Who is going to see the Twilight movie? I am on the last book Breaking Dawn

[greenbriar]

and about 1/2 way through.


I am not one to like vampire stories, but this series is just awesome

[lost-in-nj]

1. My daughter is obsessed

I think she has bought her tickets



she stays up all night reading then

making me watch the trailer!!!


lost

[greenbriar]

2. you ought to read them. They are well written

My 17 year old daughter and I have been having book discussions almost daily because of these books.


It has been really cool

[BreweryYardRat]

3. *beats head repeatedly against hard surface*

mother of god...:banghead:

Do yourself a favor. Go pick up Barbara Hambly's "Those Who Hunt The Night" and "Traveling With The Dead." Look in used bookstores.

If you like comics, go find a copy of "Life Sucks." 'Clerks' meets vampires.

All of these are much better than Twilight.

[LeftyMom]

4. That new HBO show True Blood is pretty cool too.

I don't have HBO, but well, copies keep showing up on my hard drive. In HD no less. I really should get that looked at.

[BarenakedLady]

7. Life Sucks was hilarious.

:thumbsup:

[greenbriar]

9. hey ...each to their own, but I like them so does my daughter

and many of the female students I teach.


anything to get kids to read!!!

[VenusRising]

5. I'll probably wait for the movie to come to the dollar theatre or DVD.

I never like a movie as much as the book, so I can't really justify spending a bunch of money to see it when it opens.

I'm glad that you are enjoying the books and that it's opened a book discussion with your daughter:D

:hi:

[BarenakedLady]

6. I'll be taking my daughter and friend

I read the series. Now my 11 year old is on book three. She loves it.

[bigwillq]

8. Not me.

I never read the book, and I have no interest in seeing the movie.

[greenbriar]

10. cool from the website

The Writing: I know the exact date that I began writing Twilight, because it was also the first day of swim lessons for my kids. So I can say with certainty that it all started on June 2, 2003. Up to this point, I had not written anything besides a few chapters (of other stories) that I never got very far on, and nothing at all since the birth of my first son, six years earlier.

I woke up (on that June 2nd) from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately. For what is essentially a transcript of my dream, please see Chapter 13 ("Confessions") of the book.

Though I had a million things to do (i.e. making breakfast for hungry children, dressing and changing the diapers of said children, finding the swimsuits that no one ever puts away in the right place, etc.), I stayed in bed, thinking about the dream. I was so intrigued by the nameless couple's story that I hated the idea of forgetting it; it was the kind of dream that makes you want to call your friend and bore her with a detailed description. (Also, the vampire was just so darned good-looking, that I didn't want to lose the mental image.) Unwillingly, I eventually got up and did the immediate necessities, and then put everything that I possibly could on the back burner and sat down at the computer to write—something I hadn't done in so long that I wondered why I was bothering. But I didn't want to lose the dream, so I typed out as much as I could remember, calling the characters "he" and "she."

From that point on, not one day passed that I did not write something. On bad days, I would only type out a page or two; on good days, I would finish a chapter and then some. I mostly wrote at night, after the kids were asleep so that I could concentrate for longer than five minutes without being interrupted. I started from the scene in the meadow and wrote through to the end. Then I went back to the beginning and wrote until the pieces matched up. I drove the "golden spike" that connected them in late August, three months later.

It took me a while to find names for my anonymous duo. For my vampire (who I was in love with from day one) I decided

http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/twilight.html

[Chovexani]

11. I'll be showing up drunk with a group of malcontents to make fun of it

Liquor and snarky friends are only thing that could compel me to get through a viewing of Twilight.

My favorite Harry Potter fan artist in the world pretty much summed up my attempt to get through the book.

[elshiva]

12. Hahaha! That's hilarious.

:rofl:

[Chovexani]

13. I don't know what's worse, SMeyer's writing or the fandom

When Harry goddamn Potter fans think your fandom is batshit crazy, you might just have a problem. :P

[elshiva]

14. So, you really don't like it. Why?

I haven't tried to read it, but you know I love vampires.

[Chovexani]

15. If you love vampires, you will hate it

It's basically Mary Sue badfic written by a Mormon housewife. The main character is an insufferably annoying Sue with no redeeming qualities whom everyone seems to love anyway, the main vampire is dry as toast and has no personality at all. There's no sex in the book because SMeyer's a Mormon so they dry hump in a hilarious fashion instead. I've tried like three times to get through the first book and failed, but I've read summaries and the like and so far as I can tell there is no actual plot. It's basically a million pages of SMeyer telling you in prose so purple it makes Anne Rice seem like the Queen of Brevity how beautiful and wonderful Bella and Edward are and how awesomely omg amazing their twue wuv is. It's a lot of "tell, not show" and the problem is Edward is a creepy fucking stalker that would probably be arrested irl or at least slapped with a restraining order for the shit he pulls. The comic I linked you really sums it up.

Imagine if Anne Rice tried to write another Vampire Chronicles novel after a 36 hour crack-and-Jesus binge, and you'll have only begun to contemplate the horror that is Twilight. And all you need to know about the vampires? They go out in the sun. And they sparkle. Like a five year old girl that got into her big sister's body glitter. I'm not shitting you. I don't think SMeyer ever even read a vampire novel before or is familiar with any of the mythos. I think she got high on Robitussin*, watched the Queen of the Damned movie, and decided she could do it with less style and make it make even less sense. If I sound angry and a little bitter, it's the struggling writer in me wondering how shit like this and Eragon gets published.


*Mormon drug of choice, I learned this living out West.

[elshiva]

16. I liked the Queen of the Damned movie.

Vampires that go out in the day and fucking sparkle. :wtf: Do they have a special ring or something to be able to do that or are they just like that? Didn't the ring of Amarra allow the Angel to go out during the day?

[Chovexani]

17. No ring of Amara. They just sparkle.

For no reason, except Smeyer is crazy.

[LeftyMom]

18. Sparkly, daywalking vampires?

Holy shit. That is officially the unsexiest, wrongest and generally worst thing ever.

Consider a fatwa declared on whoever writes that shit.

[Chovexani]

23. Think of every bit of vampire lore you know.

Now imagine that tossed into a barbeque pit, doused with estrogen and lit aflame with the swooning of pre-adolescent girls and grown ass women who ought to know better, and there you have it.

It's like the old rule about grammar--you have to know the rules before you break them. Meyer doesn't have a clue, and it showed rather painfully even in the bit I read. The spoilers I've read for the rest of the series, particularly the last book, just reinforce it. For all her (many) faults, Anne Rice broke the standard vampire lore with panache, to the point where she added to the mythos as much as she subtracted from it. She's got daywalkers in the VC but it makes sense within the context of her mythology; only a select few are able to do so, because they're literally older than dirt and have a direct line to the source. Lestat only got the ability once he drank from Akasha. Satan's Night Out, however, is not out playing baseball in the sunshine (an honest to gods scene in the book). Hamilton did the same thing to some extent, even as shitty as the later Anita Blake books got. Meyer doesn't even know basic shit about vampires, though, other than the blood drinking and the immortality. She doesn't even know how to properly deal with immortality--would you choose to repeat HS ad nauseum if you were a vampire? WTF, dude.

Meyer basically wrote a shitty YA romance novel and stuck the word "vampire" in it. It's Gossip Girl with sparkly fangs.

[buzzycrumbhunger]

27. That's it!

I thought it was just the lack of good sex, lack of editing, and breakage of every literary rule there is.

I read it all in about four sittings, but left feeling unsatisfied (even with the "we're married now so here's your token honeymoon we've been building up to for 1600 pages" sex) and it was a quick read, light entertainment. . . but I was fundamentally frustrated by it all. I mean, vampires ARE sex, and this borders on Disney clean. It definitely should have been packaged as a teens' romance novel, so I could have avoided it. I do find it funny that so many Mormons are gleeful their kids are reading this series--how dumb do you have to be not to know what vampires are really about?

Of course, if I'd had two-person sex in recent memory, I might not have been reading it with such a one-track mind. :eyes:

[WildEyedLiberal]

21. This is the funniest book review I've ever read

:rofl:

I LOVE good fantasy/sci-fi/gothy horror; I refuse to read Twilight because I am unconvinced that a devout Mormon could pull off any of the above with anything resembling competency. I see my fears were not unfounded.

[Chovexani]

25. I do too, which is why I reflexively react to Twilight in horror

I'm an avid reader/writer of those genres that nearly got suckered in. I lived in Arizona for a couple of years, right when Twilight hit, in Meyer's neck of the woods so I was at ground zero for the hype machine. Local alt weekly was calling her the next Rowling, etc. So I tried it.

Now I sort of feel like Cassandra. Your instincts were right. :P

[PittPoliSci]

20. hahahahahahaaaa! i love it!

:patriot:

[WildEyedLiberal]

22. That's awesome; who is the artist?

I heart HP and I heart fanfic/art - please share with me your wisdom.

[Chovexani]

24. Her name's makani, you can find her stuff on dA

Also on LJ. She does some hilariously awesome Malfoy toons.

[WildEyedLiberal]

26. Excellent; thanks!

*goes to geek out on HP fanart*

[deepthought42]

19. my sister probably will

I, on the other hand, after having to work (at a bookstore) for the midnight release of Breaking Dawn, will abstain...I'm still scarred. ;)