Those Very lovely publishers over at Hachette Group are giving my readers another chance to win a copy of Breaking Dawn! If you haven’t bought your copy yet, or even if you have and want to get an early start on your Christmas shopping, all you have to do is leave a comment here to enter to win! I would be thrilled and tickled if you posted about this contest anywhere, esp. Twilight or Teen Forums so those lovely teens can know about this contest. If you do so, please link it back here for an extra entry! You can read my review here. So sorry U.S. and Canada only and I will draw a winner on Sat. September 13th. Good luck and Miriam is the best!
Here is the link from Stephenie Meyers website to her partially completed draft of Midnight Sun. What did you think of it? Let her know in the comments.
http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/pdf/midnightsun_partial_draft4.pdf
LEAVE A MESSAGE FOR STEPHENIE MEYER HERE!! IF YOU WANT TO LEAVE A MESSAGE FOR STEPHENIE, I KNOW HER PUBLICIST AT LITTLE BROWN BOOKS AND WILL SEND HER THIS LINK. LET HER KNOW YOUR SUPPORT OVER MIDNIGHT SUN AND MAYBE WE CAN CONVINCE HER TO CONTINUE ON WITH IT. SPREAD THE WORD ON ALL THE TWILIGHT FORUMS TO COME HERE AND LEAVE A MESSAGE, THE MORE MESSAGES THE BETTER AND I WILL SEND HER THE LINK .
Did you know you could already read the first chapter of Stephenie Meyer’s new book Midnight Sun about Edward? Are you as excited to read it after reading Breaking Dawn? I am excited to read a book from his point of view and I hope it will be as good as Twilight. Here is what Stephenie has to say about it from her blog: I also posted the link to the first chapter below:
http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/pdf/midnightsun_chapter1.pdf
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*:
Read Twilight DVD Review from Movie Room Reviews
Tags: Bella, Breaking Dawn, complete partial draft of Midnight Sun, Eclipse, Edward Cullen, Edward in Alaska, leak of Midnight sun by Stephenie Meyer, Midnight Sun, New Moon, Stephenie Meyer, Stephenie Meyer new book, Twilight
Stephanie Meyer has responded to the criticism of her new book Breaking Dawn on a couple of websites today. Click Here for the link to a series of video’s on Entertainment Weekly and below is from an interview from MTV Movie Blog.
‘Breaking Dawn’ Exclusive: ‘Twilight’ Author Stephenie Meyer Reacts To Harsh Reader Complaints — ‘It Hurts’
‘You see the punch coming; that doesn’t mean it’s not gonna hurt when it hits,’ Meyer says.
By Sabrina Rojas Weiss, with additional reporting by Lisa Gonzalez
Last Saturday afternoon, less than a day after “Breaking Dawn,” the conclusion of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series, hit shelves, the Internet grumblings began. Of course, many readers were still eagerly drinking up the saga of Edward and Bella. But one fast reader expressed her disappointment in the book by launching a discussion on Amazon.com urging fellow disgruntled fans, “Don’t burn your copies of the book — RETURN THEM.”
(SPOILER ALERT, though we’ll try to keep them vague for all you slowpokes.) And judging by the heated back-and-forth that followed, there are plenty of other Twilighters complaining about what is or isn’t in the book: the lack of more explicit sex scenes, the excessive amount of sex scenes, the implausibility of Bella’s pregnancy, the pace of the story, the lack of a big battle scene, the whole Jacob section, and on and on. One blogger told Entertainment Weekly that the story “didn’t seem to fit the world that I thought Stephenie Meyer created.” So how does the author feel about this venomous reaction to the novel that sold 1.3 million copies in its first day?
“You see the punch coming; that doesn’t mean it’s not gonna hurt when it hits,” Meyer told MTV News on Thursday. “There’s no way to make everybody happy. When I do one thing that a lot of people want, there’s always the opposite reaction.
“But how can you possibly meet up with the expectations that this book had?” she asked. “It just got so built up. There is no book in the world that could stand up to that. So I knew it was going to happen, but at the same time it hurts.”
Of course, members of Team Jacob can’t be too thrilled from the very start of the book. But Meyer won’t pander to their preference for Bella’s hot-blooded werewolf pal.
“If they really love the characters, then I would hope that this would make sense to them, because these are the true characters,” she explained. “This is the story the way it was always meant to be.”
And other readers are giving Meyer grief about the fact that Bella does get a “happily ever after” without having to make any major sacrifices.
“I think she worked for it pretty hard,” Meyer countered. “It doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes you make a decision about what you want and you pay for it and you suffer for it and it doesn’t work out. Those types of stories always leave me horribly depressed. I’m not going to live in a world for a year at a time where that’s going to be the ending. If people wanted a really depressing, tragic ending, I gave them a lot of hints that it wasn’t going to be that way. They really shouldn’t have been surprised!”
And though Meyer knew the complaints would come, she was surprised by what some of them were about. One minor quibble seems to be the awkward name of Bella and Edward’s daughter, Renesmee.
“I should have known that people would feel that way,” she laughed when we read aloud one comment about Bella’s hybrid of Renee and Esme. “The name has been real to me for so long now that I’ve forgotten how unusual it would sound to everyone else.”
Meyer did seem taken aback by the “don’t burn it, return it” threats. “I’ve read a lot of books that I didn’t like very much, and that thought never occurred to me, because I had read them! I hadn’t heard of [doing] that before. That’s not fun to hear.”
But Meyer holds out hope that “Breaking Dawn” detractors will eventually see her side of things. “I hope that if they really do enjoy the other books, they’ll realize that this is kind of where it was supposed to go.”
I know, I know, more Breaking Dawn/Twilight news. Below is an amusing article from New York Magazine called “Did Breaking Dawn Ruin the Twilight Series. Out of 1.3 million copies sold, Barnes and Noble has had FIFTEEN copies returned. Ooh such a backlash! Did you know the Amazon reviews are up 1,522 after just four DAYS since the books release. To compare, The final Harry Potter book has 3,189 reviews since it’s release almost one YEAR ago. Warning this article Contains Spoilers!! (and bad language) Just a few days left to enter my contest to win a pile of fourteen books and a copy of Breaking Dawn! Click HERE to enter and make sure you enter the other giveaways for Tan Lines and Driving Sideways!!
By now you may have heard that Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final book in Stephenie Meyer’s teenage-vampire-in-love series Twilight, sold 1.3 million copies in its first day in bookstores this weekend. But some of those copies just may be headed back: A Twilight fan who was disappointed by the twists and turns of the 764-page novel has launched a “Return Breaking Dawn” campaign on Amazon’s message boards, urging fans who hated the book to return it to the store they bought it from. A Borders employee claims on her blog that she’s already seen returns, and one commenter on Amazon says that the local Borders has had fifteen copies returned already.
All these posts have plenty of commenters debating the book’s merits; some love it, while some feel it completely ruined the series. The L.A. Times‘ Denise Martin didn’t like it and says that unlike J.K. Rowling in her series finale, “Meyers bunted.” But based on all the totally crazy shit that happens in the book, it doesn’t seem that way to us.
Thanks to the hugely entertaining live blogs of Breaking Dawn by LiveJournal blogger Cleolinda Jones — well worth a read even if you don’t know the books — we now know that the following insane things occur in the final volume of the Twilight series (spoilers ahoy!):
• Bella, the human, and Edward, the vampire, get married.
• Then they have rough sex that leaves her bruised and battered. (Also, he bites a pillow and covers her with feathers.)
• Then she gets totally pregnant with some kind of demon death baby who grows at a superhuman rate, can read thoughts in the womb, drinks blood in utero, and breaks Bella’s ribs, pelvis, and spine from the inside.
• Some werewolf stuff happens.
• The baby is delivered via Cesarean section, which is a polite way of saying that other characters rip Bella’s stomach open with their teeth. (“Seriously, they cannot make this into a movie. I cannot imagine for one second how they could make this into a movie appropriate for teenage girls and keep this part in it.”)
• Bella becomes a vampire and develops superpowers and has sex with Edward a lot of times.
• Everybody lives happily forever after.
Cleolinda’s No. 1 unanswered question is a good one, though: What’s it like doing it with the undead? “Was it like fucking a popsicle?” Alas, we’ll never know. Cleolinda’s review, though, really makes us want to buy the book, not return it:
I have to say, y’all, that what follows is possibly the most awesome crackfic of any of the series so far. I love it and kind of want to snuggle it a little. Seriously, I keep hearing about all the True Fans freaking out, and honestly? I don’t see anything in the new book that wasn’t in the previous three. As in, I don’t get why you’re offended now. I mean, yes, there’s sex (yes, sex) and gore, and the previous section made me want to curl up and die, but I have no problems with Breaking Dawn that I didn’t already have with the other three (frequently, vehemently, and at top volume), and Breaking Dawn is far better written on a purely stylistic level to boot. So.
(This is spoiler-heavy. Consider yourself warned.)
It’s virtually impossible not to draw parallels between “Breaking Dawn,” the concluding installment in the “Twilight” series, and the final “Harry Potter” book. Both involve revolve around mythic worlds and young, ill-prepared protagonists headed toward a supernatural showdown between good and evil.
The problem is Stephenie Meyer is no J.K. Rowling. We who’ve enjoyed the work of both authors have known this since we picked up “Twilight.” (I like Edward too, but there’s only so many times I can read how “beautiful,” “perfect” and “dazzling” he is.) But with these final chapters, in which both authors really swung for the epic, Meyer’s bunted.
Things looked promising at first. The pace is swift and the curve balls surprising and frequent: Bella and Edward finally get busy, we get inside Jacob’s head, Bella joins the Cullens in immortality, Jacob finds his mate.
But all the while, a larger story arc is missing. The love triangle is, sadly, summarily dealt with, and once the romance is over we’re left only with Edward and Bella’s child Renesmee — even the name, well, it’s no Hermione is it — and all the conflicts she so quickly and disappointingly resolves. Edward versus Jacob? Over and done with. Vampires versus werewolves? One big happy family. Bella being a ravenous newborn? She’s not going to eat her kid!
So what to when you’ve written yourself into a corner? Meyer is forced to more or less start over and she spends the second half of “Breaking Dawn” going for outright thriller. The second half of the book singularly involves the mystery of Renesmee and shielding her from the threat of the Volturi, an enemy initially so full of literary potential. Bella, Jacob, Edward and the rest of the “Twilight” characters become little more than Renesmee’s anxious protectors.
Bogged down in the new, too convenient mythology — Bella’s new power is the only one that will matter — the book winds up faltering under its own weighty aspirations. Bella’s covert operation, the additions to the Cullen camp, the unique powers of the new vampires are explained so thoroughly yet serve so little dramatic effect that “Breaking Dawn” could easily have trimmed off 200 pages and reached the same anticlimactic ending. What’s worse, the new guys are there merely to populate the side of good for a battle that — the big spoiler — never happens. That’s right. No blood shed. No deaths of loved ones to kill readers in the gripping way Rowling did in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”
At least when you get to page 735 — where you’ll find the resolution neatly tied up — it’s more a confirmation of what you saw coming rather than simply a letdown. And as for the final scene, Meyer writes this one like she’s already imagined it on the big screen, with the swelling of sappy love song and a fade to black.
We would have much preferred the whole thing to end in book three, “Eclipse,” with yes, some happiness for Bella, but also some angst, some heartbreak, and a dark, ominous future looming.
– Denise Martin
I feel dirty! 
I posted yesterday about all the Breaking Dawn bad reviews and went ahead and posted the spoilers since the book is already out. I debated doing it, but I did it for those who have read the book, I wanted to know their opinions and for those who haven’t read the book, I posted to not read ahead if they didn’t want to know the ending. Well, I had no idea that this little book blog would get so many views from that one post that I am embarrassed to say how many. I will say I have NEVER had so much traffic. Stephanie Meyer is brilliant, she has caused so much controversy that Breaking Dawn will go beyond sales anyone has ever seen. When I posted about the Amazon reviews yesterday there were already 97 reviews posted. Today when I just checked there are already 308 reviews posted and the book just came out on Saturday! So reading Breaking Dawn is on my agenda this week! Some other books I have just finished and are ready to go for reviews are Driving Sideways by Jess Riley ( I will be having a giveaway from the author on Wednesday!) and Queen of the Road by Doreen Orion ( she will be doing a guest post on Tuesday!) Both were FANTASIC books! Happy Reading!!
For those of us who have read the books and for those of you who “gasp” haven’t, here is a primer to get you ready for the big day! I found this on E.W. website. I love that site!
BELLA The Heroine
Told from the point of view of a smart, reserved 17-year-old rocked by giant love, the Twilight series is an antidote for a generation tired of back tattoos, belly piercings, and Paris Hilton. Some critics dismiss Bella as being just another damsel in distress. ”Just because she doesn’t do kung fu and she cooks for her father doesn’t make her worthy of that criticism,” defends Meyer.
FORKS The Hometown
Bella moves to small-town Forks, a drizzly green hamlet in Washington, to live with her sheriff father Charlie and start her junior year in high school. It’s the opposite in every way from Phoenix, where Bella previously lived with her flighty Mom. (Incidentally, Meyer herself lives outside Phoenix but now summer vacations in a Pacific Northwest town a lot like Forks.)
THE CULLEN FAMILY The Allies
Bella befriends a strange, beautiful family, led by calm town doctor Carlisle and his radiant wife, Esme. Turns out all of them — ”brothers and sisters” Edward, Rosalie, Emmett, Alice, and Jasper, too — crave blood, but they’ve weaned themselves off the human stuff. Meyer balked at an early Twilight script because the screenwriter had cut her beloved Cullens, save Edward, entirely from the film.
ROBERT PATTINSON Edward Incarnate
The actor, best known for playing Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, sent the Twilighter blogosphere into a jeering fit when it was announced he’d been cast as Edward. ”They freaked out,” sighed Meyer. ”And now all their taglines on their posts say ‘When God made Robert Pattinson he was just showing off.’ ” Teenage girls = fickle beasts.
TEAM EDWARD Vampire Fans
”Oh my gosh, I want Edward’s body!” is a typical response from fans of the hairless, amber-eyed teenage vampire. ”If Bella decided to leave Edward I couldn’t forgive her,” said one ardent fan on Meyer’s recent book tour. Unconcerned about the heroine giving up her mortality in the name of love, the 19-year-old suggested that ”They can adopt little babies and make them vampires!” Cute. Creepy, but cute.
TEAM JACOB Wolf Parade
Edward, desperate to protect Bella’s safety and salvation, vanishes in Book 2, leaving her broken. A passionate offshoot of fans fell for Bella’s younger buddy Jacob, cheery and reliable, and yes, part werewolf, after he reintroduced her to blue skies. Bella is hopelessly smitten with the sexy vampire, but Team Jacob cheered when she gave into a heady kiss at the end of Eclipse.
James The Evil Vampire One of the funnest things about this very fun film was getting to see Cam Gigandet, who stars as the villian, being all James-y. Most of you know that Cam will be playing James in the Twilight movie, and now I can vouch for the fact that he will be awwwwwwwwesome.
CONSUMMATION The Deed
Meyer revealed exclusively to EW.com that she had the pleasure in Book 4 of writing Edward and Bella’s wedding scene. (Don’t worry Team Jacob, your boy just hasn’t ”imprinted” yet with his true love!) Now fans, who might dig the action, but really come back for the romance, are free to fantasize just how far Meyer will take things on the honeymoon night.
MIDNIGHT SUN Edward’s Turn
Meyer has told her fans that Breaking Dawn will be the last book she writes from Bella’s point of view. (”The reason the books have gone on so long is I have a harder time giving up Bella’s humanity than she does,” says Meyer. ”She’s so quick to say ‘No, give it all away, I’m ready to die right now!”’) But the author already has half of Midnight Sun, Twilight as narrated by Edward, cooking on her computer.
Breaking Dawn will be on sale August 2nd. Here is a sneak peek at chapter one. Don’t forget to enter my giveaway of The Host!
1. ENGAGED
NO ONE IS STARING AT YOU, I promised myself. No one is staring at you. No one is staring at you.
But, because I couldn’t lie convincingly even to myself, I had to check.
As I sat waiting for one of the three traffic lights in town to turn green, I peeked to the right — in her minivan, Mrs. Weber had turned her whole torso in my direction. Her eyes bored into mine, and I flinched back, wondering why she didn’t drop her gaze or look ashamed. It was still considered rude to stare at people, wasn’t it? Didn’t that apply to me anymore?
Then I remembered that these windows were so darkly tinted that she probably had no idea if it was even me in here, let alone that I’d caught her looking. I tried to take some comfort in the fact that she wasn’t really staring at me, just the car.
My car. Sigh.
I glanced to the left and groaned. Two pedestrians were frozen on the sidewalk, missing their chance to cross as they stared. Behind them, Mr. Marshall was gawking through the plate glass window of his little souvenir shop. At least he didn’t have his nose pressed up against the glass. Yet.
The light turned green and, in my hurry to escape, I stomped on the gas pedal without thinking — the normal way I would have punched it to get my ancient Chevy truck moving.
Engine snarling like a hunting panther, the car jolted forward so fast that my body slammed into the black leather seat and my stomach flattened against my spine.
”Arg!” I gasped as I fumbled for the brake. Keeping my head, I merely tapped the pedal. The car lurched to an absolute standstill anyway.
I couldn’t bear to look around at the reaction. If there had been any doubt as to who was driving this car before, it was gone now. With the toe of my shoe, I gently nudged the gas pedal down one half millimeter, and the car shot forward again.
I managed to reach my goal, the gas station. If I hadn’t been running on vapors, I wouldn’t have come into town at all. I was going without a lot of things these days, like Pop-Tarts and shoelaces, to avoid spending time in public.
Moving as if I were in a race, I got the hatch open, the cap off, the card scanned, and the nozzle in the tank within seconds. Of course, there was nothing I could do to make the numbers on the gauge pick up the pace. They ticked by sluggishly, almost as if they were doing it just to annoy me.
It wasn’t bright out — a typically drizzly day in Forks, Washington — but I still felt like a spotlight was trained on me, drawing attention to the delicate ring on my left hand. At times like this, sensing the eyes on my back, it felt as if the ring were pulsing like a neon sign: Look at me, look at me.
It was stupid to be so self-conscious, and I knew that. Besides my dad and mom, did it really matter what people were saying about my engagement? About my new car? About my mysterious acceptance into an Ivy League college? About the shiny black credit card that felt red-hot in my back pocket right now?
”Yeah, who cares what they think,” I muttered under my breath.
(c) 2008 by Stephenie Meyer, reprinted with permission from the Eclipse Special Edition published by Little, Brown and Company.
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(This is spoiler-heavy. Consider yourself warned.)
