What to do, what to do...

First, go to Stephanie Meyer's home page and read the August 28th Part II post.

Go ahead... I'll wait.

All right, back? Good. For those of you who decided not to do that, here's the quick and dirty. Stephanie's latest project is "Midnight Sun", a re-telling of the original Twilight book from the perspective of the male protagonist, Edward. She passed a couple of copies of her unpublished, unedited, first draft to a couple people. And it wound up on the internet.

Now, we all know what Cory Doctorow thinks about this kind of thing, but not everyone is Cory. And I can appreciate that it's tough to know how to respond to something like this, and that she's feeling horrible that her trust was betrayed.

It strikes me as interesting that this occurred within a week of Mur Lafferty's assault on Amazon (which as I recall was amazingly successful, putting her for that day at #19 on bestsellers, and #2 on Science Fiction and Fantasy - second only to Mrs. Meyer herself), and I think that Mrs. Meyer's response was altogether perfect. In fact, I'm thinking of writing her a letter. When I see Scott Sigler, J.C. Hutchins, Philippa Ballantine, Tee Morris and (insert genuflection here) Mur Lafferty's success with selling material that they initially released for free over the internet, I can't help but think that ALL this is going to do, is open new people to Mrs. Meyer's work, and make her next book even bigger. I hope that book is Midnight Sun, I really do. After seeing how much MSH and other people have enjoyed them, it would be a shame to keep them from their next fix, something that brings them so much enjoyment.