Rosalie said from the door, her arms crossed over her chest.

Everyone looked at her.

“She’s human. She can’t stay,” Rosalie repeated.

The vision swept me. If Rosalie won, and they did send me away, I’d die alone. I didn’t know where Jasper was in my visions, but I was in the street at night, hit by a car. I lay, bleeding in the street, alone. Dead.

Edward looked at me, alarmed. “She can’t go anywhere, Rosalie,” he said quietly.

//

“Where’s Jasper?” I asked, my voice stony.

I tumbled outside, my socks soaking through as soon as I hit the snow.

“JASPER!” I shrieked. “JASPER!”

“Alice!” Esme and Edward were there, reaching for me.

“JASPER!” I shrieked. He would have been able to hear me. He could hear everything. How many times had he heard my mutters from across a field, and flicked me on the nose, “Don’t sass me, darlin.”

Edward picked me up. “Calm down, Alice,” he murmured. “It’s going to be okay.”

“He left me here,” I cried, gasping and croaking. “He left me and didn’t say goodbye.”

What were his last words to me?

“You need help, Alice.”

I struggled a bit in Edward’s grip, but even I knew that it was futile.

//

I could hear them outside my room, where I was curled into a ball, in fresh pyjamas and socks, with my I.V. and oxygen tubes back in place.

“I didn’t notice that he’d taken his things,” Esme was fretting. “He said he needed to hunt.”

“That’s all I heard from him, too,” Edward agreed. “A hunt. He was very conscious that we don’t follow the same diet; he didn’t want to cause us any problems. He was very grateful we were caring for Alice. Nothing else. He will come back.”

“He took his stuff, Edward,” Rosalie rolled her eyes. “He’s dumped the girl on us and hit the road.”

“He won’t leave her,” Edward shot back. “He hates himself at the moment – for how sick Alice was. He tried to do his best, but he had no clue what she needed. Apparently, they had a place – part of an abandoned motel in Vegas – that they set up as a home. But he was worried about the covens there, and they became nomads. He thought it would be safer for them. He was changed during the Civil War; he had no idea of how to provide for a teenage girl.”

“So?” Rosalie snapped.

“Every single thing he thinks about, considers, punishes himself for is because of her. There was a fight in New Orleans a year or so ago, and she ended up lacerating her arm - a major artery. He was the one that stitched her up. Without giving in to the thirst. He ripped the ones that attacked her to shreds.” Edward shook his head. “It’s fascinating, in their heads, how they function.”

“What are you getting at, Edward?” Carlisle asked.

“They’re mated,” Edward said flatly. “I tried to work out if there was something else, any other explanation, but there isn’t.”

“She’s human!” Esme exclaimed as Rosalie snarled, “she’s a child.”

“Oh, he’s never laid his hands on her,” Edward said. “He probably doesn’t even know it yet.” I could hear the discomfort in his voice. “She’s human and she hasn’t reached, uh, maturity yet. But the connection is definitely there.”

“I’ve seen it before,” Carlisle sounded tired. “In vampires who were changed young. Their mates protect them and provide for them like family until they are sexually mature.”

“So they essentially groom children,” Rosalie said in a deadly voice.

“No, nothing so sinister. The individuals in question are usually around sixteen or seventeen. It’s a mutual thing, an entirely platonic bond that evolves. It’s a natural progression, and entirely consensual. I’ve never seen it between a human and a vampire before, but Edward’s correct – it has all the hallmarks of a bond.”

“But he left her,” Emmett interjected. “If they were mated, how could he just leave her behind?” He sounded bewildered.

“He’s punishing himself. He thinks she’s safer with us, and he’s not convinced that he can adapt to our lifestyle,” Edward said. “And he adores her, but he has no idea how much he needs her.”

“Alice will stay with us,” Carlisle said finally. “She’s still sick and needs a proper place to live. And if she’s been associating with a vampire, she’ll be safer with us. When she’s better, she can join you all at school.”

“A human,” Rosalie said in a flat voice.

“She’ll help our cover,” Esme observed. “We’ll have to provide her with proper food, and she’ll make friends in town…”

“This is going to be a disaster,” Rose muttered.

“She’ll die if we send her away,” Edward retorted. “She had a vision when Rosalie first told her she couldn’t stay. She’d be alone, without Jasper, and she gets killed in a hit and run. She dies alone on a street somewhere, bleeding into the gutter, trying to call for him.”

“If necessary,” Carlisle began slowly, “we can arrange for her to be sent away to boarding school. She’ll be safe there, and our cover is maintained. The lawyers can write up documents to make sure she’s provided for and kept safe.”

“We don’t even know her,” Rosalie hissed.

“She’s one of us, Rosie,” Emmett said gently. “Don’t you feel it? She’s a Cullen.”

“And even if she were a complete stranger, it would be the right thing to do,” Esme said firmly. “She’s a senior anyway – surely it will be safe enough for her to finish high school with us.”

Edward winced. “Uh…”

“They lied to us,” Rosalie’s voice was back to the ‘I told you so’ tone.

“No. She lied to Jasper when they met. She told him she was almost sixteen,” Edward said. “That would have been the deal-breaker for him, if she’d been any younger. Sixteen was old enough to marry and have a family in his day. She would have seen that.”

“How old is she, Edward?” Carlisle asked slowly.

“She was thirteen when she found Jasper. She’s sixteen now,” he said.

“Poor little thing; she must have been so frightened,” Esme murmured.

“Jasper kidnapped a thirteen-year-old child and bonded to her. Lovely. These are really people I want to welcome into my home,” Rosalie spat.

“She didn’t look eighteen,” was all Emmett said.

Carlisle sighed. “Fine. She’ll be a Freshman.”

[char27martin]

The Corpse Stops Here: Author Archer Mayor

The clues are everywhere. If you’re interested in discovering where longtime New York Times bestselling mystery writer Archer Mayor gets his ideas—among his fans’ favorite questions—you might start by taking a peek into his office in Vermont.

I did.

This post is by bestselling author Robert Kiener.

Kiener has been an editor and staff writer with Reader’s Digest in Asia and Europe, and now writes for the magazine and freelances from Stowe, Vt.

His book, Presumption of Guilt, is available wherever books are sold.

This article originally appeared in the February 2017 Writer’s Digest.

Where Ideas Come From

On a bookshelf is a copy of a well-thumbed medical reference book, The Pathology of Homicide. Nearby is a collection of the Journal of Forensic Sciences. Atop another shelf are numerous embroidered police force badges and caps. But the real giveaway is a sign that sits near the 66-year-old author’s vintage oak roll-top desk. It reads: “The Corpse Stops Here.”

Mayor—a lean, fit, gray-haired six-footer—laughs as he holds up the sign and explains, “My daughter gave me that. She has almost as black a sense of humor as I do.”

As many of the devoted readers of his 27 well-researched, cleverly plotted police procedurals know, Mayor comes by his expertise from personal experience. He is a medical examiner for the state of Vermont, and is regularly called to investigate unattended, sometimes suspicious, deaths. “Technically, my official title is ‘death investigator’,” says the Yale graduate with a sly grin. “But that sounds too gloomy.”

He points to the beeper hanging from his waist and explains he is on call around the clock for a week each month. Just last night he was called out to look into the death of an 80-year-old man, and wasn’t home until after midnight. Still, he is jovial for someone with death in his job title.

Mayor is quick to explain that he never uses the exact details from any of his investigations in his novels. “That would be unethical. Not kosher,” he says. “The people I meet have already suffered enough and the last thing I want to do is exploit them.” What he will do, however, is what he describes as mining the details of a case.

[Female Protagonists in Crime Fiction: What You Need to Know]

“My work as an examiner means that I am continually meeting people in crisis and under stress, and that offers me emotional content that I can incorporate in my writing,” he says.

Mayor, who has been called “the boss man on procedures” and “one of the most sophisticated stylists in the genre” by The New York Times, published the first book in his series, Open Season, in 1988. Since then he’s published almost one a year, the latest being Presumption of Guilt. All feature super sleuth Joe Gunther of the fictitious Vermont Bureau of Investigation, and take place largely in the state Mayor has called home since the early 1980s.

“People often ask me, ‘Why Vermont?’ They think we just have a lot of maple syrup and contented cows here,” Mayor says. “But we’re just like everywhere else; we have our share of bad guys … and girls.”

Of course, Mayor has an inside track on the seamier side of the Green Mountain State. In addition to being a medical examiner, he worked as a local police patrol officer and as an investigator for the sheriff’s office for nearly a decade. He has also volunteered as an EMT and firefighter. Mayor was offered the patrolman and investigator jobs long after he’d been writing novels. “The law enforcement folks realized I’d learned a lot about the field from my years as a medical examiner and all the research I’d done for my books over the years,” he says.

He is now retired from all but his medical examiner gigs, but even with 2,000-plus emergency calls under his belt to draw on for fiction fodder, he still conducts extensive research before embarking on a new book. “I admit I just get a real kick out of research,” Mayor says. “I am a historian by training and nature. Maybe I like research more than writing!”

Blending analysis and creativity is almost innate in Mayor, who grew up in a family of scientists, majored in history in college and published two history books in the 1980s before turning to fiction. “Credibility is very important to me,” he says, picking up a legal pad to show me a list of the 16 interviews with experts in various fields he conducted for his work-in-progress.

“For example, I needed to interview a police dog handler to make sure I got my details right,” he explains. “I sent him the 10-page section I wrote involving the police dog and he got back to me with corrections, telling me things like, ‘The leash is too short,’ or, ‘You wouldn’t take the dog off the leash at that stage in the pursuit.’”

[The Differences Between a Crime Novel, Mystery Novel and Thriller Novel]

Mayor is off and running, excitedly relaying how a forensic anthropologist once helped him understand what would happen to a body entombed in concrete for 40 years. His hazel eyes light up as he remembers how he spent days tracking down an obscure study of “concrete intubations.” “Great stuff!” he says. “Getting details like that right gives my writing a firmer foundation, more gravitas.”

The art of writing matters to Mayor, who confesses to having “a filing cabinet full of failed novels … that taught me how to write. Now, if I can write elegantly enough to occasionally sneak up on a reader so that she or he can pause and say, ‘Wow! That was well said,’ that gives me an extra boom!”

Mayor says it took him awhile to learn the importance of “not getting in the reader’s way.” As he explains, “I was leading a writing workshop once when I thought, What makes a happy reader? It’s all about being invited in by the writer. If a writer begins showing off with obscure or precious writing, that gets in the readers’ way. They begin to say, ‘He won’t let me in.’ The job of the writer is to ignite a fictional daydream in the brain of the reader and then step away and become invisible so the story becomes the readers’ own. You don’t want them to even know you are in the room.”

Working without a formal outline, Mayor enjoys the chance discoveries and the element of the unexpected his method of writing offers him. He continually self-edits: “As I write, I pause after each paragraph and look at how I am saying what I am saying. I have multiple goals to achieve in each paragraph. Sometimes it’s clarity, sometimes humor, content or giving the reader nuts-and-bolts information to take away. I am trying to write the best-written mystery book the reader has read all year long.”

His first editor is his wife and publishing partner, Margot. “She’s also my most vicious editor,” Mayor says with a smile. “We have the most intimate of editorial relationships.” He also sends a completed manuscript to a group of friends who read for everything from style to grammar to content. He does about 20 rewrites on each book.

“Archer is a very, very, very good writer,” says Keith Kahla, executive 
editor at St. Martin’s Press and Mayor’s longtime editor. “I know that may sound simplistic, but he is so good at everything from characterization to plot to using the English language. Not all writers are. These are the things that make him so successful. His manuscripts never need more than, at most, minor polishing.”

Although Mayor won’t offer even a clue about the subject of the 28th Joe Gunther book, to be published next fall, he does say this: “Like all my books, it’s a whydunnit as opposed to a whodunnit. I’m not interested in merely solving puzzles; I want to find out why someone did what they did. That’s the real mystery.”

10 Crime Fiction Writing Resources for One Low, Bundled Price Learn the necessary tools, techniques, and devices to keep your readers breathlessly turning pages and write and publish your very own crime, thriller, or suspense novel. Order Now!

  The post The Corpse Stops Here: Author Archer Mayor appeared first on WritersDigest.com.

from Writing Editor Blogs – WritersDigest.com http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/there-are-no-rules/corpse-stops-author-archer-mayor