I was born in Connecticut in 1973, during a brief blip in my family's otherwise western U.S. existence. We were settled in Phoenix by the time I was four, so, considering that I have twenty-seven Arizona summers under my belt, I think of myself as a native. The unusual spelling of my name was a gift from my father, Stephen ( + ie = me ). Though I have had my name spelled wrong on pretty much everything my entire life long, I must admit that it makes it easier to google myself now.

I filled the "Jan Brady" spot in my family - the second of three girls. Unlike the Brady's, none of my three brothers are steps, and all of them are younger than all the girls. My big sister was, however, very similar to Marcia (only instead of being self-absorbed and vain, she was sweet and shy, which made her all the more perfect Emily, Emily, Emily!!), and we did have a dog named after a non-canine animal (Eagle, in this case). We never had a maid, so my mom is clearly superior to Florence Henderson's character, and also has a better singing voice.

I went to high school in Scottsdale, Arizona, the kind of place where every fall a few girls would come back to school with new noses and there were Porsches in the student lot (for the record, I have my original nose, and never had a car until after I was in my twenties). Our football team was renowned statewide for having the highest average GPA. I was awarded a National Merit Scholarship, and I used it to pay my way to Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah. On the list of the biggest party schools in the country, BYU consistently and proudly finishes dead last. I majored in English, but concentrated on literature rather than creative writing, mostly because I didn't consider reading books as work (as long as I was going to be doing something anyway, I might as well get course credit for it, right?). During my college years, I heard many lame jokes about English majors' future careers in the food services industries, and to all the people who made those jokes, I now say, "Ha, ha" (to be heard in the voice of Nelson Muntz).

I met my husband, Pancho (his real name is Christiaan, but no one calls him that it's not a long story, but it is a stupid one, so I'll skip it), when I was four, but we were never anywhere close to being childhood sweethearts. In fact, though we saw each other at least weekly through church activities, I can't recall a single instance when we so much as greeted each other with a friendly wave, let alone exchanged actual words. This may have been for the best, because when we did eventually get around to exchanging words, sixteen years after our first meeting, it only took nine months from the first "hello" to the wedding. Of course, we were able to skip over a lot of the getting to know you partsÑmany of our conversations would go something like this: "This one time, when I was ten, I broke my hand at a party whenÑ" "Yeah, I know what happened. I was there, remember?"

We've been married for ten and a half years now, and have three beautiful, brilliant, wonderful boys who often remind me of chimpanzees on crack. Gabe is eight, Seth is five, and Eli is three. When I started my writing career, they were each two years younger, and, looking back, I don't have any idea how I survived trying to do so many things at once.

Twilight is my very first novel, and it has been a crazy, rollercoaster-sans-seatbelts experience from the very beginning.

I know the exact date that I began writing Twilight, because it was also the first day of swim lessons for my kids. So I can say with certainty that it all started on June 2, 2003. Up to this point, I had not written anything besides a few chapters (of other stories) that I never got very far on, and nothing at all since the birth of my first son, six years earlier.

I woke up (on that June 2nd) from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately. For what is essentially a transcript of my dream, please see Chapter 13 ("Confessions") of the book.

Though I had a million things to do (i.e. making breakfast for hungry children, dressing and changing the diapers of said children, finding the swimsuits that no one ever puts away in the right place, etc.), I stayed in bed, thinking about the dream. I was so intrigued by the nameless couple's story that I hated the idea of forgetting it; it was the kind of dream that makes you want to call your friend and bore her with a detailed description. (Also, the vampire was just so darned good-looking, that I didn't want to lose the mental image.) Unwillingly, I eventually got up and did the immediate necessities, and then put everything that I possibly could on the back burner and sat down at the computer to write—something I hadn't done in so long that I wondered why I was bothering. But I didn't want to lose the dream, so I typed out as much as I could remember, calling the characters "he" and "she."

From that point on, not one day passed that I did not write something. On bad days, I would only type out a page or two; on good days, I would finish a chapter and then some. I mostly wrote at night, after the kids were asleep so that I could concentrate for longer than five minutes without being interrupted. I started from the scene in the meadow and wrote through to the end. Then I went back to the beginning and wrote until the pieces matched up. I drove the "golden spike" that connected them in late August, three months later.

It took me a while to find names for my anonymous duo. For my vampire (who I was in love with from day one) I decided to use a name that had once been considered romantic, but had fallen out of popularity for decades. Charlotte Bronte's Mr. Rochester and Jane Austen's Mr. Ferrars were the characters that led me to the name Edward. I tried it on for size, and found that it fit well. My female lead was harder. Nothing I named her seemed just right. After spending so much time with her, I loved her like a daughter, and no name was good enough. Finally, inspired by that love, I gave her the name I was saving for my daughter, who had never shown up and was unlikely to put in an appearance at this point: Isabella. Huzzah! Edward and Bella were named. For the rest of the characters, I did a lot of searching in old census records, looking for popular names in the times that they'd been born. Some trivia: Rosalie was originally "Carol" and Jasper was first "Ronald." I like the new names much better, but every now and then I will slip up and type Carol or Ron by accident. It really confuses the people who read my rough drafts.

For my setting, I knew I needed someplace ridiculously rainy. I turned to Google, as I do for all my research needs, and looked for the place with the most rainfall in the U.S. This turned out to be the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. I pulled up maps of the area and studied them, looking for something small, out of the way, surrounded by forest... And there, right where I wanted it to be, was a tiny town called "Forks." It couldn't have been more perfect if I had named it myself. I did a Google image search on the area, and if the name hadn't sold me, the gorgeous photographs would have done the trick. (Images like these of the Hoh Rainforest (a short drive from Forks). In researching Forks, I discovered the La Push Reservation, home to the Quileute Tribe.. The Quileute story is fascinating, and a few fictional members of the tribe quickly became intrinsic to my story.

All this time, Bella and Edward were, quite literally, voices in my head. They simply wouldn't shut up. I'd stay up as late as I could stand trying to get all the stuff in my mind typed out, and then crawl, exhausted, into bed (my baby still wasn't sleeping through the night, yet) only to have another conversation start in my head. I hated to lose anything by forgetting, so I'd get up and head back down to the computer. Eventually, I got a pen and notebook for beside my bed to jot notes down so I could get some freakin' sleep. It was always an exciting challenge in the morning to try to decipher the stuff I'd scrawled across the page in the dark.

During the day, I couldn't stay away from the computer, either. When I was stuck at swim lessons, out in 115 degrees of Phoenix sunshine, I would plot and scheme and come home with so much new stuff that I couldn't type fast enough. It was your typical Arizona summer, hot, sunny, hot, and hot, but when I think back to those three months, I remember rain and cool green things, like I really spent the summer in the Olympic Rainforest.

When I'd finished the body of the novel, I started writing epilogues...lots of epilogues. This eventually clued me in to the fact that I wasn't ready to let go of my characters, and I started working on the sequel. Meanwhile, I continued to edit Twilight in a very obsessive-compulsive way.

My older sister, Emily, was the only one who really knew what I was up to. In June, I'd started sending her chapters as I finished them, and she soon became my cheerleading section. She was always checking in to see if I had something new for her. It was Emily who first suggested, after I'd finished, that I should try to get Twilight published. I was so stunned by the fact that I'd actually finished a whole, entire book, that I decided to look into it.

First, Edward was a vampire.

Second, there was a part of him-
and I didn't know how dominant that part might be-
that thirsted for my blood.

And Third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

"Don't be afraid," I murmured. "We belong together."

I was abrubtly overwhelmed by the truth of my own words.

This moment was so perfect, so right, there was no way to doubt it.

His arms wrapped around me, holding me against him... It felt like every nerve ending in my body was a live wire.

"Forever," he agreed.