1. Stephenie Meyer, author of the four-book Twilight series, was a 29-year-old stay-at-home mom in Phoenix when she started the set. “I lost sleep to write. I mean, you had to give something up, and I wasn’t giving up my time with my kids.”
2. The Twilight saga starts when Bella Swan moves from Phoenix to Forks, Wash. to live with her father. Soon she meets a mysterious classmate named Edward Cullen and romance sparks. He plays hard to get at first, but all bets are off when he finally reveals his big secret; he’s a vampire.
3. Other key characters in the story include Bella’s police chief father Charlie, family friend Jacob Black who attends a separate school, but visits Bella with his father Billy…and then the Cullen family. Dr. Carlisle Cullen works at the local hospital and is responsible for turning his family members into vampires while on their death beds.
4. Dr. Cullen hunted vampires 300 years ago before being bitten and transformed during an attack. He hated what he had become and forced himself to feed on animals rather than humans. His entire family maintains a vegetarian lifestyle, which allows them to take up a residence and live among mortals.
5. Edward and Bella’s story came to Meyer in a dream. “I woke up and I was just wrapped up in this idea of what was going to happen next; was he going to kill her or were they going to be together, because it was 50/50 at that point.”
6. A web search of rainiest places in the continental U.S. led Meyer to Forks. Her vampire clan needed to settle in a place with overcast skies year round.
7. Bella’s experiences at Forks High were modeled after Meyer’s own life. The writer describes herself as a 5 amongst Barbie-like classmates at her Scottsdale high school, but once she moved to Provo, Utah for college things changed. Like Bella, she was awestruck at the immediate attention she was getting from the opposite sex. “In Provo, surrounded by normal people, I was more like an 8,” Meyer confesses online.
8. Meyer avoided describing Bella in the books to give readers a chance to put themselves in her shoes. At the fans request she posted this on her website, “In my head, Bella is very fair-skinned, with long, straight, dark brown hair and chocolate brown eyes. Her face is heart-shaped—a wide forehead with a widow's peak, large, wide-spaced eyes, prominent cheekbones, and then a thin nose and a narrow jaw with a pointed chin. Her lips are a little out of proportion, a bit too full for her jaw line. Her eyebrows are darker than her hair and more straight than they are arched. She's five foot four inches tall, slender but not at all muscular, and weighs about 115 pounds. She has stubby fingernails because she has a nervous habit of biting them.”
9. The book cover of a single apple represents the forbidden fruit in the Bible. “I used the scripture from Genesis because I loved the phrase "the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil." Meyer says on her site: “The nice thing about the apple is it has so many symbolic roots. You've got the apple in Snow White, one bite and you're frozen forever in a state of not-quite-death... Then you have Paris and the golden apple in Greek mythology—look how much trouble that started. Apples are quite the versatile fruit.” 9. Meyer wrote a 600+ page Twilight sequel, Forever Dawn, for her sister’s birthday before she knew the series would be published. The reason it didn’t make the cut for the masses? Too racy! When she found out the books would be targeting a young adult audience, she rewrote it as New Moon.
10.Twilight is followed by New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn.
KEEP READING: Meyer's leaked manuscript!