MIDNIGHT SUN Haters, This One's For You

Super-selling YA author Stephenie Meyer announced a new book this morning, the long-awaited story of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen’s initial meeting and early romance told from Edward the Sparkly Vampire’s perspective. Midnight Sun has a freckled history—Meyer allegedly wrote some of it over a decade ago and shared it with a friend, who then leaked it, and then there was some other drama with EL James writing her Twilight-inspired series that included a book from the perspective of the hot rich dude who likes whips and rooms painted red or something, and so Midnight Sun has remained in the dark. Until today.

People are saying this announcement “broke the internet,” which is one of those head-scratching expressions that was cute for a while but now just sounds weird because I think it’s impossible to break the internet, unless you have Shaw as your internet service provider because those turds break my internet every single day, and often while I’m on Zoom teaching my creative writing kids in the hopes that they’ll become literary geniuses and then pool their Pulitzer money to buy me a cottage in the Scottish Highlands as a thank-you.

ANYWAY.

The chorus of folks out there singing about Stephenie* Meyer going all in for a cash grab are woefully out of tune and should probably hire a proper choir director or maybe Adam Levine because some people like the way he sings. (Many of these same singers are yodeling about Suzanne Collins, who releases The Hunger Games prequel THIS MONTH, called The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Which I cannot wait for.) But dear singers, publishing is a BUSINESS. Let’s all sing it together:

PUBLISHING IS A BUSINESS.

How about every time Nike releases another pair of overpriced, throwback-style runners, we scream “cash grab”? No, you dummies, we don’t do this. We get excited about buying a pair of those dumb shoes we BEGGED our dad for when we went to that dodgy shoe store up in North Portland where there was a huge poster of Farah Fawcett on the wall and we were like WHOA SHE’S PRETTY HOW DOES SHE GET HER HAIR TO DO THAT but then we were also like Whoa that girl is in a red bathing suit and I can almost see her boobs maybe someone should give her a T-shirt. Also we were nine and more interested in roller skating on the neighbor’s newly asphalted driveway and building sweet bike jumps with our sister’s old wheelchair ramp and some broken bricks, and SURE, we wanted those awesome white Nikes with the rounded nose and the red Swoosh and the blue stripe in the foamy bottom but we had no idea, at that moment, how important boobs would become to the boys around us in the subsequent fifty years and also we were too busy being mad that our dad would NOT buy us the rad Nikes but some other stupid blue runners that we would proceed to wear out in about two months from all that sweet bike jumping.

I DIGRESS.

The point is: It’s not a cash grab, Steph. I got your back on this. In fact, it’s bloody GENIUS.

I teach creative writing to middle schoolers and have, off and on, for the last five years. I regularly teach from The Hunger Games and request parents to allow their young writers to either read the book or see the movie. Structurally, it’s near perfect. Suzanne Collins was a TV writer for years. She knows how to build a story.

And The Hunger Games has weird tics that make the book easy to teach from—first person present tense (don’t @ me—I love 1PPP and so do millions of other readers, based on the huge success of these novels, so maybe it’s your brain that’s weird and not the rest of us); Katniss is often unlikable, seen as cold, fickle, and even a tease with the way she toys with Peeta and Gale, which makes her an interesting character to teach because she’s not all hearts and flowers and is ANYTHING but predictable but she has a very clear goal in mind—save Primrose, her sister; and we have a villain whose motivations are foggy at best (good bad guys always have a reason for being jerks—they think what they’re doing is The Right Thing. We don’t know where this anger and villainy comes from with President Coriolanus Snow, and being power hungry isn’t enough. Which is why Songbirds and Snakes will be awesooooome because it will tell us everything we need to know about Donald Sutherland***—er, I mean, President Snow).

FOCUS, JENN: Sorry. OK, so, yeah, I teach kids and I always ask what they’re reading, have they heard of This Book or That Book, etc., and when I ask if they’ve ever read Twilight, MANY of them say, “No, never heard of it.”

Which is why releasing Midnight Sun right now, fifteen years after the first book came out and eight years after the last Twilight Saga movie, is freaking SMART. (Remember? Breaking Dawn, Part 2, with that terrible CGI baby—Hollywood, COME ON—you made me believe a T. rex was going to eat Hot Jeff Goldblum and those kids trapped in that gaudy, upside-down Ford Explorer. Could you not have given us a CGI Renesmee that looked even sort of baby-shaped?)

The young women who inhaled the Twilight Saga like it was air are now in their 20s. I know, because I have one of those young women. She and her friends discovered Twilight when they were around 14. They read and reread and gave each other copies of the books for birthdays and then I had to see what the hubbub was about and BAM! I got sucked in and read the entire series in a week and did basically nothing else except sit on the couch with Blankie and read and no, I did not feed the children whilst enraptured in the world of clumsy Bella and hunky, sparkly, 104-year-old Edward because my children are little scavengers who know where I keep the Goldfish and fruit snacks. Also they have a dad who is a way better cook than me so yes, they ate. Don’t freak out.

This well-timed release of Midnight Sun (August in the Year of Pandemia) will lead these younger readers right to the bookstores in search of the rest of the tale: “Wait, if this is Edward’s side of the story, what about Bella?” And on and on it goes. Can you hear the gold? Because I can. And if Steph is smart, she will write the stories of EVERYONE ELSE who isn’t Bree Tanner because young Bree was a throwaway character who gets killed anyway and really does nothing in the story, so yeah, that novella release was a cash grab for sure. (We bought it. Not gonna lie.)

Though I wasn’t able to find recent stats (and I didn’t spend an hour looking because I have Actual Work To Do), in 2011, the Twilight Saga series had sold over 120 million copies worldwide and had been translated into nearly 40 languages. It won some big awards and even more vitriol. It was a phenomenon that spun itself into entire sub-industries of merchandise, fandoms, conventions, documentaries, and literary analyses, most of which harped on how weak and ineffectual Bella Swan is as a main character. Hey, even the tattoo parlors benefited. Google “Twilight tattoos” at your peril.

Most of Twilight was filmed in St. Helens, Oregon, two streets away from where I lived in another life and where my daughter was born. We now live in Vancouver, BC, where New Moon and the other movies were filmed. My daughter was an extra in New Moon. She was in the hallway when Bella and Edward walked by in an early scene. It was a highlight of her teenage life. The ramshackle cabin used as Jacob Black’s house is a five-minute drive from where we live—I have a photo in the family room of my daughter grinning like she’s just won the lottery, taken at a park we now call Jacob’s Park because we went there just after discovering the location of Jacob’s house … that was a really fun day.

We shouldn’t be starstruck. My husband is a 30-year veteran of the film industry, both in LA and Vancouver. He’s worked on some of the biggest films ever produced. And yet, we were starstruck. My daughter floated for a week after her day on the New Moon set. The photo in the family room is testament to the love she had for that damn book series, for those characters, warts and all.

These books mean a lot, to a lot of people.

Releasing Midnight Sun in August is a power move. And people who hate Edward Cullen and Bella Swan will have a field day tearing it all down. I know, because I was one of those people who saw the Catherine Hardwicke-directed movie five times in the theater but then would scoff at the “quality of the writing” when talking amongst people I wanted to impress.

Which is, in itself, total nonsense. I’m an insecure jerk who was (is) wildly envious of Stephenie Meyer’s success that really did seem to come out of nowhere. I wanted her story—I had a dream, wrote this book, sent it off to Writers House in NYC (lit agency, not a publisher), got discovered in the slush pile (ironically, I got to work with the woman who discovered Twilight and she is one of the most incredible people and most talented editors ever), and then Mrs. Meyer’s dream turned book fast-tracked into a big, juicy, six-figure, multibook deal. Come on, writers—especially writers of YA paranormal romance. We all wanted to be Stephenie back in 2010. She’s the reason a lot of us finished our first novels at all. She’s the reason so many of my friends have careers as novelists now.

It’s true for me too. I finished Sleight because my daughter’s best friend finished her first novel at 15 (!!!) and I thought, Hey, if Alysha can do it, so can I†, and also because Stephenie Meyer, a mom of three, had the courage to sit down and write a book from first page to last and then send it off to some people who might feed it to their voracious shredder. (They did not feed it to their voracious shredder.)

No, dear friend, they did not feed it to their voracious shredder and instead fed it to a bevy of readers raised on Harry Potter who were now thirsty for something dripping with romance. And then their moms read it. I’m just sayin’ that whatever Stephenie soaked her pages in while writing, let’s agree it was better than the pillow of Oreo icing in Double Stufs. Addictive, and effective. I’d use a reference to cocaine or something here, but I’ve never tried cocaine, even though I lived in a wealthy Portland suburb in the 80s and all kinds of kids were doing cocaine on lunch break and IN FACT, I used to get a nosebleed every single day at the same time, just after lunch, so Mr. Hoss, my social studies teacher and a former tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles so you can just IMAGINE how big he was, stood over my desk after the bell rang one day and said HEY WHY IS YOUR NOSE BLEEDING EVERY DAY ARE YOU DOING COCAINE and I said WHAT WHAT WHAT OMIGOD NO and he said ARE YOU SURE YOU CAN TALK TO ME and I said NO DUDE SERIOUSLY I HARDLY EVER HAVE MONEY BECAUSE I HATE BABYSITTING AND IF I DID HAVE MONEY I WOULD USE IT TO BUY CANDY AT THE SNACK BAR BECAUSE MOMMIE DEAREST BUYS THE BIG COSTCO BAGS OF M&Ms BUT SHE HIDES THEM BECAUSE SHE’S THE DEVIL SO DEFINITELY NO and that was that. Also there might be kids reading this and I don’t want their parents emailing to slap my hand so we will not talk about cocaine anymore, thank you very much.

Oh man, you can tell I haven’t talked to anyone outside these four walls for seven weeks. And I have eaten a lot of pillows of Oreo Double Stuf icing. Sans cocaine.

In conclusion, my dudes, Stephenie Meyer and Suzanne Collins are freaking geniuses who are grabbing the wheel of this publishing Zeppelin and sailing into a nice, warm draft over Cash Sea. Which sparkles just as much as Edward Cullen does while standing in the sun talking about what a (delicious) monster he is. They know what readers want—millions and millions of readers worldwide have shown them the inside of their wallets—and I for one will stand in line with my wallet open too. Happily, I shall carry my copies home and revisit a time in our shared lives when my daughter and her friends piled into my minivan to spend two hours watching an old vampire and a young, pasty girl with balance issues fall in love on the big screen.

Suck it, haters.

Also, I’m listening to Alexandre Desplat’s GORGEOUS score for New Moon as I write this and no one sings crappy duets about cash grabs, which is very pleasing.

*Hey, Publishers Weekly—in your daily newsletter that hit my inbox as I was pouring almond milk** on my Honeycomb, you spelled her name wrong. StephEnie, not StephAnie. Mrs. Meyer is a titan in the YA realm and one of the reasons other lesser-known authors get to publish their books at all (money in, money out). Tell your interns who they’re dealing with. It’s almost like that time a certain very young YA writer got all crazy and attacked Nora Roberts for stealing her book title even though Dame Nora Roberts is one of the reasons we women have been able to punch our way into the publishing industry at all. Respect.

**Almond milk is not real milk. I understand this. I also understand that the almond industry is killing bees due to overworking their sweet little bee buns. I am so very sorry, bees. I love you. You’re the best bees ever. Let me know what I can do to help, except I can’t drink regular milk because my tummy doesn’t like it and my butt’s too big already and also if I drink regular milk, someone will shame me for being mean to cows.

***President Snow is also Daddy Bennet in the 2005 Joe Wright version of Pride and Prejudice, which is MY choice for P&P because it’s the one I saw first, and after watching Matthew Macfadyen walk through that misty field with his shirt askew, nothing Colin Firth could do in the Other Version offered any titillation what.so.ever. Fight me.

†This amazing human I speak of is now on her way to finishing her PhD, so if you please, it is Doctor Alysha to you.

P.S. Moms who are Team Jacob: Ladies, he is SIXTEEN. Gross. Stop it. No. Do the math. If you’re not sure what math you should be doing, google “how do I calculate cougar age” and switch teams before someone calls Child Services. Team Edward is nice. We have wine.