Hello, lovely reader!
Again, happy anniversary and welcome to the new tenth-anniversary bonus material!
First things first:
I’M SO SORRY.
I know there is going to be a lot of wailing and teeth gnashing because this new bonus material is (A) not entirely new, but mostly (B) not Midnight Sun. (If you are worried that I don’t understand your pain quite enough, let me assure you that my mother has made it abundantly clear.) I will explain how this came about, and hopefully that will make things, if not better, at least understandable.
A very short time ago, my agent approached me and asked if there was anything I could do for the tenth-anniversary rerelease of Twilight. The publisher was looking for a foreword of some kind, a “happy anniversary” letter thing. It seemed… well, to be honest, really boring. What could I say that would be fun and exciting? Nothing. So I thought about other things I could do, and if it makes you feel better, Midnight Sun did come up. The problem was time—as in, there wasn’t any. Certainly not enough to write a novel, or even half of one.
As I was musing on Twilight after being away from it for so long, and discussing the anniversary problem with friends, I started thinking about something I’d said before at signings and in interviews. You know, Bella has always gotten a lot of censure for getting rescued on multiple occasions, and people have complained about her being a typical damsel in distress. My answer to that has always been that Bella is a human in distress, a
normal human being surrounded on all sides by people who are basically superheroes and supervillains. She’s also been criticized for being too consumed with her love interest, as if that’s somehow just a girl thing. But I’ve always maintained that it would have made no difference if the human were male and the vampire female—it’s still the same story. Gender and species aside, Twilight has always been a story about the magic and obsession and frenzy of first love.
So I thought to myself, Well, what if I put that theory to the test? That might be fun. As per my usual, I started out believing that I would do one or two chapters. (It’s funny/sad how I still don’t seem to know myself very well.) Remember how I said there was no time? Fortunately, this project was not only fun, but also really fast and easy. It turns out that there isn’t much difference at all between a female human in love with a male vampire and a male human in love with a female vampire. And that’s how Beau and Edythe were born.
A couple of notes on the conversion:
- I’ve done a pretty straight-across-the-board gender swap with all the Twilight characters, but there are two exceptions.
- The biggest exception is Charlie and Renée, who have stayed Charlie and Renée. Here’s the reason for that: Beau was born in 1987. It was a rare thing for a father to get primary custody of a child in those days—even more so when the child was just a baby. Most likely, the mother would have had to be proven unfit in some way. I have a really hard time believing that any judge at that time (or even now) would give a child to a transient, unemployed father over a mother with a steady job and strong ties to her community. Of course, these days if Charlie had fought for Bella, he probably could have taken her from Renée. Thus, the more unlikely scenario is the one that plays out in Twilight. Only the fact that a few decades ago a mother’s rights were considered more important than a father’s rights, as well as the fact that Charlie’s not the vindictive type, made it possible for Renée to raise Bella—and, inthis case, now Beau.
- The second exception is very small—just a few background characters mentioned only twice. The reason for this exception is my misplaced sense of justice for fictional people. There were two characters in the wider Twilight universe who really got the shaft in an ongoing sense. So instead of doing a swap with these characters, I gave them a coup. It adds nothing to the story. It was just me being weird and indulging my neurosis.
- There are many more changes in the writing than were necessitated by Beau’s status as a male person, so I thought I would break them down for you. These are, of course, rough estimates. I did not count all the words I changed, or do any actual math.
- 5% of the changes I made were because Beau is a boy.
- 5% of the changes were because Beau’s personality developed just slightly differently than Bella’s. The biggest variations are that he’s more OCD, he’s not nearly so flowery with his words and thoughts, and he’s not as angry—he’s totally missing the chip Bella carries around on her shoulder all the time.
- 70% of the changes I made were because I was allowed to do a new editing run ten years later. I got to fix almost every word that has bothered me since the book was printed, and it was glorious.
- 10% were things that I wished I had done the first time around but that hadn’t occurred to me at the time. That might sound like the same thing as the preceding category, but it’s slightly different. This isn’t a case of a word that sounds clunky or awkward. This is an idea that I wish had been explored earlier, or conversations that should have happened but didn’t.
- 5% were mythology issues—mistakes, actually—mostly related to visions. As I continued into the sequels to Twilight—and even Midnight Sun, where I got to look inside Alice’s head with Edward—the way Alice’s visions worked was refined. It’s more mystical in Twilight, and looking at it now, there are ways she should have been involved and wasn’t. Whoops!
- Which leaves a 5% catchall, for the many miscellaneous changes that I made, each for a different, and no doubt selfish, reason.
I hope you have fun with Beau and Edythe’s story, even though it’s not something you were waiting for. I truly had the best time ever creating this new version. I love Beau and Edythe with a passion I did not see coming, and their story has made the fictional world of Forks fresh and happy for me again. I hope it does the same for you. If you get one tenth of the pleasure out of this that I did, it will be worth it.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for being a part of this world, and thank you for being such an amazing and unexpected source of joy in my life for the last decade.
Much love, Stephenie
If his destiny be strange, it is also sublime.
Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
