The story begins with a dream. It wasn’t the Great American Dream — Stephenie Meyer, then a 29-year-old Mormon housewife living in Arizona, wasn’t sitting at home trying to figure out how to be the next mega-best-selling author. It was a different kind of dream.
On the morning of June 2, 2003, Meyer woke up with the fading afterimage of a vision in her head, of a young woman and a vampire, talking, in a meadow. She didn’t want to forget it, so she wrote it down. Then she kept on writing. Sometimes you have the dream, and sometimes the dream has you.
Everybody knows where the story ends up. Meyer has sold 45 million books in the U.S. and 40 million more worldwide. Altogether her books have spent 235 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, 136 of them at No. 1. The movie version of Twilight, which came out a year ago, made $350 million. New Moon opens on Nov. 20; the third installment, Eclipse, arrives in theaters next June.But what happened between the beginning and the end? How did the dream become the Global Franchise Megabrand? That’s the part that not everybody knows.
