Stephenie Meyer's response to the controversial VARIETY interview on my blog!

I've been so crazy busy that I haven't been watching my blog comments as much as I should have been, but it appears that on August 14, Stephenie Meyer commented on my blog post regarding her interview in Variety. I can't be sure it was Stephenie, unfortunately, as it was an anonymous comment and she didn't email to say "hey, it's really me!" :) But, if it is in fact Stephenie Meyer, I'd love for you all to read her response pasted below.

Stephenie, if you truly did comment, I sincerely appreciate you stopping by and offering your take on what happened with this interview. It means a lot to me that you took the time to comment with such thoughtfulness and address the points I brought up about this interview.

Your coming forward and leaving this response certainly has changed my opinion about the interview and I can definitely understand the miscommunication that sometimes comes with talking to a reporter. Your response about the "being over it" comment made me so grateful that you addressed it and got to fully express how you feel and what you were over exactly. Of course no one could fault you for that!

I wish you all the best moving forward and thank you for giving *us* a great decade! I'm incredibly appreciative of your explanation and I apologize for jumping to conclusions based on something I've read. I learned a valuable lesson here and will keep it in mind going forward and reading future interviews.

Here's what Stephenie had to say:

Anonymous said...
http://stepheniemeyer.com/

Read her response, Aug. 14th

August 14, 2013

Hi everyone,

I'm just back from my short publicity tour for Austenland, and very glad to be home with my boys. I hope you all are having a wonderful summer with your families, and that you have a few more weeks to enjoy (unlike Arizona, where we were back to school last week).

With all the travelling, I only just heard about the current controversy, and I am both surprised and dismayed. I am horrified that my words could be construed in any way to mean that I am "over" the lovely people who embraced Twilight, made it such a huge hit, and changed my life. The time I've spent with my fans has been one of the most precious gifts of this whole experience and I will certainly never forget them or think of them with anything but immense gratitude. I was lucky enough to see a few of them Tuesday night at the Apple "Meet the Filmmakers" event, and they were so lovely! I'm always surprised and touched that people still care about my stories.

Any of you who have ever watched me answer a question live, especially to an indulgent inquirer like a fansite, know that I do tend to go on. Though I try to be as concise as possible to make editing easier for whichever news outlet I'm working with, I'm (still) not very good at it. If you look at the Variety article, you'll notice that I'm speaking in very short statements. Of course, I didn't actually. I spoke in run-on paragraphs and made the poor, sweet man who interviewed me comb through painstakingly trying to find a few completed sentences that he could use to convey the idea of what I was saying. Unfortunately, in shortening the interview to a usable size, some of the meaning of what I was trying to say was lost, and I believe the statements I made ended up sounding much more harsh than I meant them.

Even those of you who love Twilight the most (in fact, especially those who love it the most) have probably noticed that there's been just a teensy little bit of backlash following the success of the books and films. I try my hardest to be thick-skinned, but I'm not much better at that than I am at brevity. So when I speak of Twilight becoming a negative place for me, it is entirely that near-omnipresent Twilight antipathy that I am speaking of. And I'm not complaining or saying it's unfair—I totally understand and even empathize with its existence. I'm just saying that Twilight isn't the wholly positive place for me that it once was.

Also, in regards to being "over it," I will admit, it's getting harder to answer the same questions about Twilight that I've been answering for the past decade (especially when I'm so excited to talk about Austenland). I can only imagine you are just as over reading those same answers. And the little bit about posting which characters died? That was referring to a solemn oath I made years and years ago to some cool fans. I swore I would not take to my grave the ideas I had for future stories, even if all I could to was list the outcomes in bullet points.

So please, never think I don't appreciate the people who read, watch, and love Twilight. I am grateful for your existence every single day. Thanks for the most amazing decade!

Love,

Steph

August 24, 2013 at 12:15 PM