not another twilight origin story

it’s coming up on my year anniversary of being a twilight fan. (i know! only a year?! i shall explain…) i thought, in honour of that, i will post a blog about how i fell into this world ~ my beloved twiverse.

like everyone else on the planet, i heard of twilight sometime after the first movie came out. i am, in general, fiercely against anything popular. underdogs ftw! at the time, i was taking a few classes at university with a bunch on people 10 years younger than me and i didn’t want to like anything they did. i needed to set myself apart from them somehow. from the beginning, i was against it. plus, i don’t like vampires. (HA!)
i remember seeing previews for new moon on tv and scoffing at the whole vampire/werewolf/human love triangle thing (how cliché, right?) without knowing anything about it. the release of eclipse also came and went without a care from me. (i don’t remember if i knew at the time that the movies were based on books.)

now, anyone who knows me knows that i have a little problem with digital hoarding. i download movies obsessively and, for the most part, never get around to watching them. i am especially needy when it comes to franchises. even if i have no interest in the series, i have to have it in my collection. so, at some point in 2011, i downloaded the 3 twilight movies but they remained unwatched for quite some time.

i worked full time as a preschool teacher for the first six months of last year but was exhausted by the end so i wanted to take the summer off. i ended up working only 5 sporadic days throughout the summer and was really bored. i caught up on some of my movie watching. but I still refused to watch twilight.

then, on august 15^th, i had run out of movies that piqued my interest and was sitting on the couch scrolling through the list and thought, what the hell… may as well just so i can prove everyone wrong. i pressed play on catherine hardwicke’s little vampire flick…

i was riveted. i thought it was the most horribly romantic thing i’d ever seen. i am a huge sucker (pun intended) for love stories, although i don’t think i realized to what extent at the time. as soon it was over, i watched new moon and eclipse in quick succession. and as soon as eclipse was over, i started with twilight again. i watched all three twice through in one sitting. that’s 752 minutes, btw.  over 12 and a half hours.

the next day, i went online to find the books. (who has time to wait for things to be delivered? i downloaded .pdf’s. illegal pirating prevails in my household. lock me up.) i read twilight. i remember having mixed feelings bout the book but when it came down to it, i was obsessed with the story and had to keep going. couldn’t put it down.

i think i read midnight sun (what there is of it! *sob*) before i moved on to new moon. i was completely heartbroken when it ended right before the good part!

i ended up reading all four books in three days. i hauled my laptop to bed with me and read all night and then slept during the day. (my husband was NOT happy.) people who know me also know it’s impossible to get me to wake up for anything other than work or school. what they don’t know is that i will also wake up to read new twilight related source material. for that first week or so, i was a twilight watching/reading zombie. seemed only fitting.

i was heartbroken all over again when i read the last page of breaking dawn. it was all over. (more on that later…) and i was mad that i had to wait 3 more months for the new breaking dawn movie to come out.

when i had watched all the movies and read all the books (and listened to the audio books as well), i was starving for more. i downloaded the dvd special features to accompany the movies (i still didn’t have my own copies yet. it didn’t take long for me to acquire the blu-rays though.) and watched all the deleted/extended scenes and documentaries. it still wasn’t enough. i went online and watched every single interview i could find. (that’s where i feel i “got to know” rob and kristen. which started a whole other obsession. but that’s for another time…) still, i needed more. which brought me to fanfiction.net. any other twihard who reads this will be thinking, ‘oh, here we go…’ but it isn’t what you think. i never really got into the whole fanfic world (yet). 2 reasons ~ #1. there’s a lot of crap to sift through and without recommendations, it can be very overwhelming. there’s just so much! a lot of it, not good. #2. i wasn’t looking for stories outside of the actual stephenie meyer created world. i just wanted more of what was already there. so i found a few continuations of midnight sun and a few epov’s of new moon and eclipse. (i have yet to find a good epov of breaking dawn. if anyone knows of any… ?!)

back to the aforementioned gloom surrounding the end of the series with breaking dawn~ there are maybe one or two continuations i came across that i’ve enjoyed but almost as soon as i put down breaking dawn (yes, by the way, i have purchased the actual books by now.) and came to terms with the fact that it may be a very long time before stephenie meyer ever continues the vampire stories, if at all, i started forming my own continuing story in my head. when i can’t sleep, i actually narrate in my head. the following night, i pick up where i left off previously. the morning after the first night, i actually got up and wrote it down with the intention of always doing that. but from there, a lot has been lost. it’s never as good when i go to write it down as when i first imagine it. but i am still working on it. my original intention was to write my own novel (well, my own using sm’s characters, of course.) or perhaps a screenplay. for now i just call it “my story” when referring to what i’m writing when my husband asks what i’m doing. in my head, i also affectionately think of it as “twilight movie #6”.

i know i’m not alone in my creative urge after reading twilight. that’s one of the things that is so great about what stephenie meyer created herself. something about it makes you want to create things yourself. no other books have ever brought that out in me. something about her world makes you want to move in and never leave it. somehow, she created these characters that you love fiercely and can’t let go of.

i’m not good at explaining on an intellectual level why i feel a connection to certain things. i can’t tell you matter-of-factly why i love twilight SO much. i can only tell you these movies and books bring out such strong feelings in me that nothing else in my life has ever done before. i have a friend who is obsessed with harry potter and we frequently have potter vs. twilight arguments. although i enjoy jkr’s books, they just don’t make me FEEL what twilight does. twilight has become my own personal brand of heroin.