No Book for You!

The teen reading world is dealing with Richter-level quakes this week ever since the news broke that Stephenie Meyer, of Twilight fame, has announced that she will shelve Midnight Sun, a retelling of Twilight from the vampire Edward's point of view. Apparently, a rough (very rough, she admits) draft of Midnight Sun was posted to the Interwebs, and so now she's put the book on hold "indefinitely." Of course, the reading juggernaut that is teenage girls is up in arms. They're posting on Meyer's site, on Twilight fan sites, and just about everywhere else what they think, with the comments split between "OOO! No fair, Stephenie Meyer! We want Edward's story, you meanie!" and "OOO! No fair, anonymous leaker! How dare you do that to our precious Stephenie Meyer!"

Now I have to admit that I'm not a fan of the Twilight series. Kudos to Stephenie Meyer for tapping into the teen female zeitgeist, but Twilight itself did nothing for me. So I won't be crying in my Dr Pepper because I'm missing the new book. But I do have one big question:

What in the world was a complete draft of her new work doing floating around somewhere where it could be anonymously posted on the Net? Most of my writer friends are far more careful with their drafts. Obsessive, even. They have copies on hard drives and copies on flash drives and printed copies in boxes under the bed, but not whole copies lying around waiting to be snatched up and posted. Maybe snatcherdom is something you worry about only when you're an NYT best-selling author, but I doubt it. I've read too many paranoid posts from unpublished writers who refuse to enter writing contests because they're convinced someone will steal their precious work.

Here's where it gets weird. Meyer herself uploaded the initial chapter of Midnight Sun to her own website to whet her readership's appetite. Fine. I get that. But where did the rest of it come from? If she didn't leak it herself (and I assume she didn't, given the hurt tone of her posts regarding the leak), why would Meyer play fast and loose with a manuscript worth millions of dollars, one she freely admits is very messy and loaded with mistakes? The mind boggles. I empathize with Meyer--how awful to have your privacy violated in that way--but seriously. Keep your work yours until you decide it's time to float it out there in the big ugly world of publishing!!

Oh, well. No more vampires. Can't say I'm missing them, or that I'm going to be hunting the web looking for what could have been.