an article posted about 20 hours ago said it's available in e-book and hardcover tuesday. dunno if that means next tuesday or today, I shall check amazon
you can buy a dual edition of the first book along with the gender bent but I don't want to get both. Might see if it's going to be sold on it's own any time soon. and the gender swapped (called Life and Death apparently) is 400 pages. entire book is 13 bucks (ebook) for 704 pages total. not today, Meyer.
hah we aren't the only ones asking about renesmee but since it's only the first book i think we aren't supposed to take that part seriously.
So I read an article where her explanation for writing this genderbend au was given: The article continues from there.
"She wasn't a damsel in distress!" Lies "She wasn't overly obsessed with Edward!" LIES! "It was a healthy relationship!" Why you keep lying?!
Twilight is so not my thing, but -- this attitude really, really bothers me. Twilight is Meyer's own IP. It's her creation, her world, she made it, she owns copyright to it, it's hers to spindle, fold, and mutilate however she likes. If she wants to write an AU of her own stuff then it's an author-approved AU canon, not fanfic. Pooh-poohing her as if she's stealing from her own work is bizarre. Get on Meyer's tits about bad writing, sure, but condescending about her writing an alternate canon of her own damn creation is really not on. (Also, maybe we could stop denigrating fanfic by implying it's stealing and lazy by association? Thanks.)
I'm excited about this, if only because I get to read more Cleolinda Jones Twilight recaps. (In case nobody knows Cleolinda Jones, she recapped all ... three? four? Twilight books so hilariously that I actually checked the whole series out of the library to read. For the record, the books are far less fun than her recaps of them.) Edit: Storify of Cleo's livetweet recap of the first six chapters. I'm pretty satisfied so far.
"And expecting to make money off it" @Mercury I got into a whole (poorly written I'm sure, but it was there) thing about how I didn't feel rewriting a book but only changing the genders and who knows what else was enough to qualify as 'new book'. Maybe she didn't feel that way either, or the publishers didn't because they are selling it only as a double feature with the original version of the first book, but writing something so similar and then selling it to people, even if it is your universe, even if your fans are capable of making decisions and spending their money how they please, just feels icky to me.
Oh no. Just saw a Tumblr post going around about what swapped Jacob will be like. A butch lady with a warm, husky voice who builds and rides motorcycles. Oh nooooooooo.
'i don't think this is work, so i don't think she should get paid'. please explain why the men who write novel adaptation of movies— where they simply write down the stuff that happened in the movie they watched, with a little extra padded in here and there— should get paid, while smeyer, reinterpreting her entire universe and all the relationships between all her characters, as well as examining gender norms, her own ideas about gender roles and performances and identities, and revising big chunks of the plot for consistency with developments in the later series, should not be paid. even by people who want to buy the content she produced.
The more I think about it, the more weirdly interested I'm becoming in how the genderswap would change things for the side characters. Like, Rosalie's backstory with sexual violence and being betrayed by her husband-to-be-- what's boy Rosalie's equivalent of that? And I feel like the tone for Alice is totally different, though I can't quite word it, but premonitions+"accusations of being a witch"+put in an asylum, those happen to female characters, those are all predominantly feminine plots, at least in my mind. How would those change, if at all, when they're both male? edit: but those aren't in book one and there's no way all 4 books are getting this treatment, so all that probably will stay headcanon or speculation. sigh. not even getting into the pregnancy thing or the wedding.
@bornofthesea670 I'm getting what @roach got from your post. You insist on talking about Life and Death as if it were fan fiction (and as if fanfic was easy to write!), or like SMeyer is somehow doing something wrong by having written it and offered it for sale, for reasons you can describe as nothing more than 'icky'. Why? Why on earth is it icky for her to write a new iteration of her own damn ideas and offer it up for people to pay money for, should they want to? Why on earth is it icky for her to ask money for her work? Because let me tell you, even if all she was doing was swapping pronouns, making sure those pronouns are swapped properly (since not everyone in the book is genderswapped) is tedious, difficult work. Actually re-writing shit, as she's doing? Work. Even if the end result is still literary Twinkies, it's work.
Ah, I think I'm spotting the miscommunication between @Mercury and @bornofthesea670 here. Mercury posits Meyer is doing actual work on her stuff, and not ms word "find and replace" pronouns and names, while bots670 thinks it's basically just that - did i get that about right? because ms word "find and replace" and then sell it as a new book.... yeah, that's a bit cheap. looking at some stuff i saw, nothing new, though. if meyer is actually flipping everything on its head and then rewrite the story under those flipped premises, that.... might be interesting to some people? (i confess, i read the first three chapters of the first book and just closed the book at the start of chapter four because i just. couldnt read it. and then returned it to the friend i borrowed them from.)
No, I think it's pretty clear that I'm not misunderstanding @bornofthesea670 at all, since she said That pretty heavily implies that she knows SMeyer is doing more than search and replace, but still doesn't find it adequate. Ok, but I covered that: I have actually had to DO that on some of my own work. Twice. I changed the gender of a character, realized it didn't work, changed it back - and correcting the pronouns alone was tedious and took forever, and it was one lousy chapter. And I still missed a bunch of places. It's work, even if it's work that any particular person might not want to pay for. But that's not what SMeyer did. She demonstrably re-wrote quite a few things to suit the new perspective she was writing from (because she clearly does believe that men and women experience things in very different ways and think about them in very different ways). This is something she had to sit down and figure out, both what those experiences would be and how to fit them in the story, and then how to word them. It was probably not easy! But that's irrelevant, because even if it were easy and fun for SMeyer to do, it was still work on her own intellectual property.
Plus, she's selling you the original book as well, included in the price. It's pretty much a "fans only" deal, of course, but if one of the authors I liked wanted to try this kind of experiment I'd probably push a few bucks their way.
I read Twilight when I was younger in an attempt to prove it was awful, and also because.. IIRC.. someone had given me a box set? No idea why, I was vocal in my dislike of it. Anyway I found it surprisingly enjoyable, even if it has hella flaws. And.. I mean, I've seen people getting angry at SMeyer for "rewriting a whole book out of spite just to prove she's not sexist" but like ... ... presumably it DOES take a lot of introspection about your assumptions about gender roles to try and write this, yeah?
I don't know if I'd call it introspection, exactly, but... awareness of? At any rate, a person can't just spill it out on the page without thinking about those assumptions and how they're going to apply. The very nature of what they're trying to write is going to make the thinking happen.
I have a friend who really likes Twilight who is excited about this so I'm jazzed for them, haha. I remember I enjoyed the first book because this sort of cheese is my thing, but my enjoyment dimmed enough that around the middle of book three I stopped. I ended up finding my fix for this sort of niche out of Vampire Kisses by Ellen Schreiber. I just unironically liked cheesy paranormal romance ya fiction, what can I say? And now I'm feeling weirdly nostalgic.
