Twilight: How I learned to enjoy it

Now, you've probably never heard the phrase "I used to hate Twilight" but I'm sure it's happened.

For me, it was when I read another terrible book.

A friend let me borrow a book called Crank, by Ellen Hopkins. It was, hands down, the worst book I have ever read. Not so much with grammar or the flow of the story, but the subject matter itself. It's about a girl who gets addicted to crystal meth and other such substances. One part in particular has stuck in my mind where she smokes a cigarette for the first time, after coughing and hacking she says (I paraphrase here): "I did the sensible thing: I took another drag." I think eventually she gets raped and has a crack-addicted baby. The end.

No, seriously, the end. That's the end of the book.

And then my face was stuck like this for three days.

Bad books stick with you about as well as good ones, and you can't help but think "This book was actually worse than X!" (in my case X=Twilight). You then begin to compare and contrast the level of suckitude. However, I stated blending the ideas of both books when I realized the character's withdrawal from crystal meth in Crank sounded eerily like Bella's feelings and actions when she was away from Edward in Twilight.


I've heard some people describe Edward as less of a vampire and more of an incubus, so let's take a side-step here for some learning (which I will keep at PG-13 for my own sake) and some references so I can try and get you into the right mindframe for a theory.

An incubus is the male equivalent of a succubus. The incubus in folklore are known to seduce and "lie with women" in order to produce offspring. Enough horizontal mambo and the woman starts to get ill and, eventually, die.

In The Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher there are three different types of vampire: Black Court, Red Court, and White Court. For the sake of discussion I'm just going to focus on just certain aspects of the Red and White. Red Court a very narcotic and addictive saliva, which make humans enjoy every moment of their oncoming death, and the White Court are basically incubi and succubi that feed on human emotions and desires. Humans get addicted to White Court vampires as well, and keep coming back for more until, eventually, they're totally consumed and die (though they enjoy every moment of it.)

Combining the crystal meth, incubus folklore, and White and Red Court vampires from those sources, I suddenly had a very interesting take on Twilight. Here it is:

At some point Edward says vampires "sparkle" to attract their prey, but that's just silly. No one is just going to go "Shiny!" and walk right into a pit of spikes where a diamond was dangling from. However, what if the sparkly vampires had a less obvious means of making themselves attractive to humans?

Stephanie Meyer explains a lot of the Twilight-verse in her website that she was either too lazy to explain about in her so-called "saga" or else didn't think about it until people started bugging her about it. One of those questions being how their eyes manage to move around in their heads despite pretty much being made of solid rock. The answer is that they're made entirely of stone and venom (the venom that causes other people to become infected) their eyes are rocks that float in the venom. That means all of their bodily fluids are venom.

Now, logically, the first kiss from Edward would have Bella rolling around and screaming because she'd gotten infected from the saliva in his mouth. Or, later, she'd have certainly gotten infected, erm, on her honeymoon night.

My theory is that, in small doses, Smeyer's vampire venom acts as a highly addictive narcotic. Only in large doses does it cause full-blown vampirism.

I read the book, keeping all this in mind, and it's got some pretty sound evidence to it.

When Bella first meets Edward, sure she's going to watch him, he's a pretty boy. Still, at her first description she does describe the Cullens as the skin around their eyes looking dark like they were all recovering from broken noses. With every description after that, Bella's description of Edward is "Perfect" in one word or another.

I took some notes, so you can even look it up yourself it you want.

Page 45 is when they first touch. Bella describes it as an "Electric hand sting" it's not pleasant to her, it's actually a little painful. We come back to the "All bodily fluids are venom" thing that Meyer herself has confirmed, along with my "Narcotic venom" theory. If all fluids are venom, then that means sweat would be, too, as well as the natural oils on the skin. Edward is, literally, covered in a small amount of venom. When Bella touches him she's coming into contact with the venom for the first time, it would explain the sting she feels as some things can be absorbed though the skin.

By page 56 she's already anxious to see him. You've probably heard of some drugs that take only one use to become addicted. Maybe vampire venom is the same.



Hey Steve, I'm gonna need about 3 more ounces
of Edward Cullen's underarm sweat

The more body contact there is, the more skin absorption Bella has of Edward's sweet, addictive substance.

On page 56, there's full-blown half-body contact while Team Tyler's Van cheers one determined Forks highschooler tries to shorten the series an entire four books by running over Bella and Edward pretty much smothers Bella all over trying to keep the Van of Awesome away from her.

That night, she dreams about him.



Zzzz...Heroin...Er I mean....Edward.

By page 70 she's become incredibly depressed when he ignores her. A few pages later her hands are shaky.

Page 74: "I couldn't allow him to have this level of influence over me. It was pathetic. It was more than pathetic, it was unhealthy." Sounds more like an anti-fan than Bella herself, right? Go check, I'll wait right here...

Are you back? Good...then Ha! I knew you had a copy, too! You're never gonna live this down! I'm going to tell everyone you're Team Jacob and you make out with your Siberian Husky and-

Oh, sorry, got a little off track there. Let's move on.

Of course, by page 79 she's calling him perfect. Page 92 her mind just goes blank. Shaking hands, thinking constantly about getting a fix, and losing her thought processes at the drop of a hat? Hmm, sounds like withdrawal symptoms.

Page 138 and continuing into 139, she's considering Edwards advice that she avoid him and she feels a "Sudden agony of despair" and her mind "rejects the pain." Not bad for knowing him for less than a month.

Page 139: "I didn't know if there ever was a choice. I was already in too deep. Now that I know, if I knew, I could do nothing about my frightening secret. Because when I thought of him, of his voice, his hypnotic eyes, the magnetic force of his personality, I wanted nothing more than to be with him right now."

Replace all mentions of a person with a substance, and if you're like me, it sounds creepy.

Page 141: "I couldn't feel the right kind of fear."  If people are smart, they know the drug they're addicted to is bad, it's wrong, they're aware it's going to kill them.

At page 145, Bella's been having a great day, but all it takes is not seeing Edward at lunch for her to think this: "Desolation hit me with crippling strength" so either she's trying to be poetic by using large words, she's overreaction, or she's freaking out because she can't get her fix, which is becoming more and more needed.

There's the whole alley scene where Bella's rescued by Edward, and he gives her his jacket. She takes a big ol' whiff. Now, I don't have to quote anything for you to know there are inhaled addictive substances.

Page 175, he freaks her out a bit, but her "Spasm of fear" is "stifled by a sense of safety." She has alarm bells going off in her head but there's something tamping them down. Again, we come back to the fact that people are aware that a drug is bad for them and they use it anyway. Also, she's wearing his jacket at the time, the one probably just dripping in venom from being worn so often (sorry, too gross?)

Page 190, Bella says "Not seeing you. It makes me anxious, too." I can understand Edward being anxious, his food (ie: Bella) is off wandering around being stupid. You'd be worried too if you had a delicious bucket of chicken wandering around a city full of cats and dogs (You attached wheels to the bottom of it...I have no idea why.)

On page 193 she smells his breath and notices it smells the same as his jacket. I don't know about you, but I would never want my breath to smell like my jacket or my jacket to smell like my breath. The only explanation is that venom has a smell to it.

By page 195 she's totally in love.

Page 211 "If I had to, I supposed I could purposefully put myself in danger to keep him close." That's certainly a far cry from the previous "I couldn't allow him to have this level of influence over me." Although she discards the idea of putting herself in danger, she does so for the wrong reasons, not because it's stupid or even a sick idea, it's because she knows she'd get in trouble....It's also pretty impressive what people will do to get another hit of their addiction. You know...just saying...

Page 219, she's got an "Overpowering craving to touch him."

This is only half of the book. I didn't manage to read it all in time to make this post. It's just slow and I had other books occupying my time.



A satyr in a wedding dress. How could I resist?

Anyway, I didn't really need to finish it. I've made my point. I'm loving every moment of my reread because it's not the loving story of an air-headed moron falling for a bi-polar prettyboy. It's the dark, sick story of a normal girl who becomes addicted to a narcotic substance that causes her to fall out of touch with her friends, school, family, the real world and eventually ends with her death (and subsequent rebirth into a venom-producing monster to lure more hapless humans.) This doesn't even count all the eye-gaze-induced brain-scrambling Edward does to control Bella and everyone else around them.

So remember kids, don't do drugs.

...And don't lick Edward Cullen.

Twilight: The Upside

Everything has an upside, even if you hate everything about Twilight with a burning passion, you really should stop and think about it.

I think what started the spark was Meyer's The Host. I was hearing that people who hated Twilight actually liked The Host. I was curious, but also terrified. I felt like someone feeding a treat to a dog that had bitten off three of my fingers a month ago. Had it not been for a good friend loaning it to me, I probably never would have read it.

The book still sat on my end table for a long time, gathering dust (If you ever read this: Sorry Olive! Nobody likes a dusty book!) because I was actually too scared to read it. The book I was reading at the time, though, eventually ran out of pages and The Host still beckoned, so I decided to read it.

I was actually pretty impressed. It had its problems, like how many character's names start with J that it starts to get confusing about who said what, and it's a little drawn out, but I can say I enjoyed it. Enough to buy my own copy, even.

That was when I realized I didn't hate Stephanie Meyer, I hated Twilight. It happened again when I read The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner. As long as Meyer's golden boy Edward wasn't in a story, it did well. Even then, I have to admit that when I read the Twilight series, and later watched the movies, that there's something there buried under the dung heap of the story. Meyer's writing has a spark, a really good potential, but it's bogged down in a poor choice of content and may never truly see the light of day.

It also took someone telling me that Twilight opened the door for a lot of first-time authors to get published for it to really sink in. When new authors loved Twilight they wrote a book because they loved it so much, when new authors hated Twilight they wrote a book because they hated it so much. "I can do better than that," has been the beginning of a lot of amazing books.

Including Dusted.

Twilight may not have started Dusted, I'm not even quite sure any more, but I can certainly say my disgust at the series certainly provided a good motivator. It has also allowed for the resurrection of books. Most notably L.J. Smith's Vampire Diaries and Nightworld series.

Here are a handful of books that I'm absolutely certain wouldn't have gone far without Twilight's help (and these are just the ones I'm aware of)

Blue Bloods series by Melissa De La Cruz

Hush Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick

House of Night series by P.C. Cast

Darkest Powers and Darkness Rising series by Kelly Armstrong

Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare

Unearthly trilogy by Cynthia Hand

Hex Hall series by Rachel Hawkins

Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl


These days I think you're seeing less and less of the supernatural  because now the next gold rush authors are running for is the dystopian overdrive from The Hunger Games (that is, perhaps, another post for another day.)

You also have to give Stephanie Meyer some credit for taking a lot of flak and hatred. Sure, she is probably the most well-known author for having childish hissy-fits, but she's never lashed out very badly at her fans, and she doesn't hate what she's created (jaded actors and rude musicians, please take note)

Taking a step back and analyzing Twilight let me see some very interesting aspects of it and even taught me how to read something in an entirely different light of what is intended in the otherwise shallow meaning. One that I will share with you soon.

Twilight: First Discovery

Here we are in week two of Twilight Month. Feeling nauseous yet?



Exactly like this one.

When I first discovered Twilight I was in Barnes and Noble. I saw pins on almost every single employee's shirt (I really hope it was a uniform requirement at the time, because the 60+ male employee wearing one disturbed be a bit).

I did some research and found it was actually rather popular. So, either I had been living under a rock this whole time, or the popularity exploded right around the time Breaking Dawn was released. I'm actually more likely to believe the former, since I'm not exactly a well-connected person.



She's having a conversation with the dial tone.

I picked up a copy of Twilight because, even then, I was looking to get published, and I'm sure the CEO of Burger King eats at McDonald's for the very same reason: He has to know what's popular and why.

At around this time my family was a part of the Science Fiction Book Club and they were offering all four books at a great price. So, naturally, I figured why not just get the whole bundle and knock them all out at once? So I did, giving my copy of Twilight to a friend because I'm awesome like that, though had I known about the series' evil nature I probably would have burned the first book and warded off the next three with a cross.

Back! Back you evil series!

At the time angsty, dark teen stories with vampires were pretty much impossible to find (unless I was still under a rock) so I was actually, legitimately interested Twilight. "Okay, Bella is sorta clumsy, I can identify with that," I thought to myself. Yeah, sorta interesting. But then it went on.

And on.

And on.

And on.

By the time I was done with Twilight I was ready to stake myself


Obviously not me, I'm way hotter than that.

Instead I decided to suck it up and read New Moon, ended up in the hospital after finishing it with self-inflicted injuries of palm-to-forehead application, then started on Eclipse, woke up in a puddle of motor oil and grass shavings, then finally finished Breaking Dawn with enough brain cells to rub together to realize that maybe that as a mistake.

One of my most vivid memories of reading it was probably the introduction to the sparkling. I honestly heard nothing about it so was totally unprepared. I read the whole foresty glen scene where he walks into sunlight and....then sort of stopped.



My actual face upon reading it.

I snorted, rolled my eyes, and never took it seriously after that. The sparkling was the first nail in the coffin that only rolled downhill from there gathering no moss to fish for a lifetime (I think I still have some residual brain damage from reading it.)

But, a couple years later, I would start to learn that, like anything, Twilight has its enjoyable upsides.

...Which you're going to have to wait a week to learn.



Twilight: The Blank Pages

I've actually managed to get some editing done. Nothing motivates like a looming deadline when you realize you really ought to be publishing a book at least once a year. Perhaps my largest procrastinating tool is this blog, I'll write posts rather than edit or write a manuscript (or struggle with the awkward settings for pictures...as evidenced by the strange white squares at the start of this one. Trust me, the more I fiddle with it, the worse it gets, so let's just use this as a reminder of how I have no idea what I'm doing.)

The weather has been pretty dreary here in Idaho. When it's not just looking cloudy, it's so windy that I swear it's trying to tear the roof off various structures on our property (succeeded in one case, too) So everything is becoming green and alive as Spring arrives.

Naturally, I figured I would dedicate this month to Twilight.

Love it or hate it, you have to admit that it's changed the world of writing forever.

Now, you've likely noticed the occasional jab I've made at Twilight's expense, but over this next month you'll get to truly see my relationship with the series and how it's evolved over the years and come to settle down into how I will always probably think of it.
It started with my absolute hatred of it. At the time of the series' popularity, I was a minority. These days it's actually more popular to hate it than love it, and it appears that Team Sweden can't stand the anti-fans as much as the fans. Perhaps even more. So, because of this, I had to come up with a more in-depth reason. It's easy to love something, and it's even easier to hate something, but it's hard to really break down some of the details of why and, to be honest, there are reasons that I both love and hate it these days.

For today, we get to have some fun at Twilight's expense, with math!

This was originally written by me in 2009, so of course the numbers have changed, but it's still interesting to see.

In the second Twilight book, New Moon, there is a point where Edward leaves Bella. Bella becomes so devastated that she literally becomes a brain-dead zombie ("There's a change?" you ask yourself), this is represented by four blank pages.

I admit, it did manage to make me go "Whoa" at the time, though nothing else managed to give me that feeling in the series, but the effect was quickly lost and it wasn't long before I realized how stupit it was. It was a waste of good paper.

So I decided to figure out how much of a waste it really is.

There are 4 blank pages in New Moon. I did some research and figured out that over 24 million copies of New Moon were sold as of the end of 2009 (This doesn't include the gobs of them that haven't sold). Take the 4 blank pages and multiply them by the number of copies of New Moon.

4 x 25,000,000 = 100,000,000

We now have 100 million blank pages.

But I'm not finished yet. Let's put those pages to good use.

The US standard edition versions of the Harry Potter series (Books 1-7) equal a total of 4,165 pages. Let's find out how many copies of the entire Harry Potter series we can make using the blank pages of New Moon alone. Take 100 million and divide by 4,175. If it comes up as a fraction, round down to the whole number because we don't want a partial set of the Harry Potter series.

100,000,000 / 4,175 = 23,952

We now have 23,952 copies of the entire Harry Potter series, the adventures of Harry, Ron, Hermione, and many others, made from all the blank pages of New Moon alone.

Happy reading everyone!

The Process of (not) Editing)

A step-by-step process of procrastination.

Well, now would be a good time to sit down and start editing.
I have to pee.
Ahhh.
Now I'm hungry.
Oh I should do some laundry!
Hey wait, I said I'd change my bedsheets.
I should probably find some clean sheets first.
There they are! Wait...those aren't sheets.
Oh well maybe I can just get rid of the electric blanket instead.
Man it feels good to get rid of that blanket, I've been getting way too warm.
Let me check for sheets again.
Nope, still can't find any.
Oh yeah, I was going to do laundry.
Bleh, I want to eat something first.
Waffle!
Back to laundry...but first let me check for clean sheets one last time.
Still nothing, I give up.
Lalala, sorting laundry.
Okay, laundry is now in the washing machine.
Time for some editing!
A Steam friend sent me a video link.
Haha, what will the Internet think of next?
I should write a blog post about procrastinating...
Hey I wonder if (insert author here)'s blog has been updated?
It has!
I need to shower.
My nails are getting pretty long.
Time to move the laundry into the dryer!

Several hours later and still no editing done.