My Twilight Fan Fiction: Its Title and Epigraph

(See the earlier post on my Twilight fan fiction here.)

Stephenie Meyer names her books after celestial phenomena (Twilight, New Moon, etc., etc.), and I will do the same. Eric Yorkie's narrative is entitled Sunspot, a "spot or patch appearing from time to time on the sun's surface, appearing dark by contrast with its surroundings." The title is also a mean allusion to Eric's acne.

I've been saving up similar terms for the chapters, the more recherché the better: parhelion, iridule, alchochoden, fogbow. It's only fair to admit that I got that last one from playing Free Rice, but "alchochoden" I encountered in situ in John Gardner's Jason and Medeia.

Meyer starts each novel with an epigraph, biblical or Shakespearian. I have mine ready:

For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. (Matthew 25:29)

It's the end of the Parable of the Talents: Before going on a trip, a master entrusts each of his servants with some money; two of them use their shares to make more money, but the third buries his share in the ground; when the master returns, he scolds the third servant, takes his money, enunciates the enduring truth quoted above. And in the next verse that third servant gets cast "into the outer darkness: in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

"The outer darkness." What a great phrase.

Niftily enough, "talent" is a Greek word and properly denotes a unit of weight or value, "two talents of gold" or some such. The more familiar sense of the word comes precisely from an allegorical reading of the passage from Matthew, because the talents of money that the servants ought to make good use of are like the aptitudes and abilities bestowed upon us, metaphorically our "talents." Biblical exegesis embodied in a deceptively plain and simple vocab item!