Costco Connection

A different

idea of love

By Stephanie E. Ponder

AT TENDING A STEPHENIE MEYER book signing is a bit like going to a concert featuring one of today’s top pop acts. Average attendance tops 1,000 people. Excited teenage girls turn out in droves wearing T-shirts announcing their love of Meyer and her characters. Fans travel thousands of miles to meet her—one traveled from Germany to San Francisco. But Meyer says she has yet to adapt to the popularity she experiences.

The author of the Twilight series for young adults and a new adult novel, The Host, Meyer says that the massive turnouts are still kind of baffling. “I walk in and think, ‘These people can’t be here to see me. I must be in the wrong room.’ ”

From dream to bestseller

It all began with Meyer’s first novel, Twilight. Published in 2005 and set in Forks, Washington, it features a romance between a vampire and a human high school girl. The Costco member says the idea began as a dream she had about a vampire in a sunny field. That vampire evolved into Edward, whose girlfriend, Bella, just happens to have a werewolf as a best friend.

Meyer’s popularity grew with the publication of the next two titles in the series, New Moon and Eclipse. Each novel is told from Bella’s point of view. When fan fiction, in which readers attempted to tell the story through Edward, began popping up on the Internet, Meyer realized that her fans wanted to get inside the vampire’s head and began working on Midnight Sun, which is Twilight told from Edward’s point of view.

When The Costco Connection caught up with Meyer, she had just returned from a two-week book tour in Germany to promote Eclipse, and she was preparing to face the first round of edits for Breaking Dawn, the series’ next title. Somewhere between writing, editing and promoting that series, Meyer found time to write The Host, her first adult novel.

In The Host, humans are being taken over by a race of insect-like aliens who use human bodies as hosts—taking over their thoughts and lives.

Costco Connection The Host is available in most Costco warehouses and at costco.com. Breaking Dawn is also available for pre-order on costco.com

However,MelanieStryderrefusestorelinquishco n-trolto Wanderer, whohasbeengiven Melanie”s body. Ever aware of Melanie”s thoughts and feelings of love toward her brother, Jamie, and Jared, a man she left behind, Wanderer begins to cultivate the same emotions. The body shared by two minds finally finds Jamie and Jared living with a handful of Melanie’s relatives and other rebels in the desert outside Phoenix. Everyone there has to decide whether to accept and trust the human form that looks and sounds like Melanie but has become a stranger by virtue of its telltale silver, alien eyes.

Although Meyer constructs a love triangle with only two physical bodies, she says the book is not a romance. “It’s a real example of every kind of love— love of your people, community, family, children and romantic love. It’s about how, as humans, we’re motivated by love on all sides.

“Because [Wanderer] is human for the first time, it’s all fresh.”

Lucky in life

By the time 2008 comes to a close

Meyer will have had five books published in three years. Speaking from her home outside Phoenix, the author says that despite the impressive output she’s still pretty new at this—in her words, still “a freshman.”

Meyer, who studied English literature at Brigham Young University and was raising two young sons when she first began to write, says she drifts in and out of writing styles and makes outlines she doesn’t stick to. And although The Host was the first book she wrote chronologically, she prefers to write major scenes and then fill in the story between them.

Now the mother of three, Meyer says she uses her sons’ school time to work and also the time after they’re in bed, writing until she can’t stay awake.

Despite the busy work schedule, whirlwind tours and unflinchingly dedicated fans, fame hasn’t completely turned Meyer’s world upside down. “I have a great family and live in a great city,” Meyer tells The Connection. “I was already pretty lucky in what I have. I had the happily ever after already. It feels like too much. What did I do to deserve this luck?” C

DAVID STONE

Book

giveaway

COSTCO HAS 50 copies of Stephenie Meyer’s The Host with signed bookplates to give away. To enter, print your name, membership number, address and daytime phone number on a postcard or letter and send it to: Stephenie Meyer, The

Costco Connection, P.O. Box 34088, Seattle, WA 98124-1088. Or send an e-mail to giveaway@costco. com, with “Stephenie Meyer” in the subject line.

No purchase is necessary. Open to legal residents of the U.S. (except

Puerto Rico) who are age 18 or older at the time of entry and who are current

Costco members. One entry per household. Entries must be received or postmarked by June 2, 2008. Winners will be randomly selected and notified by mail on or before July 1, 2008. The value of the prize is $25.96. Void where prohibited. Winners are responsible for all applicable federal, state and local taxes. Odds of winning depend on the number of eligible entries received. Employees of Costco or Hachette Book Group USA and their families are not eligible.