Megan McCafferty

Vampire Books Are Not My Bag (Part One)

Monday, December 1st, 2008

I know I risk alienating approximately one half of the world’s literate population with this subject heading. Let me preface this entry by saying that while vampire books are not my bag, I understand why they are your bag. I get it. Really, I do.

About a year ago I was asked by an editor at TeenLibris books if I would consider contributing an essay to an anthology about Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. At the time I was between novels. I was coming off all the promotional business for Fourth Comings and wasn’t quite ready to start writing Perfect Fifths. I had just submitted a short story for an upcoming anthology I’ll tell you about later–the only work I’d taken on since finshing Fourth Comings six months earlier. I was eager to keep the creative momentum going so it wouldn’t be as difficult for me to return to the full-time intensity required to write Perfect Fifths. So I did something very unusual for me by agreeing to the assignment before I read any of the Twilight books. I figured I could approach the essay like a college term paper: Read the books, come up with a thesis, then go back to the source materials to find evidence to support it.

I learned two things from this experience:

1. Never underestimate the page-turning powers of the literary bad boy.

2. Never agree to write an essay before you have read the 1792 pages required to do so.

Part One (click on the individual pages to see them better):

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Tags: edward cullen, life lessons learned the hard way, marcus flutie