TWILIGHT | NEW MOON | ECLIPSE | BREAKING DAWN | MIDNIGHT SUN
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TWILIGHT
TWILIGHT PLOT SUMMARY | TWILIGHT COVER | THE STORY BEHIND TWILIGHT
Twilight is the debut, young-adult vampire-romance novel by author Stephenie Meyer. Twilight was initially rejected by 14 agents, but became an instant bestseller when published originally in hardback in 2005, debuting at #5 on the New York Times Best Seller list within a month of its release and later peaking at #1. That same year, Twilight was named one of Publishers Weekly's Best Children's Books of 2005. The novel was also the biggest selling book of 2008 and, to date, has sold 17 million copies worldwide, spent over 91 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, and been translated into 37 different languages.
TWILIGHT PLOT SUMMARY | TWILIGHT COVER | THE STORY BEHIND TWILIGHT
Twilight is the debut, young-adult vampire-romance novel by author Stephenie Meyer. Twilight was initially rejected by 14 agents, but became an instant bestseller when published originally in hardback in 2005, debuting at #5 on the New York Times Best Seller list within a month of its release and later peaking at #1. That same year, Twilight was named one of Publishers Weekly's Best Children's Books of 2005. The novel was also the biggest selling book of 2008 and, to date, has sold 17 million copies worldwide, spent over 91 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, and been translated into 37 different languages.
It is the first book of the Twilight series, and introduces seventeen-year-old Isabella "Bella" Swan, who moves from Phoenix, Arizona to Forks, Washington and finds her life in danger when she falls in love with a vampire, Edward Cullen. The novel is followed by New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn.
***SPOILER ALERT***
TWILIGHT PLOT SUMMERY
Isabella "Bella" Swan moves from sunny Phoenix, Arizona to rainy Forks, Washington to live with her father, Charlie, while her mother, Renée, travels with her new husband, Phil Dwyer, a minor league baseball player. Bella attracts much attention at her new school and is quickly befriended by several students. Much to her dismay, several boys compete for shy Bella's attention.
When Bella is seated next to Edward Cullen in class on her first day of school, Edward seems utterly repulsed by her. He disappears for a few days, but warms up to Bella upon his return; their newfound relationship reaches a climax when Bella is nearly run over by a fellow classmate's van in the school parking lot. Seemingly defying the laws of physics, Edward saves her life when he instantaneously appears next to her and stops the van with his bare hands.
Bella becomes determined to find out how Edward saved her life, and constantly pesters him with questions. After tricking a family friend, Jacob Black, into telling her the local tribal legends, Bella concludes that Edward and his family are vampires who drink animal blood rather than human. Edward confesses that he initially avoided Bella because the scent of her blood was too desirable to him. Over time, Edward and Bella fall in love.
Their relationship is disturbed when another vampire coven sweeps into Forks. James, a tracker vampire who is intrigued by the Cullens' relationship with a human, wants to hunt Bella for sport. The Cullens attempt to distract the tracker by splitting up Bella and Edward, and Bella is sent to hide in a hotel in Phoenix. There, Bella receives a phone call from James, who claims to be holding her mother captive. When Bella surrenders herself, James attacks her. Before she is killed, Edward, along with the other Cullens, rescues her and defeats James. Once they realize that James has bitten Bella's hand, Edward successfully sucks the venom from her bloodstream and prevents her from becoming a vampire, after which she is brought to a hospital. Upon returning to Forks, Bella and Edward attend their school prom and Bella expresses her desire to become a vampire, but Edward refuses.
TWILIGHT COVER
Stephenie Meyer has stated that the apple on the cover represents the forbidden fruit from the Book of Genesis. It symbolizes Bella and Edward's love, which is forbidden, similar to the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, as is implied by the quote from Genesis 2:17 that is quoted at the beginning of the book. It also represents Bella's knowledge of what good and evil are, and the choice that she has in partaking of the "forbidden fruit", Edward, or choosing not to see him. An alternate cover features Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, the actors who play Bella and Edward, respectively, in the film adaptation.
THE STORY BEHIND WRITING TWILIGHT
STEPHENIE MEYER quote:
I get a ton of questions about how I came up with the story of Twilight and how I got it published. I may be killing my FAQ page by doing this, but here is the whole story:
(Warning: there are Twilight spoilers contained in the following; if you don't want to ruin the suspense, stop reading.....now. Warning #2: As you might have guessed from the length of my book, I can't tell a short story—this is going to take a while. You have been warned.)
The Writing: I know the exact date that I began writing Twilight, because it was also the first day of swim lessons for my kids. So I can say with certainty that it all started on June 2, 2003. Up to this point, I had not written anything besides a few chapters (of other stories) that I never got very far on, and nothing at all since the birth of my first son, six years earlier.
I woke up (on that June 2nd) from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately. For what is essentially a transcript of my dream, please see Chapter 13 ("Confessions") of the book.
Though I had a million things to do (i.e. making breakfast for hungry children, dressing and changing the diapers of said children, finding the swimsuits that no one ever puts away in the right place, etc.), I stayed in bed, thinking about the dream. I was so intrigued by the nameless couple's story that I hated the idea of forgetting it; it was the kind of dream that makes you want to call your friend and bore her with a detailed description. (Also, the vampire was just so darned good-looking, that I didn't want to lose the mental image.) Unwillingly, I eventually got up and did the immediate necessities, and then put everything that I possibly could on the back burner and sat down at the computer to write—something I hadn't done in so long that I wondered why I was bothering. But I didn't want to lose the dream, so I typed out as much as I could remember, calling the characters "he" and "she."
From that point on, not one day passed that I did not write something. On bad days, I would only type out a page or two; on good days, I would finish a chapter and then some. I mostly wrote at night, after the kids were asleep so that I could concentrate for longer than five minutes without being interrupted. I started from the scene in the meadow and wrote through to the end. Then I went back to the beginning and wrote until the pieces matched up. I drove the "golden spike" that connected them in late August, three months later.
It took me a while to find names for my anonymous duo. For my vampire (who I was in love with from day one) I decided to use a name that had once been considered romantic, but had fallen out of popularity for decades. Charlotte Bronte's Mr. Rochester and Jane Austen's Mr. Ferrars were the characters that led me to the name Edward. I tried it on for size, and found that it fit well. My female lead was harder. Nothing I named her seemed just right. After spending so much time with her, I loved her like a daughter, and no name was good enough. Finally, inspired by that love, I gave her the name I was saving for my daughter, who had never shown up and was unlikely to put in an appearance at this point: Isabella. Huzzah! Edward and Bella were named. For the rest of the characters, I did a lot of searching in old census records, looking for popular names in the times that they'd been born. Some trivia: Rosalie was originally "Carol" and Jasper was first "Ronald." I like the new names much better, but every now and then I will slip up and type Carol or Ron by accident. It really confuses the people who read my rough drafts.
For my setting, I knew I needed someplace ridiculously rainy. I turned to Google, as I do for all my research needs, and looked for the place with the most rainfall in the U.S. This turned out to be the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. I pulled up maps of the area and studied them, looking for something small, out of the way, surrounded by forest... And there, right where I wanted it to be, was a tiny town called "Forks." It couldn't have been more perfect if I had named it myself. I did a Google image search on the area, and if the name hadn't sold me, the gorgeous photographs would have done the trick. (Images like these of the Hoh Rainforest (a short drive from Forks). Also see forks-web.com ). In researching Forks, I discovered the La Push Reservation, home to the Quileute Tribe. The Quileute story is fascinating, and a few fictional members of the tribe quickly became intrinsic to my story.
All this time, Bella and Edward were, quite literally, voices in my head. They simply wouldn't shut up. I'd stay up as late as I could stand trying to get all the stuff in my mind typed out, and then crawl, exhausted, into bed (my baby still wasn't sleeping through the night, yet) only to have another conversation start in my head. I hated to lose anything by forgetting, so I'd get up and head back down to the computer. Eventually, I got a pen and notebook for beside my bed to jot notes down so I could get some freakin' sleep. It was always an exciting challenge in the morning to try to decipher the stuff I'd scrawled across the page in the dark.
During the day, I couldn't stay away from the computer, either. When I was stuck at swim lessons, out in 115 degrees of Phoenix sunshine, I would plot and scheme and come home with so much new stuff that I couldn't type fast enough. It was your typical Arizona summer, hot, sunny, hot, and hot, but when I think back to those three months, I remember rain and cool green things, like I really spent the summer in the Olympic Rainforest.
When I'd finished the body of the novel, I started writing epilogues...lots of epilogues. This eventually clued me in to the fact that I wasn't ready to let go of my characters, and I started working on the sequel. Meanwhile, I continued to edit Twilight in a very obsessive-compulsive way.
My older sister, Emily, was the only one who really knew what I was up to. In June, I'd started sending her chapters as I finished them, and she soon became my cheerleading section. She was always checking in to see if I had something new for her. It was Emily who first suggested, after I'd finished, that I should try to get Twilight published. I was so stunned by the fact that I'd actually finished a whole, entire book, that I decided to look into it.
Getting Published: To put it mildly, I was naive about publishing. I thought it worked like this: you printed a copy of your novel, wrapped it up in brown paper, and sent it off to a publishing house. Ho ho ho, that's a good one. I started googling (naturally) and began to discover that this was not the way it is done. (Movies lie to us! Why?! A side note: you will not be able to enjoy the new Steve Martin version of Cheaper by the Dozen when you know how insanely impossible the publishing scenario it contains is.) The whole set up with query letters, literary agents, simultaneous submissions vs. exclusive submissions, synopsizes, etc., was extremely intimidating, and I almost quit there. It certainly wasn't belief in my fabulous talent that made me push forward; I think it was just that I loved my characters so much, and they were so real to me, that I wanted other people to know them, too.
I subscribed to WritersMarket.com and compiled a list of small publishers that accepted unsolicited submissions and a few literary agencies. It was around this time that my little sister, Heidi, mentioned Janet Evanovich's website to me. In her Q and A for writers section, Janet E. mentioned Writers House, among a few others, as "the real thing" in the world of literary agencies. Writers House went on my wish list as the most desirable and also least likely.
I sent out around fifteen queries (and I still get residual butterflies in my stomach when I drive by the mailbox I sent the letters from—mailing them was terrifying.). I will state, for the record, that my queries truly sucked, and I don't blame anyone who sent me a rejection (I did get seven or eight of those. I still have them all, too). The only rejection that really hurt was from a small agent who actually read the first chapter before she dropped the axe on me. The meanest rejection I got came after Little, Brown had picked me up for a three-book deal, so it didn't bother me at all. I'll admit that I considered sending back a copy of that rejection stapled to the write-up my deal got in Publisher's Weekly, but I took the higher road.
My big break came in the form of an assistant at Writers House named Genevieve. I didn't find out until much later just how lucky I was; it turns out that Gen didn't know that 130,000 words is a whole heck of a lot of words. If she'd known that 130K words would equal 500 pages, she probably wouldn't have asked to see it. But she didn't know (picture me wiping the sweat from my brow), and she did ask for the first three chapters. I was thrilled to get a positive response, but a little worried because I felt the beginning of the book wasn't the strongest part. I mailed off those three chapters and got a letter back a few weeks later (I could barely get it open, my hands were so weak with fear). It was a very nice letter. She'd gone back with a pen and twice underlined the part where she'd typed how much she enjoyed the first three chapters (I still have that letter, of course), and she asked for the whole manuscript. That was the exact moment when I realized that I might actually see Twilight in print, and really one of the happiest points in my whole life. I did a lot of screaming.
About a month after I sent in the manuscript, I got a call from Jodi Reamer, an honest to goodness literary agent, who wanted to represent my book. I tried really hard to sound like a professional and a grownup during that conversation, but I'm not sure if I fooled her. Again, my luck was tremendous (and I don't usually have good luck—I've never won anything in my life, and no one ever catches a fish when I'm in the boat) because Jodi is the uber-agent. I couldn't have ended up in better hands. She's part lawyer, part ninja (she's working on earning her black belt right now, no kidding), a pretty amazing editor in her own right, and a great friend.
Jodi and I worked for two weeks on getting Twilight into shape before sending it to editors. The first thing we worked on was the title, which started out as Forks (and I still have a teeny soft spot for that name). Then we polished up a few rough spots, and Jodi sent it out to nine different publishing houses. This really messed with my ability to sleep, but luckily I wasn't in suspense for long.
Megan Tingley, of Megan Tingley Books, of Little, Brown and Company, read Twilight on a cross-country flight and came back to Jodi the day after the Thanksgiving weekend with a preemptive deal so huge that I honestly thought Jodi was pulling my leg—especially the part where she turned the offer down and asked for more. The upshot was that, by the end of the day, I was trying to process the information that not only was my book going to be published by one of the biggest young adult publishers in the country, but that they were going to pay me for it. For a very long time, I was convinced it was a really cruel practical joke, but I couldn't imagine who would go to these wild extremes to play a hoax on such an insignificant little hausfrau.
And that's how, in the course of six months, Twilight was dreamed, written, and accepted for publication.
Things keep getting crazier, what with the movie deal and all the pre-publication attention that Twilight continues to receive. Though I've gotten impatient from time to time, I'm glad I've had the last two years to try to come to terms with the situation. I'm greatly looking forward to finally having Twilight on the shelves, and more than a little frightened, too. Overall, it's been a true labor of love, love for Edward and Bella and all the rest of my imaginary friends, and I'm thrilled that other people get to meet them now.
--Stephenie
NEW MOON
NEW MOON PLOT SUMMARY | NEW MOON DEVELOPMENT | THE STORY BEHIND NEW MOON
New Moon is a fantasy-romance novel by author Stephenie Meyer, and is the second book in the Twilight series. According to Meyer, the book is about losing true love. The title refers to the darkest phase of the lunar cycle, indicating that New Moon is about the darkest time of the protagonist Bella's life.[2] The book was originally released in hardcover in 2006, following the successful publishing of Meyer's debut novel Twilight. A film adaptation was released on November 20, 2009.
Upon its publication in the United States, New Moon moved quickly to the top of bestseller lists, becoming one of the most anticipated books of the year. It peaked at #1 on both the New York Times Best Seller list and USA Today's Top 150 Bestsellers, and was the biggest selling children's paperback of 2008 with over 5.3 million copies sold.
New Moon has been translated into many diverse languages, including Czech, Thai, Russian, Norwegian and Arabic.
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Moon_(novel)
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***SPOILER ALERT***
NEW MOON PLOT SUMMARY
On Isabella "Bella" Swan's 18th birthday, Edward Cullen, the vampire she loves, and his family throw her a birthday party. While unwrapping a gift, she gets a paper cut, which causes Edward's adopted brother, Jasper, to be overwhelmed by her blood's scent and attempt to kill Bella. To protect her, Edward decides to end their relationship, and the Cullens move away from Forks. This leaves Bella heart-broken and depressed.
In the months that follow, Bella learns that thrill-seeking activities, such as motorcycle riding, allow her to "hear" Edward's voice in her head. She also seeks comfort in her deepening friendship with Jacob Black, a cheerful companion who eases her pain over losing Edward. Bella later discovers that Jacob and other tribe members are shape-shifters who assumes gigantic wolf forms. Jacob and his pack protect Bella from the vampire Laurent and also Victoria, who seeks revenge for her dead mate, James, whom the Cullens killed in Twilight.
Meanwhile, a series of miscommunications leads Edward to believe that Bella has killed herself. Distraught over her supposed suicide, Edward flees to Italy to provoke the Volturi, vampire royalty who are capable of killing him. Alice and Bella rush to Italy to save Edward, arriving just in time to stop him. Before leaving Italy, the Volturi tell Edward that Bella, a human who knows that vampires exist, must either be killed or transformed into a vampire. When they return to Forks, Edward tells Bella that he has always loved her and only left Forks to protect her. She forgives him, and the Cullens vote in favor of Bella being transformed into a vampire, to Edward's dismay. However, Edward gives Bella a choice: either she lets Carlisle change her after her graduation, or, if Bella agrees to marry him, he will change her himself.
Publication and reception
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Moon_(novel)
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NEW MOON DEVELOPMENT
After Meyer finished writing Twilight, she found herself writing multiple, hundred-paged epilogues, and has said, "I quickly realized I wasn't ready to stop writing about Bella and Edward." She began writing a sequel, which was entitled Forever Dawn and skipped over Bella's final year of high school. While Meyer was still writing Forever Dawn, she learned that Twilight was going to be published and marketed as a young-adult novel.Wanting the next book to be aimed at a similar audience, she decided to write a new sequel, New Moon, which took place during Bella's senior year of high school.
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Moon_(novel)
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THE STORY BEHIND WRITING NEW MOON
**A note: I don't pull any punches here, so if you haven't read New Moon and you don't want to be spoiled, don't read this.**
STEPHENIE MEYER quote:
Writing a sequel is a very different experience than writing a story. It was for me, at least.
If you've read the story behind Twilight, then you know that I didn't set out to write a novel or begin a career as an author. I was just writing down a story for my personal enjoyment, letting it grow as it would and lead where it would. No pressure, just fun.
The first sequel I wrote to Twilight—Forever Dawn—was more of the same. I wasn't planning a sequel any more than I was planning to write a book in the first place. Originally, Twilight had a more defined ending. But, when it was ended, I started writing epilogues. After I'd written three epilogues, all of them over a hundred pages long, I realized I wasn't ready to stop writing about Bella and Edward. One of those epilogues turned into Forever Dawn.
(People often ask me if I'm ever going to make Forever Dawn public. The answer is no. For one thing, it's not great—it's downright embarrassing in some places. However, some of the content will work as a loose outline for book four, so I can't tell you what happened, either.)
I was about three hundred pages into Forever Dawn when my life got turned upside down. Twilight was going to be published. People were going to read what I was writing. More specifically, young adults were going to be reading what I was writing. Unintentionally, I'd written a young adult novel. I realized pretty quickly that Forever Dawn did not follow the rules of YA. Because I was caught up in the story, I finished Forever Dawn anyway, knowing that it would never see the light of day; I gave it to my big sister as a birthday gift. And then I started on the real sequel.
The biggest non-YA thing I'd done with Forever Dawn was this: I'd pretty much passed over the rest of Bella's high school experience entirely, skipping ahead to a time in her life with more mature themes. So, as I began to sketch out New Moon, I went back to Bella's senior year of high school and asked my little cast of characters, "What happened?"
I swiftly regretted asking them for the story. Because they gave me a story I wasn't expecting. More specifically, Edward told me something I didn't want to hear.
I should probably mention here that I am not crazy (that I know of), it's just that I am a character writer. I write my stories because of my characters; they are the motivation and the reward. The difficulty with strong, defined characters, though, is that you can't make them do something that is out of character. They have to be who they are and, as a writer, they're often out of your control.
As I started plotting New Moon (untitled at that point), it became clear that Edward was Edward, and he would have to behave as only Edward would. And, because of that, Edward was leaving.
NO! I didn't want Edward to leave. I pitched a fit every bit as violent and tearful as those I've seen in New Moon discussion forums. I tried to talk him out of it. I presented him with other plot options. I begged. Edward remained unmoved.
Someday, when Midnight Sun (Edward's version of Twilight) is available, I think you'll understand better what was going on in the boy's head. See, just as Bella doesn't think she's good enough for Edward, Edward sees himself as a soulless monster destroying Bella's life and endangering her afterlife. The incident with Jasper acts as a catalyst, forcing him to act. He is determined to save Bella. He thinks the best way to do this is to take the vampires out of her life.
Is he being silly? In some ways, yes. But he can't see any other way to protect Bella. Edward's dealing with the idea that if he hadn't been quick enough, if he hadn't read Jasper's thoughts just in the nick of time, then would that—death—have been better for Bella than a life with Edward? If she died at eighteen and went to heaven, wouldn't that be better than an immortal but soulless and damned existence? Edward thinks so. However, he knows he'd never be able to watch her die. Consequently, he'd better get away from her before something happens that makes biting her a necessity...
So there I was, with Edward leaving. It was a hard pill to swallow, but once I accepted the inevitability of it, I had an interesting question on my hands. (And writers live for interesting questions.)
WHAT IF... What if true love left you? Not some ordinary high school romance, not some random jock boyfriend, not anyone at all replaceable. True love. The real deal. Your other half, your true soul's match. What happens if he leaves?
The answer is different for everyone. Juliet had her version, Marianne Dashwood had hers, Isolde and Catherine Earnshaw and Scarlett O'Hara and Anne Shirley all had their ways of coping.
I had to answer the question for Bella. What does Bella Swan do when true love leaves her? Not just true love, but Edward Cullen! None of those other heroines lost an Edward (Romeo was a hothead, Willoughby was a scoundrel, Tristan had loyalty issues, Heathcliff was pure evil, Rhett had a mean streak and cheated with hookers, and sweet Gilbert was much more of a Jacob than an Edward). So what happens when True Love in the form of Edward Cullen leaves Bella?
I let Bella answer the question for herself, writing to see what she would do. It was hard to write her pain, because I had to live it to write it, and I was often writing through my tears. At the same time, it was always interesting. Bella surprised me with her grit and dogged determination. She pushed through the agony, living for others—Charlie in this case—as has always been her style.
(Side note: there are those who think Bella is a wuss. There are those who think my stories are misogynistic—the damsel in distress must be rescued by strong hero.
To the first accusation, I can only say that we all handle grief in our own way. Bella's way is no less valid than any other to my mind. Detractors of her reaction don't always take into account that I'm talking about true love here, rather than high school infatuation.
I emphatically reject the second accusation. I am all about girl power—look at Alice and Jane if you doubt that. I am not anti-female, I am anti-human. I wrote this story from the perspective of a female human because that came most naturally, as you might imagine. But if the narrator had been a male human, it would not have changed the events. When a human being is totally surrounded by creatures with supernatural strength, speed, senses, and various other uncanny powers, he or she is not going to be able to hold his or her own. Sorry. That's just the way it is. We can't all be slayers. Bella does pretty well I think, all things considered. She saves Edward, after all. Side note/rant over. Back to the story.)
And thus was born the basic premise of New Moon, and with it the title. To follow after Twilight, I needed a time of day to reflect the mood of the sequel. As this is the blackest period of Bella's life, I thought it appropriate to name the book after the darkest kind of night, a night with no moon.
When the advanced reading copies began to fall into the hands of my fans, I asked people read New Moon twice, promising that I would explain why later. It's later, and this is why: the first time through New Moon, I've found that readers are so anxious about the absence of Edward that they can't settle into the middle portion of the book. They skim and speed read and flip ahead until, at last, they find him again. However, at that point they've missed the main section of the novel almost completely. On a second reading, knowing that Edward will return to the story at the proper place and time, the reader can slow down and enjoy the wondrousness that is Jacob Black.
And with that as a segue, on to the benefits!
I didn't realize until I was working on the resolution how much my characters had gained from this experience. Vital stuff. Without this painful separation, Bella might never have realized that Edward really is hers to keep. No matter how perfect she thinks he is, or how imperfect she thinks she is, he belongs to her. Words can't quite capture the life-changing nature of this knowledge for Bella.
Equally as cataclysmic—Edward finally realizes the intensity of Bella's feelings for him, something he has always underestimated. Here's the thing about Edward: he knows human nature pretty well. He's seen a hundred thousand human relationships from the inside, and none of them have come close to touching the depth and everlasting devotion of Carlisle's and Esme's love, or Alice's and Jasper's, or even Rosalie's and Emmett's. Can you blame him for thinking himself—after one hundred years of immortal experience—capable of a more profound love than his eighteen-year-old human girlfriend? Edward is, understandably, a bit of a know-it-all. He learns a lot through this experience, the most important being that Bella's feelings for him are an exception to the human rule. Something else he learns (not quite as important, but still good to know) is that, despite all his knowledge, he is fully able to make hideous mistakes in judgment.
Ah, and then there is my favorite gift that New Moon gave to me: Jacob Black.
Jacob's development into a major character was a strange journey. Originally, Jacob was just a device. In Twilight, Bella needed a way to find out the truth about Edward, and the conveniently located Quileute Tribe, with all their fantastic legends, provided a cool option for that revelation. And so Jacob was born—born to tell Bella and Edward's secret.
Something happened then that I didn't expect. Jacob was my first experience with a character taking over—a minor character developing such roundness and life that I couldn't keep him locked inside a tiny role. (Since Jacob, this has reoccurred with several other meant-to-be-minor characters. I really love it when this happens, though it often destroys my outlines.) From the very beginning, even when Jacob only appeared in chapter six of Twilight, he was so alive. I liked him. More than I should for such a small part. Bella liked him. Her instinctive trust and affection came without my intervention. And it wasn't just us; my agent did, too. "I love that Jacob kid," Jodi said (or something to that effect-this all happened in 2003). My editor agreed. "Can we get more Jacob in the story?" Megan asked.
Oh yes, we could!
I was writing New Moon and editing Twilight simultaneously. So, when Jacob Black started taking over New Moon, I was able to go back and weave Jacob and Billy throughout Twilight more centrally.
Lots of people give me more credit than I deserve; they think I knew Jacob was a werewolf from the very beginning. This is not the case. Twilight was supposed to be a stand alone novel, remember. There was no thought of werewolves in my mind as I wrote it. The Quileute (Quill-yoot) legends Jacob tells Bella in chapter six of Twilight are all genuine Quileute stories that I learned when I was researching the tribe (which is a real tribe with a truly fascinating and mystical history). All actual Quileute legends, except for the vampire myth about the 'cold ones.' I latched onto the wolf story (the actual Quileute legend claims that the tribe descended from wolves transformed by a sorcerer) because it fit with my sketchy knowledge of vampires and werewolves always being at each others' throats (ha ha, pun intended). The dream Bella had of Jacob transforming into a wolf to protect her had no foreshadowing significance at the time. It was just my way of letting Bella's subconscious articulate the situation.
Of course, I of all people should know that dreams can have a serious impact on your life.
Bella's wolf dream was always one of my favorite visual images from Twilight. When I started working on New Moon, that image stuck with me. And I thought to myself, wouldn't it be cool if it was true—if ALL of Jacob's legends were founded in absolute fact? What if Jacob was descended from wolves?
It all started to come together then. Sam on the beach in Twilight was no longer just a believer in old traditions—he was the first contemporary wolf. Billy's warnings were more vital—he had concrete evidence on his hands, rather than just suspicions. And Jacob, my poor, sweet Jacob, had a whole secret heritage just waiting to come crashing down on him.
At that point all the crucial supports of the story were in place, and I only had to write it. Ha. Easier said then done.
It's hard to explain how joyous the writing process was for me when I was creating Twilight. It was something I did for fun and excitement, with no concern for what anyone else might think, because no one else was ever going to read it. With New Moon, I knew people were going to read it. And some of those people were going to have bright red pens in hand while reading. I knew enough about the editing process to know that there were painful changes ahead; the parts I loved now might not make the final cut. I was going to have to rethink and revise and rework. This made it very hard to put the words down, and I had a horrible feeling much like stage fright the whole time I was writing.
It took about five months, but the editing process was much longer and more difficult than the same process with Twilight. New Moon was a very hard story to tell, not only emotionally, but also functionally. It needed a lot of work. The New Moon outtakes I posted explain some of the bigger renovations that I had to make.
The good news is that I got over—or rather got used to—the stage fright. Book three was much easier in a multitude of ways. I learned a lot through the New Moon experience, and I grew as a writer. Even better, my characters grew and matured in interesting ways that gave me so much to work with throughout the rest of the series! I'm writing book four at this moment in time, and let me tell you, Forks is a very exciting place to be these days.
--Stephenie
Source : http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/nm_thestory.html
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ECLIPSE
ECLIPSE PLOT SUMMARY | ECLIPSE COVER
Eclipse is the third book in the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. It continues the story of 18-year-old Bella Swan and her vampire love, Edward Cullen. Eclipse is preceded by New Moon and followed by Breaking Dawn. The book was released on August 7, 2007 with an initial print run of 1 million copies, and sold more than 150,000 copies in the first 24 hours alone.
Eclipse was the fourth bestselling book of 2008, only behind Twilight, New Moon, and Breaking Dawn,. and was also ranked #1 on Publishers Weekly's list of "Bestselling Hardcover Backlist Children's Books" in 2008 with over 4.5 million copies sold.
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_(novel)
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***SPOILER ALERT***
ECLIPSE PLOT SUMMARY
The story opens with the revelation that Seattle, Washington is being plagued by a string of unsolved murders, which Edward suspects is caused by a new vampire that is unable to control its thirst for human blood. As Edward and Bella apply to colleges, Bella explains to Edward her desire to see her friend, Jacob Black, a werewolf. Although Edward fears for her safety, Bella insists that neither Jacob nor his wolf pack would ever harm her, and she begins visiting him occasionally. Meanwhile, Alice Cullen has a vision that Victoria, a vampire who is hunting Bella for revenge, has returned to Forks. A few days later, Edward proposes to Bella and, despite harboring an aversion to marriage, she accepts.
Bella and the Cullens soon realize that the Seattle murders are being committed by an "army" of newborn vampires, controlled by Victoria. The Cullens join forces with the wolf pack to combat this threat. As everyone else prepares for battle, Edward, Bella, and Jacob camp in the mountains, hidden during the battle, where they are later joined by Seth Clearwater, a young wolf pack member, to wait out the fight.
In the morning, Jacob becomes upset when he overhears Edward and Bella discussing their engagement and threatens to join the fight and get himself killed. To stop him, Bella kisses Jacob and comes to realize that she is in love with him as well. During the battle, Victoria tracks Edward's scent to Bella's forest hiding place, and Edward is forced to fight. After Victoria and her army are successfully destroyed, Bella explains to Jacob that while she loves him, her love for Edward is greater. After receiving a wedding invitation from Edward, Jacob runs away in his wolf form to escape his pain, angry and heartbroken at Bella's decision to become a vampire.
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_(novel)
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ECLIPSE COVER
The book jacket features a torn red ribbon. Although it was supposed to be disclosed to the public in May 2007 at the Eclipse Prom, Barnes & Noble and Stephenie Meyer's official website premiered the newly released cover in March 2007, along with a preview summary of the book's plot. The broken ribbon represents choice, as in the book Bella must choose between her love for the vampire Edward Cullen, and her friendship with the werewolf Jacob Black. Meyer also stated that the ribbon represents the idea that Bella is unable to completely break away from her human life.
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_(novel)
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BREAKING DAWN
BREAKING DAWN PLOT SUMMARY | BREAKING DAWN DEVELOPMENT
Breaking Dawn is the fourth and final novel in the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. Divided into three parts, the first and third sections are written from Bella Swan's perspective and the second is written from the perspective of Jacob Black. Breaking Dawn was released on August 2, 2008 at midnight release parties in over 4,000 bookstores throughout the US. From its initial print run of 3.7 million copies, 1.3 million were sold in the first 24 hours of the book's release, setting a record in first-day sales performance for the Hachette Book Group USA.
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Dawn
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***SPOILER ALERT***
BREAKING DAWN PLOT SUMMARY
Breaking Dawn is split into three separate parts. The first part details Bella's marriage and honeymoon with Edward, which they spend on a private island off the coast of Brazil. Two weeks into their honeymoon, Bella realizes that she is pregnant and that her condition is progressing at an unnaturally accelerated rate. After contacting Carlisle, who confirms her pregnancy, she and Edward immediately return home to Forks, Washington. Edward, concerned for Bella's life and convinced that the fetus is a monster as it continues to develop with unnatural rapidity, urges her to have an abortion. However, Bella feels a connection with the child and refuses.
The novel's second part is written from the perspective of wolf shape-shifter Jacob Black, and lasts throughout Bella's pregnancy and childbirth. Jacob's Quileute wolf pack, not knowing what danger the unborn child may pose, plan to destroy it, also killing Bella. Jacob vehemently protests this decision and leaves, forming his own pack with Leah and Seth Clearwater. Bella soon gives birth, but the baby breaks many of her bones and she loses massive amounts of blood. In order to save her life, Edward changes her into a vampire by injecting his venom into her heart. Jacob, who was present for the birth, almost immediately "imprints"—an involuntary response in which a shape-shifter finds his soul mate—on Edward and Bella's newborn daughter, Renesmee.
The third section of Breaking Dawn shifts back to Bella's perspective, finding her changed into a vampire and enjoying her new life and abilities. However, the vampire Irina misidentifies Renesmee as an "immortal child", a child who has been turned into a vampire. Because "immortal children" are uncontrollable, creating them has been outlawed by the Volturi. After Irina presents her allegation to the Volturi, they plan to destroy Renesmee and the Cullens. In an attempt to survive, the Cullens gather other vampire clans from around the world to stand as witnesses and prove to the Volturi that Renesmee is not an immortal child. Upon confronting the gathered Cullen allies and witnesses, the Volturi discover that they have been misinformed and immediately execute Irina for her mistake. However, they remain undecided on whether Renesmee should be viewed as a threat to vampires' secret existence. At that time, Alice and Jasper, who had left prior to the confrontation, return with a Mapuche called Nahuel, a 150-year-old vampire-human crossbreed like Renesmee. He demonstrates that the crossbreeds pose no threat, and the Volturi surrender. Edward, Bella and Renesmee return to their home in peace.
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Dawn
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BREAKING DAWN DEVELOPMENT
The title, Breaking Dawn, is a reference to the beginning of Bella's life as a newborn vampire. The cover is a metaphor for Bella's progression throughout the entire series; she began as the physically weakest player on the board, the pawn, but at the end she becomes the strongest, the queen.
The plays The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream both influenced Breaking Dawn. Originally, Meyer wrote a book titled Forever Dawn, which was a direct sequel to Twilight. While the basic storyline remained the same, Forever Dawn was narrated completely from Bella's point of view, the werewolves and Jacob were "only sketchily developed", Victoria and Laurent were both alive, and there was an epilogue. Meyer went on to say that she "may post some extras someday if I ever have time to go back through the Forever Dawn manuscript—it's just as long as Breaking Dawn."
In regard to Renesmee's unique name, Meyer wrote that she "couldn't call her Jennifer or Ashley. What do you name the most unique baby in the world? I looked through a lot of baby name websites. Eventually I realized that there was no human name that was going to work for me, so I surrendered to necessity and made up my own." Meyer decided to include the pregnancy in her story while she was researching vampires and came across the legend of the incubus, a demon who could father children.
Meyer states in regard to ending the series that:
"The Twilight Saga is really Bella's story, and this was the natural place for her story to wind up. She overcame the major obstacles in her path and fought her way to the place she wanted to be. I suppose I could try to prolong her story unnaturally, but it wouldn't be interesting enough to keep me writing. Stories need conflict, and the conflicts that are Bella-centric are resolved."
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Dawn
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LEAKING OF MIDNIGHT SUN | LATEST NEWS ON MIDNIGHT SUN
MIDNIGHT SUN: EDWARD'S VERSION OF TWILIGHT
STEPHENIE MEYER quote:
Midnight Sun is an exercise in character development that got wildly out of hand (as do many of my projects).
While I was procrastinating some real editing work (I'm always at my most creative when procrastinating), I started to wonder how the first chapter of Twilight would read if it were written from Edward's perspective. There is so much more to his side of the story than there is to Bella's in that first chapter. After all, Bella only knows that an incredibly gorgeous boy is looking at her funny. Meanwhile, Edward is suffering through one of the most momentous days of his very long life! First there's the shock and frustration of not being able to hear Bella's thoughts, then the wild, monstrous reaction to her scent, followed by the incredible expenditure of self-control that it takes to not kill her... His side of Bella's first day at Forks High School is a hundred times more exciting than her own.
Though I didn't have time to work on it right away, the idea of letting Edward have his chance to speak stuck with me. I couldn't shake it. I found myself thinking his words in the middle of the night and jotting down phrases he would use while I was waiting in line at the post office. As soon as I finished my real work, I sat down and let Edward get his say.
Writing chapter one, "First Sight," from Edward's point of view was an exciting experience; I actually had my pulse racing as I typed. When I finished, I was truly pleased with my creation. Here was the other side of the story that no one knew. Here was the truth of what Edward had been through. I felt like I knew my Edward even better, and I was sure his dialogue would be more insightful in future novels. The end. Exercise over.
Ha ha. It wasn't long before I was thinking about Edward in Alaska, Edward upon his return to Forks, Edward's side of that fateful conversation in Biology... Chapter two started to write itself in my head, while I kept telling myself that I didn't have time to write a book for fun when I had real books to write. (My mother seconded that opinion—she thinks I work too hard).
But when a story demands to be written, there's no way to resist. And the more I wrote, the more I became convinced that Edward deserved to have his story told. At first I was planning to post it all here on my website, but I changed my mind for two reasons, the most important being that Edward's version is much longer than Bella's—Edward over-thinks everything. I'm not even half way done, and the page count is near three hundred. The second reason that I changed my mind is a little bit silly—I just would really love to have a pretty, matching, bound version of Midnight Sun to put beside Twilight on top of my desk. So I'm going to try to have it published as a complementary novel to Twilight. It will take a while, because I can only work on it between editing stints, but I hope that someday I'll be able to see Midnight Sun on the bookstore shelves next to Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and etc... (Fueling my belief that Midnight Sun is worthy of publishing is my mother's about face—after reading the first eleven chapters, she thinks it's magic and says I should go for it.)
And here I was going to write just a short paragraph of introduction. You see what I mean about things getting out of hand?
Because I just can't wait out the years it will take to reach publication for people to begin to understand Edward, here is my original character development exercise, Edward's version of Bella's first day at Forks High School, the first chapter of Midnight Sun.
--Stephenie
Source :http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/midnightsun.html
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THE LEAKING OF MIDNIGHT SUN ON THE INTERNET
STEPHENIE MEYER quote:
As some of you may have heard, my partial draft of Midnight Sun was illegally posted on the Internet and has since been virally distributed without my knowledge or permission or the knowledge or permission of my publisher.
I have a good idea of how the leak happened as there were very few copies of Midnight Sun that left my possession and each was unique. Due to little changes I made to the manuscript at different times, I can tell when each left my possession and to whom it was given. The manuscript that was illegally distributed on the Internet was given to trusted individuals for a good purpose. I have no comment beyond that as I believe that there was no malicious intent with the initial distribution.
I did not want my readers to experience Midnight Sun before it was completed, edited and published. I think it is important for everybody to understand that what happened was a huge violation of my rights as an author, not to mention me as a human being. As the author of the Twilight Saga, I control the copyright and it is up to the owner of the copyright to decide when the books should be made public; this is the same for musicians and filmmakers. Just because someone buys a book or movie or song, or gets a download off the Internet, doesn't mean that they own the right to reproduce and distribute it. Unfortunately, with the Internet, it is easy for people to obtain and share items that do not legally belong to them. No matter how this is done, it is still dishonest. This has been a very upsetting experience for me, but I hope it will at least leave my fans with a better understanding of copyright and the importance of artistic control.
So where does this leave Midnight Sun? My first feeling was that there was no way to continue. Writing isn't like math; in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything. If I tried to write Midnight Sun now, in my current frame of mind, James would probably win and all the Cullens would die, which wouldn't dovetail too well with the original story. In any case, I feel too sad about what has happened to continue working on Midnight Sun, and so it is on hold indefinitely.
I'd rather my fans not read this version of Midnight Sun. It was only an incomplete draft; the writing is messy and flawed and full of mistakes. But how do I comment on this violation without driving more people to look for the illegal posting? It has taken me a while to decide how and if I could respond. But to end the confusion, I've decided to make the draft available here (at the end of this post). This way, my readers don't have to feel they have to make a sacrifice to stay honest. I hope this fragment gives you further insight into Edward's head and adds a new dimension to the Twilight story. That's what inspired me to write it in the first place.
I do want to take a moment and thank the wonderful fans who have been so supportive of me over the past three years. I cannot begin to tell you how much each of you means to me. I only hope this note will stop all the confusion and online speculation so that the Twilight universe can once again become the happy escape it used to be. After this incredibly busy year, I am now focusing on spending more time with my family and working on some other writing projects.
--Stephenie
Source :http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/midnightsun.html
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LATEST NEWS ON MIDNIGHT SUN
message found on Stephenie Meyer's website:
June 2008 Update: In response to the outrageous number of emails that I have received with questions concerning Midnight Sun, I talked to Stephenie this weekend and she asked me to let everyone know that Midnight Sun is her next project. She has not yet finished writing it (and there is no timeline set up, so we all need to put a lot of effort into being patient for a while longer), but she is definitely still planning on having it published. And, after Breaking Dawn comes out, Stephenie will have much more time to focus on writing Midnight Sun.
Source :http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/midnightsun.html
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Back to INFO PAGE
***SPOILER ALERT***
TWILIGHT PLOT SUMMERY
Isabella "Bella" Swan moves from sunny Phoenix, Arizona to rainy Forks, Washington to live with her father, Charlie, while her mother, Renée, travels with her new husband, Phil Dwyer, a minor league baseball player. Bella attracts much attention at her new school and is quickly befriended by several students. Much to her dismay, several boys compete for shy Bella's attention.
When Bella is seated next to Edward Cullen in class on her first day of school, Edward seems utterly repulsed by her. He disappears for a few days, but warms up to Bella upon his return; their newfound relationship reaches a climax when Bella is nearly run over by a fellow classmate's van in the school parking lot. Seemingly defying the laws of physics, Edward saves her life when he instantaneously appears next to her and stops the van with his bare hands.
Bella becomes determined to find out how Edward saved her life, and constantly pesters him with questions. After tricking a family friend, Jacob Black, into telling her the local tribal legends, Bella concludes that Edward and his family are vampires who drink animal blood rather than human. Edward confesses that he initially avoided Bella because the scent of her blood was too desirable to him. Over time, Edward and Bella fall in love.
Their relationship is disturbed when another vampire coven sweeps into Forks. James, a tracker vampire who is intrigued by the Cullens' relationship with a human, wants to hunt Bella for sport. The Cullens attempt to distract the tracker by splitting up Bella and Edward, and Bella is sent to hide in a hotel in Phoenix. There, Bella receives a phone call from James, who claims to be holding her mother captive. When Bella surrenders herself, James attacks her. Before she is killed, Edward, along with the other Cullens, rescues her and defeats James. Once they realize that James has bitten Bella's hand, Edward successfully sucks the venom from her bloodstream and prevents her from becoming a vampire, after which she is brought to a hospital. Upon returning to Forks, Bella and Edward attend their school prom and Bella expresses her desire to become a vampire, but Edward refuses.
TWILIGHT COVER
Stephenie Meyer has stated that the apple on the cover represents the forbidden fruit from the Book of Genesis. It symbolizes Bella and Edward's love, which is forbidden, similar to the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, as is implied by the quote from Genesis 2:17 that is quoted at the beginning of the book. It also represents Bella's knowledge of what good and evil are, and the choice that she has in partaking of the "forbidden fruit", Edward, or choosing not to see him. An alternate cover features Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, the actors who play Bella and Edward, respectively, in the film adaptation.
THE STORY BEHIND WRITING TWILIGHT
STEPHENIE MEYER quote:
I get a ton of questions about how I came up with the story of Twilight and how I got it published. I may be killing my FAQ page by doing this, but here is the whole story:
(Warning: there are Twilight spoilers contained in the following; if you don't want to ruin the suspense, stop reading.....now. Warning #2: As you might have guessed from the length of my book, I can't tell a short story—this is going to take a while. You have been warned.)
The Writing: I know the exact date that I began writing Twilight, because it was also the first day of swim lessons for my kids. So I can say with certainty that it all started on June 2, 2003. Up to this point, I had not written anything besides a few chapters (of other stories) that I never got very far on, and nothing at all since the birth of my first son, six years earlier.
I woke up (on that June 2nd) from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately. For what is essentially a transcript of my dream, please see Chapter 13 ("Confessions") of the book.
Though I had a million things to do (i.e. making breakfast for hungry children, dressing and changing the diapers of said children, finding the swimsuits that no one ever puts away in the right place, etc.), I stayed in bed, thinking about the dream. I was so intrigued by the nameless couple's story that I hated the idea of forgetting it; it was the kind of dream that makes you want to call your friend and bore her with a detailed description. (Also, the vampire was just so darned good-looking, that I didn't want to lose the mental image.) Unwillingly, I eventually got up and did the immediate necessities, and then put everything that I possibly could on the back burner and sat down at the computer to write—something I hadn't done in so long that I wondered why I was bothering. But I didn't want to lose the dream, so I typed out as much as I could remember, calling the characters "he" and "she."
From that point on, not one day passed that I did not write something. On bad days, I would only type out a page or two; on good days, I would finish a chapter and then some. I mostly wrote at night, after the kids were asleep so that I could concentrate for longer than five minutes without being interrupted. I started from the scene in the meadow and wrote through to the end. Then I went back to the beginning and wrote until the pieces matched up. I drove the "golden spike" that connected them in late August, three months later.
It took me a while to find names for my anonymous duo. For my vampire (who I was in love with from day one) I decided to use a name that had once been considered romantic, but had fallen out of popularity for decades. Charlotte Bronte's Mr. Rochester and Jane Austen's Mr. Ferrars were the characters that led me to the name Edward. I tried it on for size, and found that it fit well. My female lead was harder. Nothing I named her seemed just right. After spending so much time with her, I loved her like a daughter, and no name was good enough. Finally, inspired by that love, I gave her the name I was saving for my daughter, who had never shown up and was unlikely to put in an appearance at this point: Isabella. Huzzah! Edward and Bella were named. For the rest of the characters, I did a lot of searching in old census records, looking for popular names in the times that they'd been born. Some trivia: Rosalie was originally "Carol" and Jasper was first "Ronald." I like the new names much better, but every now and then I will slip up and type Carol or Ron by accident. It really confuses the people who read my rough drafts.
For my setting, I knew I needed someplace ridiculously rainy. I turned to Google, as I do for all my research needs, and looked for the place with the most rainfall in the U.S. This turned out to be the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. I pulled up maps of the area and studied them, looking for something small, out of the way, surrounded by forest... And there, right where I wanted it to be, was a tiny town called "Forks." It couldn't have been more perfect if I had named it myself. I did a Google image search on the area, and if the name hadn't sold me, the gorgeous photographs would have done the trick. (Images like these of the Hoh Rainforest (a short drive from Forks). Also see forks-web.com ). In researching Forks, I discovered the La Push Reservation, home to the Quileute Tribe. The Quileute story is fascinating, and a few fictional members of the tribe quickly became intrinsic to my story.
All this time, Bella and Edward were, quite literally, voices in my head. They simply wouldn't shut up. I'd stay up as late as I could stand trying to get all the stuff in my mind typed out, and then crawl, exhausted, into bed (my baby still wasn't sleeping through the night, yet) only to have another conversation start in my head. I hated to lose anything by forgetting, so I'd get up and head back down to the computer. Eventually, I got a pen and notebook for beside my bed to jot notes down so I could get some freakin' sleep. It was always an exciting challenge in the morning to try to decipher the stuff I'd scrawled across the page in the dark.
During the day, I couldn't stay away from the computer, either. When I was stuck at swim lessons, out in 115 degrees of Phoenix sunshine, I would plot and scheme and come home with so much new stuff that I couldn't type fast enough. It was your typical Arizona summer, hot, sunny, hot, and hot, but when I think back to those three months, I remember rain and cool green things, like I really spent the summer in the Olympic Rainforest.
When I'd finished the body of the novel, I started writing epilogues...lots of epilogues. This eventually clued me in to the fact that I wasn't ready to let go of my characters, and I started working on the sequel. Meanwhile, I continued to edit Twilight in a very obsessive-compulsive way.
My older sister, Emily, was the only one who really knew what I was up to. In June, I'd started sending her chapters as I finished them, and she soon became my cheerleading section. She was always checking in to see if I had something new for her. It was Emily who first suggested, after I'd finished, that I should try to get Twilight published. I was so stunned by the fact that I'd actually finished a whole, entire book, that I decided to look into it.
Getting Published: To put it mildly, I was naive about publishing. I thought it worked like this: you printed a copy of your novel, wrapped it up in brown paper, and sent it off to a publishing house. Ho ho ho, that's a good one. I started googling (naturally) and began to discover that this was not the way it is done. (Movies lie to us! Why?! A side note: you will not be able to enjoy the new Steve Martin version of Cheaper by the Dozen when you know how insanely impossible the publishing scenario it contains is.) The whole set up with query letters, literary agents, simultaneous submissions vs. exclusive submissions, synopsizes, etc., was extremely intimidating, and I almost quit there. It certainly wasn't belief in my fabulous talent that made me push forward; I think it was just that I loved my characters so much, and they were so real to me, that I wanted other people to know them, too.
I subscribed to WritersMarket.com and compiled a list of small publishers that accepted unsolicited submissions and a few literary agencies. It was around this time that my little sister, Heidi, mentioned Janet Evanovich's website to me. In her Q and A for writers section, Janet E. mentioned Writers House, among a few others, as "the real thing" in the world of literary agencies. Writers House went on my wish list as the most desirable and also least likely.
I sent out around fifteen queries (and I still get residual butterflies in my stomach when I drive by the mailbox I sent the letters from—mailing them was terrifying.). I will state, for the record, that my queries truly sucked, and I don't blame anyone who sent me a rejection (I did get seven or eight of those. I still have them all, too). The only rejection that really hurt was from a small agent who actually read the first chapter before she dropped the axe on me. The meanest rejection I got came after Little, Brown had picked me up for a three-book deal, so it didn't bother me at all. I'll admit that I considered sending back a copy of that rejection stapled to the write-up my deal got in Publisher's Weekly, but I took the higher road.
My big break came in the form of an assistant at Writers House named Genevieve. I didn't find out until much later just how lucky I was; it turns out that Gen didn't know that 130,000 words is a whole heck of a lot of words. If she'd known that 130K words would equal 500 pages, she probably wouldn't have asked to see it. But she didn't know (picture me wiping the sweat from my brow), and she did ask for the first three chapters. I was thrilled to get a positive response, but a little worried because I felt the beginning of the book wasn't the strongest part. I mailed off those three chapters and got a letter back a few weeks later (I could barely get it open, my hands were so weak with fear). It was a very nice letter. She'd gone back with a pen and twice underlined the part where she'd typed how much she enjoyed the first three chapters (I still have that letter, of course), and she asked for the whole manuscript. That was the exact moment when I realized that I might actually see Twilight in print, and really one of the happiest points in my whole life. I did a lot of screaming.
About a month after I sent in the manuscript, I got a call from Jodi Reamer, an honest to goodness literary agent, who wanted to represent my book. I tried really hard to sound like a professional and a grownup during that conversation, but I'm not sure if I fooled her. Again, my luck was tremendous (and I don't usually have good luck—I've never won anything in my life, and no one ever catches a fish when I'm in the boat) because Jodi is the uber-agent. I couldn't have ended up in better hands. She's part lawyer, part ninja (she's working on earning her black belt right now, no kidding), a pretty amazing editor in her own right, and a great friend.
Jodi and I worked for two weeks on getting Twilight into shape before sending it to editors. The first thing we worked on was the title, which started out as Forks (and I still have a teeny soft spot for that name). Then we polished up a few rough spots, and Jodi sent it out to nine different publishing houses. This really messed with my ability to sleep, but luckily I wasn't in suspense for long.
Megan Tingley, of Megan Tingley Books, of Little, Brown and Company, read Twilight on a cross-country flight and came back to Jodi the day after the Thanksgiving weekend with a preemptive deal so huge that I honestly thought Jodi was pulling my leg—especially the part where she turned the offer down and asked for more. The upshot was that, by the end of the day, I was trying to process the information that not only was my book going to be published by one of the biggest young adult publishers in the country, but that they were going to pay me for it. For a very long time, I was convinced it was a really cruel practical joke, but I couldn't imagine who would go to these wild extremes to play a hoax on such an insignificant little hausfrau.
And that's how, in the course of six months, Twilight was dreamed, written, and accepted for publication.
Things keep getting crazier, what with the movie deal and all the pre-publication attention that Twilight continues to receive. Though I've gotten impatient from time to time, I'm glad I've had the last two years to try to come to terms with the situation. I'm greatly looking forward to finally having Twilight on the shelves, and more than a little frightened, too. Overall, it's been a true labor of love, love for Edward and Bella and all the rest of my imaginary friends, and I'm thrilled that other people get to meet them now.
--Stephenie
NEW MOON
NEW MOON PLOT SUMMARY | NEW MOON DEVELOPMENT | THE STORY BEHIND NEW MOON
New Moon is a fantasy-romance novel by author Stephenie Meyer, and is the second book in the Twilight series. According to Meyer, the book is about losing true love. The title refers to the darkest phase of the lunar cycle, indicating that New Moon is about the darkest time of the protagonist Bella's life.[2] The book was originally released in hardcover in 2006, following the successful publishing of Meyer's debut novel Twilight. A film adaptation was released on November 20, 2009.
Upon its publication in the United States, New Moon moved quickly to the top of bestseller lists, becoming one of the most anticipated books of the year. It peaked at #1 on both the New York Times Best Seller list and USA Today's Top 150 Bestsellers, and was the biggest selling children's paperback of 2008 with over 5.3 million copies sold.
New Moon has been translated into many diverse languages, including Czech, Thai, Russian, Norwegian and Arabic.
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Moon_(novel)
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***SPOILER ALERT***
NEW MOON PLOT SUMMARY
On Isabella "Bella" Swan's 18th birthday, Edward Cullen, the vampire she loves, and his family throw her a birthday party. While unwrapping a gift, she gets a paper cut, which causes Edward's adopted brother, Jasper, to be overwhelmed by her blood's scent and attempt to kill Bella. To protect her, Edward decides to end their relationship, and the Cullens move away from Forks. This leaves Bella heart-broken and depressed.
In the months that follow, Bella learns that thrill-seeking activities, such as motorcycle riding, allow her to "hear" Edward's voice in her head. She also seeks comfort in her deepening friendship with Jacob Black, a cheerful companion who eases her pain over losing Edward. Bella later discovers that Jacob and other tribe members are shape-shifters who assumes gigantic wolf forms. Jacob and his pack protect Bella from the vampire Laurent and also Victoria, who seeks revenge for her dead mate, James, whom the Cullens killed in Twilight.
Meanwhile, a series of miscommunications leads Edward to believe that Bella has killed herself. Distraught over her supposed suicide, Edward flees to Italy to provoke the Volturi, vampire royalty who are capable of killing him. Alice and Bella rush to Italy to save Edward, arriving just in time to stop him. Before leaving Italy, the Volturi tell Edward that Bella, a human who knows that vampires exist, must either be killed or transformed into a vampire. When they return to Forks, Edward tells Bella that he has always loved her and only left Forks to protect her. She forgives him, and the Cullens vote in favor of Bella being transformed into a vampire, to Edward's dismay. However, Edward gives Bella a choice: either she lets Carlisle change her after her graduation, or, if Bella agrees to marry him, he will change her himself.
Publication and reception
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Moon_(novel)
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NEW MOON DEVELOPMENT
After Meyer finished writing Twilight, she found herself writing multiple, hundred-paged epilogues, and has said, "I quickly realized I wasn't ready to stop writing about Bella and Edward." She began writing a sequel, which was entitled Forever Dawn and skipped over Bella's final year of high school. While Meyer was still writing Forever Dawn, she learned that Twilight was going to be published and marketed as a young-adult novel.Wanting the next book to be aimed at a similar audience, she decided to write a new sequel, New Moon, which took place during Bella's senior year of high school.
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Moon_(novel)
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THE STORY BEHIND WRITING NEW MOON
**A note: I don't pull any punches here, so if you haven't read New Moon and you don't want to be spoiled, don't read this.**
STEPHENIE MEYER quote:
Writing a sequel is a very different experience than writing a story. It was for me, at least.
If you've read the story behind Twilight, then you know that I didn't set out to write a novel or begin a career as an author. I was just writing down a story for my personal enjoyment, letting it grow as it would and lead where it would. No pressure, just fun.
The first sequel I wrote to Twilight—Forever Dawn—was more of the same. I wasn't planning a sequel any more than I was planning to write a book in the first place. Originally, Twilight had a more defined ending. But, when it was ended, I started writing epilogues. After I'd written three epilogues, all of them over a hundred pages long, I realized I wasn't ready to stop writing about Bella and Edward. One of those epilogues turned into Forever Dawn.
(People often ask me if I'm ever going to make Forever Dawn public. The answer is no. For one thing, it's not great—it's downright embarrassing in some places. However, some of the content will work as a loose outline for book four, so I can't tell you what happened, either.)
I was about three hundred pages into Forever Dawn when my life got turned upside down. Twilight was going to be published. People were going to read what I was writing. More specifically, young adults were going to be reading what I was writing. Unintentionally, I'd written a young adult novel. I realized pretty quickly that Forever Dawn did not follow the rules of YA. Because I was caught up in the story, I finished Forever Dawn anyway, knowing that it would never see the light of day; I gave it to my big sister as a birthday gift. And then I started on the real sequel.
The biggest non-YA thing I'd done with Forever Dawn was this: I'd pretty much passed over the rest of Bella's high school experience entirely, skipping ahead to a time in her life with more mature themes. So, as I began to sketch out New Moon, I went back to Bella's senior year of high school and asked my little cast of characters, "What happened?"
I swiftly regretted asking them for the story. Because they gave me a story I wasn't expecting. More specifically, Edward told me something I didn't want to hear.
I should probably mention here that I am not crazy (that I know of), it's just that I am a character writer. I write my stories because of my characters; they are the motivation and the reward. The difficulty with strong, defined characters, though, is that you can't make them do something that is out of character. They have to be who they are and, as a writer, they're often out of your control.
As I started plotting New Moon (untitled at that point), it became clear that Edward was Edward, and he would have to behave as only Edward would. And, because of that, Edward was leaving.
NO! I didn't want Edward to leave. I pitched a fit every bit as violent and tearful as those I've seen in New Moon discussion forums. I tried to talk him out of it. I presented him with other plot options. I begged. Edward remained unmoved.
Someday, when Midnight Sun (Edward's version of Twilight) is available, I think you'll understand better what was going on in the boy's head. See, just as Bella doesn't think she's good enough for Edward, Edward sees himself as a soulless monster destroying Bella's life and endangering her afterlife. The incident with Jasper acts as a catalyst, forcing him to act. He is determined to save Bella. He thinks the best way to do this is to take the vampires out of her life.
Is he being silly? In some ways, yes. But he can't see any other way to protect Bella. Edward's dealing with the idea that if he hadn't been quick enough, if he hadn't read Jasper's thoughts just in the nick of time, then would that—death—have been better for Bella than a life with Edward? If she died at eighteen and went to heaven, wouldn't that be better than an immortal but soulless and damned existence? Edward thinks so. However, he knows he'd never be able to watch her die. Consequently, he'd better get away from her before something happens that makes biting her a necessity...
So there I was, with Edward leaving. It was a hard pill to swallow, but once I accepted the inevitability of it, I had an interesting question on my hands. (And writers live for interesting questions.)
WHAT IF... What if true love left you? Not some ordinary high school romance, not some random jock boyfriend, not anyone at all replaceable. True love. The real deal. Your other half, your true soul's match. What happens if he leaves?
The answer is different for everyone. Juliet had her version, Marianne Dashwood had hers, Isolde and Catherine Earnshaw and Scarlett O'Hara and Anne Shirley all had their ways of coping.
I had to answer the question for Bella. What does Bella Swan do when true love leaves her? Not just true love, but Edward Cullen! None of those other heroines lost an Edward (Romeo was a hothead, Willoughby was a scoundrel, Tristan had loyalty issues, Heathcliff was pure evil, Rhett had a mean streak and cheated with hookers, and sweet Gilbert was much more of a Jacob than an Edward). So what happens when True Love in the form of Edward Cullen leaves Bella?
I let Bella answer the question for herself, writing to see what she would do. It was hard to write her pain, because I had to live it to write it, and I was often writing through my tears. At the same time, it was always interesting. Bella surprised me with her grit and dogged determination. She pushed through the agony, living for others—Charlie in this case—as has always been her style.
(Side note: there are those who think Bella is a wuss. There are those who think my stories are misogynistic—the damsel in distress must be rescued by strong hero.
To the first accusation, I can only say that we all handle grief in our own way. Bella's way is no less valid than any other to my mind. Detractors of her reaction don't always take into account that I'm talking about true love here, rather than high school infatuation.
I emphatically reject the second accusation. I am all about girl power—look at Alice and Jane if you doubt that. I am not anti-female, I am anti-human. I wrote this story from the perspective of a female human because that came most naturally, as you might imagine. But if the narrator had been a male human, it would not have changed the events. When a human being is totally surrounded by creatures with supernatural strength, speed, senses, and various other uncanny powers, he or she is not going to be able to hold his or her own. Sorry. That's just the way it is. We can't all be slayers. Bella does pretty well I think, all things considered. She saves Edward, after all. Side note/rant over. Back to the story.)
And thus was born the basic premise of New Moon, and with it the title. To follow after Twilight, I needed a time of day to reflect the mood of the sequel. As this is the blackest period of Bella's life, I thought it appropriate to name the book after the darkest kind of night, a night with no moon.
When the advanced reading copies began to fall into the hands of my fans, I asked people read New Moon twice, promising that I would explain why later. It's later, and this is why: the first time through New Moon, I've found that readers are so anxious about the absence of Edward that they can't settle into the middle portion of the book. They skim and speed read and flip ahead until, at last, they find him again. However, at that point they've missed the main section of the novel almost completely. On a second reading, knowing that Edward will return to the story at the proper place and time, the reader can slow down and enjoy the wondrousness that is Jacob Black.
And with that as a segue, on to the benefits!
I didn't realize until I was working on the resolution how much my characters had gained from this experience. Vital stuff. Without this painful separation, Bella might never have realized that Edward really is hers to keep. No matter how perfect she thinks he is, or how imperfect she thinks she is, he belongs to her. Words can't quite capture the life-changing nature of this knowledge for Bella.
Equally as cataclysmic—Edward finally realizes the intensity of Bella's feelings for him, something he has always underestimated. Here's the thing about Edward: he knows human nature pretty well. He's seen a hundred thousand human relationships from the inside, and none of them have come close to touching the depth and everlasting devotion of Carlisle's and Esme's love, or Alice's and Jasper's, or even Rosalie's and Emmett's. Can you blame him for thinking himself—after one hundred years of immortal experience—capable of a more profound love than his eighteen-year-old human girlfriend? Edward is, understandably, a bit of a know-it-all. He learns a lot through this experience, the most important being that Bella's feelings for him are an exception to the human rule. Something else he learns (not quite as important, but still good to know) is that, despite all his knowledge, he is fully able to make hideous mistakes in judgment.
Ah, and then there is my favorite gift that New Moon gave to me: Jacob Black.
Jacob's development into a major character was a strange journey. Originally, Jacob was just a device. In Twilight, Bella needed a way to find out the truth about Edward, and the conveniently located Quileute Tribe, with all their fantastic legends, provided a cool option for that revelation. And so Jacob was born—born to tell Bella and Edward's secret.
Something happened then that I didn't expect. Jacob was my first experience with a character taking over—a minor character developing such roundness and life that I couldn't keep him locked inside a tiny role. (Since Jacob, this has reoccurred with several other meant-to-be-minor characters. I really love it when this happens, though it often destroys my outlines.) From the very beginning, even when Jacob only appeared in chapter six of Twilight, he was so alive. I liked him. More than I should for such a small part. Bella liked him. Her instinctive trust and affection came without my intervention. And it wasn't just us; my agent did, too. "I love that Jacob kid," Jodi said (or something to that effect-this all happened in 2003). My editor agreed. "Can we get more Jacob in the story?" Megan asked.
Oh yes, we could!
I was writing New Moon and editing Twilight simultaneously. So, when Jacob Black started taking over New Moon, I was able to go back and weave Jacob and Billy throughout Twilight more centrally.
Lots of people give me more credit than I deserve; they think I knew Jacob was a werewolf from the very beginning. This is not the case. Twilight was supposed to be a stand alone novel, remember. There was no thought of werewolves in my mind as I wrote it. The Quileute (Quill-yoot) legends Jacob tells Bella in chapter six of Twilight are all genuine Quileute stories that I learned when I was researching the tribe (which is a real tribe with a truly fascinating and mystical history). All actual Quileute legends, except for the vampire myth about the 'cold ones.' I latched onto the wolf story (the actual Quileute legend claims that the tribe descended from wolves transformed by a sorcerer) because it fit with my sketchy knowledge of vampires and werewolves always being at each others' throats (ha ha, pun intended). The dream Bella had of Jacob transforming into a wolf to protect her had no foreshadowing significance at the time. It was just my way of letting Bella's subconscious articulate the situation.
Of course, I of all people should know that dreams can have a serious impact on your life.
Bella's wolf dream was always one of my favorite visual images from Twilight. When I started working on New Moon, that image stuck with me. And I thought to myself, wouldn't it be cool if it was true—if ALL of Jacob's legends were founded in absolute fact? What if Jacob was descended from wolves?
It all started to come together then. Sam on the beach in Twilight was no longer just a believer in old traditions—he was the first contemporary wolf. Billy's warnings were more vital—he had concrete evidence on his hands, rather than just suspicions. And Jacob, my poor, sweet Jacob, had a whole secret heritage just waiting to come crashing down on him.
At that point all the crucial supports of the story were in place, and I only had to write it. Ha. Easier said then done.
It's hard to explain how joyous the writing process was for me when I was creating Twilight. It was something I did for fun and excitement, with no concern for what anyone else might think, because no one else was ever going to read it. With New Moon, I knew people were going to read it. And some of those people were going to have bright red pens in hand while reading. I knew enough about the editing process to know that there were painful changes ahead; the parts I loved now might not make the final cut. I was going to have to rethink and revise and rework. This made it very hard to put the words down, and I had a horrible feeling much like stage fright the whole time I was writing.
It took about five months, but the editing process was much longer and more difficult than the same process with Twilight. New Moon was a very hard story to tell, not only emotionally, but also functionally. It needed a lot of work. The New Moon outtakes I posted explain some of the bigger renovations that I had to make.
The good news is that I got over—or rather got used to—the stage fright. Book three was much easier in a multitude of ways. I learned a lot through the New Moon experience, and I grew as a writer. Even better, my characters grew and matured in interesting ways that gave me so much to work with throughout the rest of the series! I'm writing book four at this moment in time, and let me tell you, Forks is a very exciting place to be these days.
--Stephenie
Source : http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/nm_thestory.html
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ECLIPSE
ECLIPSE PLOT SUMMARY | ECLIPSE COVER
Eclipse is the third book in the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. It continues the story of 18-year-old Bella Swan and her vampire love, Edward Cullen. Eclipse is preceded by New Moon and followed by Breaking Dawn. The book was released on August 7, 2007 with an initial print run of 1 million copies, and sold more than 150,000 copies in the first 24 hours alone.
Eclipse was the fourth bestselling book of 2008, only behind Twilight, New Moon, and Breaking Dawn,. and was also ranked #1 on Publishers Weekly's list of "Bestselling Hardcover Backlist Children's Books" in 2008 with over 4.5 million copies sold.
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_(novel)
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***SPOILER ALERT***
ECLIPSE PLOT SUMMARY
The story opens with the revelation that Seattle, Washington is being plagued by a string of unsolved murders, which Edward suspects is caused by a new vampire that is unable to control its thirst for human blood. As Edward and Bella apply to colleges, Bella explains to Edward her desire to see her friend, Jacob Black, a werewolf. Although Edward fears for her safety, Bella insists that neither Jacob nor his wolf pack would ever harm her, and she begins visiting him occasionally. Meanwhile, Alice Cullen has a vision that Victoria, a vampire who is hunting Bella for revenge, has returned to Forks. A few days later, Edward proposes to Bella and, despite harboring an aversion to marriage, she accepts.
Bella and the Cullens soon realize that the Seattle murders are being committed by an "army" of newborn vampires, controlled by Victoria. The Cullens join forces with the wolf pack to combat this threat. As everyone else prepares for battle, Edward, Bella, and Jacob camp in the mountains, hidden during the battle, where they are later joined by Seth Clearwater, a young wolf pack member, to wait out the fight.
In the morning, Jacob becomes upset when he overhears Edward and Bella discussing their engagement and threatens to join the fight and get himself killed. To stop him, Bella kisses Jacob and comes to realize that she is in love with him as well. During the battle, Victoria tracks Edward's scent to Bella's forest hiding place, and Edward is forced to fight. After Victoria and her army are successfully destroyed, Bella explains to Jacob that while she loves him, her love for Edward is greater. After receiving a wedding invitation from Edward, Jacob runs away in his wolf form to escape his pain, angry and heartbroken at Bella's decision to become a vampire.
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_(novel)
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ECLIPSE COVER
The book jacket features a torn red ribbon. Although it was supposed to be disclosed to the public in May 2007 at the Eclipse Prom, Barnes & Noble and Stephenie Meyer's official website premiered the newly released cover in March 2007, along with a preview summary of the book's plot. The broken ribbon represents choice, as in the book Bella must choose between her love for the vampire Edward Cullen, and her friendship with the werewolf Jacob Black. Meyer also stated that the ribbon represents the idea that Bella is unable to completely break away from her human life.
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_(novel)
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BREAKING DAWN
BREAKING DAWN PLOT SUMMARY | BREAKING DAWN DEVELOPMENT
Breaking Dawn is the fourth and final novel in the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. Divided into three parts, the first and third sections are written from Bella Swan's perspective and the second is written from the perspective of Jacob Black. Breaking Dawn was released on August 2, 2008 at midnight release parties in over 4,000 bookstores throughout the US. From its initial print run of 3.7 million copies, 1.3 million were sold in the first 24 hours of the book's release, setting a record in first-day sales performance for the Hachette Book Group USA.
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Dawn
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***SPOILER ALERT***
BREAKING DAWN PLOT SUMMARY
Breaking Dawn is split into three separate parts. The first part details Bella's marriage and honeymoon with Edward, which they spend on a private island off the coast of Brazil. Two weeks into their honeymoon, Bella realizes that she is pregnant and that her condition is progressing at an unnaturally accelerated rate. After contacting Carlisle, who confirms her pregnancy, she and Edward immediately return home to Forks, Washington. Edward, concerned for Bella's life and convinced that the fetus is a monster as it continues to develop with unnatural rapidity, urges her to have an abortion. However, Bella feels a connection with the child and refuses.
The novel's second part is written from the perspective of wolf shape-shifter Jacob Black, and lasts throughout Bella's pregnancy and childbirth. Jacob's Quileute wolf pack, not knowing what danger the unborn child may pose, plan to destroy it, also killing Bella. Jacob vehemently protests this decision and leaves, forming his own pack with Leah and Seth Clearwater. Bella soon gives birth, but the baby breaks many of her bones and she loses massive amounts of blood. In order to save her life, Edward changes her into a vampire by injecting his venom into her heart. Jacob, who was present for the birth, almost immediately "imprints"—an involuntary response in which a shape-shifter finds his soul mate—on Edward and Bella's newborn daughter, Renesmee.
The third section of Breaking Dawn shifts back to Bella's perspective, finding her changed into a vampire and enjoying her new life and abilities. However, the vampire Irina misidentifies Renesmee as an "immortal child", a child who has been turned into a vampire. Because "immortal children" are uncontrollable, creating them has been outlawed by the Volturi. After Irina presents her allegation to the Volturi, they plan to destroy Renesmee and the Cullens. In an attempt to survive, the Cullens gather other vampire clans from around the world to stand as witnesses and prove to the Volturi that Renesmee is not an immortal child. Upon confronting the gathered Cullen allies and witnesses, the Volturi discover that they have been misinformed and immediately execute Irina for her mistake. However, they remain undecided on whether Renesmee should be viewed as a threat to vampires' secret existence. At that time, Alice and Jasper, who had left prior to the confrontation, return with a Mapuche called Nahuel, a 150-year-old vampire-human crossbreed like Renesmee. He demonstrates that the crossbreeds pose no threat, and the Volturi surrender. Edward, Bella and Renesmee return to their home in peace.
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Dawn
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BREAKING DAWN DEVELOPMENT
The title, Breaking Dawn, is a reference to the beginning of Bella's life as a newborn vampire. The cover is a metaphor for Bella's progression throughout the entire series; she began as the physically weakest player on the board, the pawn, but at the end she becomes the strongest, the queen.
The plays The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream both influenced Breaking Dawn. Originally, Meyer wrote a book titled Forever Dawn, which was a direct sequel to Twilight. While the basic storyline remained the same, Forever Dawn was narrated completely from Bella's point of view, the werewolves and Jacob were "only sketchily developed", Victoria and Laurent were both alive, and there was an epilogue. Meyer went on to say that she "may post some extras someday if I ever have time to go back through the Forever Dawn manuscript—it's just as long as Breaking Dawn."
In regard to Renesmee's unique name, Meyer wrote that she "couldn't call her Jennifer or Ashley. What do you name the most unique baby in the world? I looked through a lot of baby name websites. Eventually I realized that there was no human name that was going to work for me, so I surrendered to necessity and made up my own." Meyer decided to include the pregnancy in her story while she was researching vampires and came across the legend of the incubus, a demon who could father children.
Meyer states in regard to ending the series that:
"The Twilight Saga is really Bella's story, and this was the natural place for her story to wind up. She overcame the major obstacles in her path and fought her way to the place she wanted to be. I suppose I could try to prolong her story unnaturally, but it wouldn't be interesting enough to keep me writing. Stories need conflict, and the conflicts that are Bella-centric are resolved."
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Dawn
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LEAKING OF MIDNIGHT SUN | LATEST NEWS ON MIDNIGHT SUN
MIDNIGHT SUN: EDWARD'S VERSION OF TWILIGHT
STEPHENIE MEYER quote:
Midnight Sun is an exercise in character development that got wildly out of hand (as do many of my projects).
While I was procrastinating some real editing work (I'm always at my most creative when procrastinating), I started to wonder how the first chapter of Twilight would read if it were written from Edward's perspective. There is so much more to his side of the story than there is to Bella's in that first chapter. After all, Bella only knows that an incredibly gorgeous boy is looking at her funny. Meanwhile, Edward is suffering through one of the most momentous days of his very long life! First there's the shock and frustration of not being able to hear Bella's thoughts, then the wild, monstrous reaction to her scent, followed by the incredible expenditure of self-control that it takes to not kill her... His side of Bella's first day at Forks High School is a hundred times more exciting than her own.
Though I didn't have time to work on it right away, the idea of letting Edward have his chance to speak stuck with me. I couldn't shake it. I found myself thinking his words in the middle of the night and jotting down phrases he would use while I was waiting in line at the post office. As soon as I finished my real work, I sat down and let Edward get his say.
Writing chapter one, "First Sight," from Edward's point of view was an exciting experience; I actually had my pulse racing as I typed. When I finished, I was truly pleased with my creation. Here was the other side of the story that no one knew. Here was the truth of what Edward had been through. I felt like I knew my Edward even better, and I was sure his dialogue would be more insightful in future novels. The end. Exercise over.
Ha ha. It wasn't long before I was thinking about Edward in Alaska, Edward upon his return to Forks, Edward's side of that fateful conversation in Biology... Chapter two started to write itself in my head, while I kept telling myself that I didn't have time to write a book for fun when I had real books to write. (My mother seconded that opinion—she thinks I work too hard).
But when a story demands to be written, there's no way to resist. And the more I wrote, the more I became convinced that Edward deserved to have his story told. At first I was planning to post it all here on my website, but I changed my mind for two reasons, the most important being that Edward's version is much longer than Bella's—Edward over-thinks everything. I'm not even half way done, and the page count is near three hundred. The second reason that I changed my mind is a little bit silly—I just would really love to have a pretty, matching, bound version of Midnight Sun to put beside Twilight on top of my desk. So I'm going to try to have it published as a complementary novel to Twilight. It will take a while, because I can only work on it between editing stints, but I hope that someday I'll be able to see Midnight Sun on the bookstore shelves next to Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and etc... (Fueling my belief that Midnight Sun is worthy of publishing is my mother's about face—after reading the first eleven chapters, she thinks it's magic and says I should go for it.)
And here I was going to write just a short paragraph of introduction. You see what I mean about things getting out of hand?
Because I just can't wait out the years it will take to reach publication for people to begin to understand Edward, here is my original character development exercise, Edward's version of Bella's first day at Forks High School, the first chapter of Midnight Sun.
--Stephenie
Source :http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/midnightsun.html
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THE LEAKING OF MIDNIGHT SUN ON THE INTERNET
STEPHENIE MEYER quote:
As some of you may have heard, my partial draft of Midnight Sun was illegally posted on the Internet and has since been virally distributed without my knowledge or permission or the knowledge or permission of my publisher.
I have a good idea of how the leak happened as there were very few copies of Midnight Sun that left my possession and each was unique. Due to little changes I made to the manuscript at different times, I can tell when each left my possession and to whom it was given. The manuscript that was illegally distributed on the Internet was given to trusted individuals for a good purpose. I have no comment beyond that as I believe that there was no malicious intent with the initial distribution.
I did not want my readers to experience Midnight Sun before it was completed, edited and published. I think it is important for everybody to understand that what happened was a huge violation of my rights as an author, not to mention me as a human being. As the author of the Twilight Saga, I control the copyright and it is up to the owner of the copyright to decide when the books should be made public; this is the same for musicians and filmmakers. Just because someone buys a book or movie or song, or gets a download off the Internet, doesn't mean that they own the right to reproduce and distribute it. Unfortunately, with the Internet, it is easy for people to obtain and share items that do not legally belong to them. No matter how this is done, it is still dishonest. This has been a very upsetting experience for me, but I hope it will at least leave my fans with a better understanding of copyright and the importance of artistic control.
So where does this leave Midnight Sun? My first feeling was that there was no way to continue. Writing isn't like math; in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything. If I tried to write Midnight Sun now, in my current frame of mind, James would probably win and all the Cullens would die, which wouldn't dovetail too well with the original story. In any case, I feel too sad about what has happened to continue working on Midnight Sun, and so it is on hold indefinitely.
I'd rather my fans not read this version of Midnight Sun. It was only an incomplete draft; the writing is messy and flawed and full of mistakes. But how do I comment on this violation without driving more people to look for the illegal posting? It has taken me a while to decide how and if I could respond. But to end the confusion, I've decided to make the draft available here (at the end of this post). This way, my readers don't have to feel they have to make a sacrifice to stay honest. I hope this fragment gives you further insight into Edward's head and adds a new dimension to the Twilight story. That's what inspired me to write it in the first place.
I do want to take a moment and thank the wonderful fans who have been so supportive of me over the past three years. I cannot begin to tell you how much each of you means to me. I only hope this note will stop all the confusion and online speculation so that the Twilight universe can once again become the happy escape it used to be. After this incredibly busy year, I am now focusing on spending more time with my family and working on some other writing projects.
--Stephenie
Source :http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/midnightsun.html
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LATEST NEWS ON MIDNIGHT SUN
message found on Stephenie Meyer's website:
June 2008 Update: In response to the outrageous number of emails that I have received with questions concerning Midnight Sun, I talked to Stephenie this weekend and she asked me to let everyone know that Midnight Sun is her next project. She has not yet finished writing it (and there is no timeline set up, so we all need to put a lot of effort into being patient for a while longer), but she is definitely still planning on having it published. And, after Breaking Dawn comes out, Stephenie will have much more time to focus on writing Midnight Sun.
Source :http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/midnightsun.html
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