
I write my stories because of my characters they are the motivation and the reward. I should probably mention here that I am not crazy (that I know of), it’s just that I am a character writer. More specifically, Edward told me something I didn’t want to hear.

Because they gave me a story I wasn’t expecting. I swiftly regretted asking them for the story. So, as I began to sketch out New Moon, I went back to Bella’s senior year of high school and asked my little cast of characters, “What happened?” The biggest non-YA thing I’d done with Forever Dawn was this: I’d pretty much passed over the rest of Bella’s high school experience entirely, skipping ahead to a time in her life with more mature themes. Because I was caught up in the story, I finished Forever Dawn anyway, knowing that it would never see the light of day I gave it to my big sister as a birthday gift. I realized pretty quickly that Forever Dawn did not follow the rules of YA. Unintentionally, I’d written a young adult novel. More specifically, young adults were going to be reading what I was writing. People were going to read what I was writing. I was about three hundred pages into Forever Dawn when my life got turned upside down. However, some of the content will work as a loose outline for book four, so I can’t tell you what happened, either.) For one thing, it’s not great-it’s downright embarrassing in some places. (People often ask me if I’m ever going to make Forever Dawn public. One of those epilogues turned into Forever Dawn. After I’d written three epilogues, all of them over a hundred pages long, I realized I wasn’t ready to stop writing about Bella and Edward. But, when it was ended, I started writing epilogues.

Originally, Twilight had a more defined ending. I wasn’t planning a sequel any more than I was planning to write a book in the first place.

The first sequel I wrote to Twilight-Forever Dawn-was more of the same.

I was just writing down a story for my personal enjoyment, letting it grow as it would and lead where it would. If you’ve read the story behind Twilight, then you know that I didn’t set out to write a novel or begin a career as an author. Writing a sequel is a very different experience than writing a story. **A note: I don’t pull any punches here, so if you haven’t read New Moon and you don’t want to be spoiled, don’t read this.**
