There has been a countdown page at Stephenie Meyer’s Fickle Fish Films Facebook page the last thirty days and today we at last got the payoff. It was announced that the long awaited Midnight Sun, the Edward Cullen perspective of the events in Twilight, the first book in the Forks Saga, will be published on 4 August 2020.
This manuscript has an interesting history. Meyer was writing it in 2008 when beta chapters, the first twelve, were released by her trusted readers to the internet. She then gave up on writing the book and put up a pdf of the draft chapters on her website. That draft is not available this morning at StephenieMeyer.com (check here to see if it is now). She talked about it again in 2015 but balked at publication.
Read the news about the new Twilight at The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, and USA Today. The TwiHards on Twitter, of course, are losing their minds with excitement. Me? I’m looking forward to it, frankly, for two reasons.
First, I’ve read the Midnight Sun draft chapters and more than once. It was an important part of my writing Spotlight: A Close Up Look at the Artistry and Meaning of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga. I’d love to read, to experience Jacob’s perspective on the finale in the room of mirrors. I’m a fan and a serious reader of the series; of course I want to read the complete Midnight Sun. I have a three ring binder on my Twilight shelf with a print out of the drafts.
Last, Meyer is a student, nay, a disciple of Orson Scott Card, the other best-selling Latter-day Saint writer of our times. Her favorite book is Speaker for the Dead, part of Card’s Ender’s Game series, and she claims to have read at least twice everything Card has written. Check out his bibliography to understand what that means. One of Card’s signature moves? Re-telling stories from his various series from the perspective of other characters in that story.
My only question is, “Why now?” Besides it being International Star Wars Day (‘May the Fourth Be With You’). Is it the fifteenth anniversary of Twilight’s release? Or the failure of Meyer’s other books to take off? I doubt sales of her The Host or The Chemist will ever approach those of Twilight or even pay back her advance from hopeful publishers. Or is that just a cheap shot at a target that is more abused than given her due?
Let me know your thoughts on Midnight Sun in the comment boxes below. Hat-tip to James, my contact in Twilight fandom, for letting me know about the count-down page and this morning’s announcement.
the famous Batman cowl in 2021’s The Batman. While there will undoubtedly be hue and cry from every corner, as there always is with the casting of such a culturally important character, Pattinson is both an interesting and a promising choice.
A good friend from the Twilight years here at HogwartsProfessor keeps me up to speed on the author of that series, 
How unusual is that? Not very unusual, I’m afraid. One of the best-selling authors of the 21st Century publishes a book in late 2016 with a major house (500,000 copies printed…), just in time for Christmas, and uber fans of hers haven’t heard of it in 2019. Wikipedia, believe it or don’t, still doesn’t have a page dedicated to it. 
So why did Ms. Meyer decide to write a pulpy spy thriller, an ultramasculine genre that is notoriously tough to break into, particularly for female authors? 
She rarely holds book signings, and no longer reads reviews or online comments about herself. “At first I read everything, and I learned that was not superhealthy,” she said.
A few years later, Ms. Meyer returned to the idea and decided to write it as a novel. She keeps vampire-like work hours — a residual habit from when she began writing “Twilight” while she and her husband were raising their three sons — and worked on “The Chemist” from 9 p.m. until 3 a.m. The plot flowed quickly, but she struggled at times to devise unusual ways to kill, maim and torture people, so she consulted several experts in biochemistry and molecular biology, including Kirstin Hendrickson, a senior lecturer at the School of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University.
I don’t know where J. K. Rowling is or what she’s thinking or doing now that she is abstaining from twitter-dom. It’s been a refreshing silence, frankly, and we can only hope it has been and will continue to be a refreshing and rejuvenating respite for The Presence.
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