New Twilight Saga Novella Announced for Release in June

Stephenie Meyer has thrown us loyal fans a Twilight-sized bone. According to her website, a new novella, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, will be published on June 5, 2010. This release is the first new material from Stephenie in two years and is timed perfectly to prepare all of us for the theatrical release of Twilight Saga: Eclipse.

This novella promises to give us an insiders viewpoint of the newborns and Victoria/Riley during Eclipse. Read Stephenie's entire statement and press release on her personal website.

Preorder information is forthcoming and this post will be updated when the information is available. The book has another breathtaking cover, as seen below. Also, one dollar from each book sold out of the first printing will go to the American Red Cross.

What is the best part of this announcement? The book will be available online for free from June 7 through July 5, as a thank you to Stephenie Meyer's fans. You can access the novella at http://www.breetanner.com/.

After your collective sqeeing has died down, what are you looking forward to learning about the newborns? Are you going to preorder a copy or just read it for free online? Or do you say "Who cares about Bree? Where's Midnight Sun already?!?" Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

UPDATE: The novella is available for preorder from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. This price is around $9. I preordered mine!!!

(First posted to the Bewitched Bookworms blog on 3-30-2010 by myself. I'm a lazy if not efficient blogger, lol)

Here's my opinion on the matter. I'm excited that we will be getting some new material out of Stephenie Meyer that is from the Twilight Saga. I am really surprised that this was kept so secret. Everything seems to be leaked on the internet these days. On Stephenie Meyer's website, there is a picture of one of the Eclipse actress' burned and soaked copy of the manuscript. I'm sure Stephenie has learned her lesson with Midnight Sun and had a thick document they had to sign before getting their hot little hands on it.

This gives me hope that Stephenie Meyer has been secretly working on Midnight Sun and it will be sprung on us just like this novella was. Her camp has proven they can keep things quiet and we won't even see it coming. I predict the internet and twitter will simultaneously fail if that press release comes out!

How Twilight and other vampire novels ruined regular novels for me

Let's start this up with a dream I had last week that I've been meaning to share. I was in a grocery store with Sam and Dean from Supernatural. The guy in line immediately before us bought porno mags and some shamwows. That last episode of Supernatural gave me weird dreams. I would throw those shamwows out after that guy's done if he knows what's good for him. Anyway, on to today's topic.

Last night I tried to read John Updike’s Widows of Eastwicke. I lasted through exactly 3 pages before I gave up. I haven’t read any of his other works, but this was just paragraph after paragraph of run on sentences. What’s happened to me? Have all these years of chick lit, vampire books, and chemistry texts/journals killed my ability to read regular literature and enjoy it?

I started my love affair with vampire novels a little over a year ago. I started with Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Series after watching a few episodes of True Blood. I was hooked instantly. Once I finished all available books in two weeks, I immediately started over. Rereading these books at a much more leisurely pace allowed me to catch some things I missed the first time around. I read several more non-paranormal books before Christmas before I stopped reading novels all together. My pregnancy addled mind couldn’t focus on novels, so I read magazines and surfed the net on my crackberry to keep me from maiming the freaks on the train. Thinking ahead, I told my sister to buy Twilight as my Christmas gift since I had heard good things about the series. She bought me Twilight and New Moon. These two books were shelved away for the future when I could focus on a novel.

After Baby C was born in March, I found myself with three months of maternity leave ahead of me (Well, 10 weeks actually since Baby C was stubborn and came out a week late). On a baby supply run to Target, I bought Eclipse and Breaking Dawn. I hate to start a novel series and not be able to read them all in a row. I once spent two months reading through 13 of Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta series. I don’t like having to think about what the hell happened in the last book that I read months ago (I never said I wasn’t OCD about anything!). The next books that I was due to read out of the authors I follow weren’t going to be released until the beginning of May (Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Series Book Nine – Dead and Gone and Jennifer Lancaster’s fourth memoir Pretty in Plaid). I was recovering from an emergency c-section so what better way to rest than to sit stiffly with a good book and the cutest baby in the world in your lap? Then the wheels were put into motion for my fascination. Hey, I needed something to occupy my time while the hubs was playing Call of Duty nonstop.

I started Twilight and was done in two days. There is something about Stephenie Meyer’s writing that just sucks you in. I still maintain that there are subliminal messages in the text. How else could so many people of all ages love these books? I continued on to New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn. Breaking Dawn nearly broke my psyche, but I finished it after taking a break to read the books I had been waiting for above. I did watch the Twilight movie on DVD with my sister. She was totally in love with it and I made fun of it the first time I watched it. Now I don’t have much of an excuse, I’ve watched it about 10 times now. It gets less hokey upon repeat viewings. There are still some scenes that make me cringe, which I’m sure will come up in MrsVanquish and Betti’s movie vs. book discussion on their blogs. Bottom line, I read these books quickly and probably missed some key points. I plan on rereading these before New Moon comes out in the theater to refresh my memory.

Through various True Blood websites like sookiestackhouse.com and Twilight websites, I found out about other vampire series. The first set I read was the Queen Betsey series by MaryJanice Davidson. These books follow the life of the Queen of the Vampires whose main hobbies are shoes and cussing. These are very comedic but also contain some lovely lemons. Seven books are available in this series. The next set I finished was the Night Huntress series by Jeaniene Frost. There are four books currently available, featuring a half-human half-vampire woman named Cat who fights bad vampires with her vampire husband Bones. This series is also funny but more serious than the Queen Betsey series and also contains serious lemony goodness. I can’t wait for a new release in this series to come out in 2010.

In between some of these books I’ve attempted to read non-vampire books without much success. I read Stephenie Meyer’s The Host with difficulty. The book was pretty unbearable from about 100 pages in until around page 450. Several of my friends have read this and it’s a pretty even split among those who loved it and those who loathed it. I’ve never forced myself to finish reading a book like I had to do with this one. I had borrowed it from a friend and didn’t want to buy it for myself. I finished it, gave it back, and am now on the fence about reading any future non-Twilight Saga books from this author. I read the seventh book in the Andy Carpenter Lawyer series by David Rosenfelt I had been waiting for (New Tricks). David Rosenfelt's books feature a reluctant lawyer and always have dogs in the story. In real life, his foundation has rescued over 4000 dogs from shelters and death. Then I read a book featuring a woman prophet and demons called Every Demon Has Its Day by Cara Lockwood. That book also took a little getting into even though it was supernatural. I never had a problem getting right into books before like I do now. If the subject is vampires, I’m right into it. If the subject is something else, blah. All of these vampire series has ruined me on regular fiction.

So what’s a girl to do that has free time on her commute to help her ignore the mutants that ride the train? I think I’m going to start the Vampire Diaries series by L.J. Smith. Next I’ll reread Twilight and New Moon. Maybe a little Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare. I still haven’t gotten around to reading the Anita Blake series by Laurell K. Hamilton or the Black Dagger Brotherhood series by JR Ward. The covers of those book seriously embarrass me, but who cares? I don’t ride on the train with anyone I know anyway.

I guess I might as well continue my vampire book obsession. I do have the new Patricia Cornwell book, The Scarpetta Factor, coming out in a few weeks. That will be my only non vampire book to read in the near future. Any suggestions to what I should read? I need to start compiling my Christmas wish lists...

Beware: Twilight Saga can be hazardous to your mental well being

***Disclaimer, post is not very funny, really long, and may be TMI for everyone, myself included. Oh, and there's a few WTF pics too.***

Back in my very first post on this blog I alluded to my opinion that reading the Twilight Saga books gave me post partum depression for a few days. I luckily have a lovely support system in my husband, mother, and sister so I wasn’t like this for long.

I’d gotten Twilight and New Moon for Christmas as a gift from my sister. Since I was already starting to feel not so hot from being pregnant and working on my feet full time, I wasn’t reading as much as I usually did on the train. I mostly surfed the net on my crackberry on the commute home and tried not to kill the people who routinely annoyed me on my rides to and fro. I tried to pass out in my seat on the way to work which isn’t so easy when you’re ballooning to walrus size and aren’t very bendable. After waiting an extra week after my due date, I finally gave birth via an emergency c-section (no squished head!) to the cutest baby boy (okay, I am a little biased) towards the end of March.

Fast forward to April, I’m really sleep deprived and still sore from the major surgery I had undergone to have baby C. I’d been at home since the beginning of March, there was only so much of the internet I could surf. I’d basically played Mahjong Safari on pogo.com for 2 weeks straight waiting to have the baby while the husband played Call of Duty. This was pre-Twilight blogs and websites to check each day. When the Twilight DVD came out, my sister bought it and eventually made me watch it with her. Now I’ll admit to being a movie talker, I’ve got some kind of movie Tourettes and I can’t shut my trap for very long. You so don't want to watch a scary movie in the theater with me, I get dirty looks from everyone from laughing so loud. So you can imagine how my first viewing of Twilight was. The lipstick on all of the Cullens drove me nuts the entire time. And I mentioned that, a lot. The movie did pique my interest though so I decided to start reading the books. I did have plenty of time to read them, since I was on leave until June 1.

After that first viewing, my sister and I headed to Target for some much needed baby supplies. We walked past a display housing all of Stephenie Meyer’s books. I figured I might as well buy the Eclipse and Breaking Dawn since I have Twilight and New Moon waiting for me at home. There is nothing I hate worse than having to wait to read the next book in a series. Once I know I like a writer’s style and the book, I usually buy the rest of the series that is available. I should probably own stock in Amazon, I buy so much from there (I don't only buy for myself, I'm an enabler and preordered Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for the hubby. Guess I'm a glutten for punishment). Our local Barnes and Noble is a crap shoot and we’re always looking over our shoulder because our crazy neighbor goes there a lot. We’d rather not get stuck talking to him so we have to cut our trips short if he’s there. When we got back to my house, I let my sister borrow books two through four since she already borrowed Twilight from a friend, and I start reading book one.

The hubby can regale you with stories of how I’ve ignored him in the last 16 years while reading books and magazines more than he has with his crap-ass Call of Duty game. So he probably does have me there. And now I started another consuming book series where the books just got longer and longer. I read Twilight in a day with an infant in my lap, continuing on through books two and three without incident. You try holding a 700 page monstrosity in one hand without hitting your baby with it. It’s not that easy. Finally, I got to Breaking Dawn. And this is when I could swear I was having panic attacks at night for a few days. I was fine through book 1, no problem with Bella and Edward’s wedding, honeymoon, even when she got pregnant. Again, reading Jacob’s perspective was pretty uneventful, until the birth was about to begin. Then I was really tweaked at night and pretty bummed during the day.

There were too many coincidences in the birth of Reneesmee (what a stupid name) and baby C. We both had to have emergency c-sections, there was no chance of a regular birth. Bella would die so no option there. Baby C was starting to have heart rate fluctuations and I didn’t dilate enough or have strong enough contractions after 15 hours of labor. Bella didn’t get to see her baby after the birth. I had to wait several hours before I could hold my own baby C after going through recovery, etc. Plus, Bella and I were both really doped up. Let me tell you, an epidural of fentanyl straight into your spine combined with vicodin and ibuprofen make you feel nothing. I couldn’t remember what I had done 10 minutes before, let alone stay awake without nodding off for a few minutes over the course of two days.

The worst thing was not being able to move. Bella couldn’t move due to the morphine and I was immobile as well. I’m extremely claustrophobic and not being able to move anything below my neck during the c-section was pure hell. I had a blue sheet in my face so I couldn’t see anything, an oxygen line in my nose, and a husband in my face. How I didn’t totally freak out, I don’t know. I know my husband was just trying to comfort me, but he got yelled at for his effort and I am sorry for that. He doesn’t grasp how my claustrophobia has gotten worse the older I get. I had to get an MRI of my head for migraines, and I was barely able to do that. The kicker is that I didn’t have a choice. If I wanted baby C out and healthy, I had to endure this living hell. The decision was made and 10 minutes later I was being wheeled into surgery. I’ll readily admit that I feel ripped off that I didn’t get to have a regular birth. But what really pisses me off is that if we want more children, I’m going to have to experience a c-section all over again. I’m not sure I’ll ever be strong enough to endure that again. And now I have a shelf gut now to show for the first one.

When I went to bed that night at about 2 am after reading the birth scenes, I couldn’t sleep. I just lay in bed thinking how I wouldn’t live forever, I couldn’t live forever. Eventually baby C would be without a mom and dad. I’m sure a lot of this stems from fear of death and what follows. Reading the twilight books, especially Breaking Dawn really struck something in me. Fluctuating post partum hormones and severe sleep deprivation weren’t exactly leaving me the most rational woman around. This sleeplessness and panic about dieing and leaving everyone behind continued for another night. I realized that for my own sanity I had to stop reading that book.

By this time it was the beginning of May and I had preordered two books by authors that I really love. I didn’t read anything at all until I received Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris and Pretty In Plaid by Jennifer Lancaster, both New York Times best selling authors. The new Charlaine Harris book is the ninth book of the Southern Vampire Series that the HBO series True Blood is based on. Jennifer Lancaster’s books are autobiographical and she is one of the funniest authors that I read. She is very snarky and borderline bitchy, but it makes for some hilarious reading. This book is her fourth and I really recommend reading her other three in order. You can read their descriptions on amazon.com (damn you Amazon for taking all of my money) or find them at your local bookstore (damn you too local Barnes and Noble).

So I had a choice, read something that was sure to be very funny, or take my chances with another vampire book. I chose to read the further adventures of Sookie Stackhouse, so I read Dead and Gone first. This book didn’t give me any panic attacks. I really just think there were too many coincidences between my birth story and that of Bella. My subconscious fears about death and dying really came to the front during those few nights. So, a word of warning to people who are pregnant, newly post partum, and have issues with death. You might want to wait to read book four of the Twilight Saga until your hormones have leveled off and you're mentally stable. Plus it still bothers me that Stephenie Meyer described the birth scene in detail but faded to black on Edward and Bella’s honeymoon. I mean, come on, your audience has grown as your books have come out. You can describe a huge bloody mess but not a word of some action? Even a little description of the nookie would have been fine.

Obviously I’m incapable of being serious for the whole length of a huge ass post such as this, so here are a few new WTF pictures that I got in an email recently. Sorry to anyone that I have scarred for life on the ideas of childbirth or claustrophobia. Since my husband might be the only one reading this, now you know what I went through during one of the hardest and best times of my life. And we have a beautiful, perfect son to show for it.

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Notice anything in particular about what this shirt is made of? I really hope those were new underwear.

Um, where I hail from, we usually wind up running racoons over, not feeding them. Especially not feeding them this way. Have they not heard of the lady who was polar bear bait? Or what about the person who was panda bear bait?

Best Costume Ever and Birth During New Moon

Sister Widow is due with baby #2 on November 23. While we were talking about the Twilight Saga and how it was taking me forever to get through Breaking Dawn, she says the strangest thing.

Sister Widow: That's what I'm going to be for Halloween.

Me: Huh? (obviously I was really slow that day)

Sister Widow: Duh, pregnant Bella.

Me: I'm pretty sure the only people that would get that would be you and me. And only because you told me.

Sister Widow: This is gonna be the most awesome costume ever!

I have to disagree since I think Nephew Widow's Spongebob Squarepants costume was pretty wicked last year, but why burst her bubble. (I'm a lover of all things Spongebob, so shoot me)

Since she's due so close to the release date of New Moon, we're getting kind of scared that she won't make it. I know I don't want to be the people on the news whose relative had a baby in the movie theatre. Plus, if she has the baby before the movie comes out and she's still in the hospital, I'll just drag Mr. Widow to go see it. I can watch it again when she's out of the hospital right? Nothing wrong with seeing it multiple times in the theater.

Sister Widow has employed just this strategy with the Harry Potter movies. We always go see them opening weekend together, before she sees it with her boyfriend. She's even willing to lie and say she hasn't seen the movie yet. What a sister! I think she really just has to see it again since I'm usually asking her questions during the movie since I refuse to read the books. Who knows how much she actually remembers.

During our annual Harry Potter movie trip in 2002, we encountered the worst thing imaginable in the women's bathroom on our way out of the theater. Was it crack whores? People making out in the bathroom? No, far worse. We caught the 11:00 pm show so it was 1:00 am when we left. Stopping off at the bathroom before we left was a big mistake. Someone had smeared poo all over a couple of the bathroom stall walls. It was so gross. We expect that from boys, not girls. We really felt sorry for the poor movie theater worker that was gonna have to clean that!

And to start something new, here's a picture that makes you go WTF! I guess partying Grandma just couldn't keep up.