I was reading this article and was thinking about I started reading the books. It was sophomore year of high school (so right as the books were coming out) and the girl behind me in my Honors Chemistry class had her nose buried in the book before class had started. She started talking to my friend Laura, who was also reading the book, they were discussing Edward's character. That was my first experience with Twilight. Later through the semester, the pair started talking about their fan fictions that they were working on. So while I was reading this article, it brought back a lot of memories and it made a lot of sense. When an author is accessible to his or her fans, it gives them a "personal" connection.
After reading this article, I also decided to check out the Twilight website that was mentioned: http://www.twilightlexicon.com/. It's actually a pretty cool fountain of knowledge on the Twilight saga. Personally, Harry Potter and MuggleNet will always be top in my book. (J.K. Rowling has a pretty cool interactive website too) It was interesting because on the website, they had a blog posting about what might be the Next Twilight.
In the future, I was just thinking about how I would relate this to my classroom. I think an interesting project might be to try to contact authors and interview them. I think that might be something I would do if I were teaching a journalism course. Perhaps I would have the students find a YA novel that they enjoy and have them interview the authors if they can get a hold of them. It might be a nice semester long assignment to pair reading a YA novel with interviewing the author.
(ALSO: If you love Twilight, I would suggest checking out Midnight Sun. It is essentially Twilight from Edward's perspective. It is just a draft and not complete but I hope one day she does finish it.)
I think that would be a great idea for students! I am sure not all of the authors would respond, but I know people like Stephenie Myers and Laurie Halse Anderson are both very involved with their fans. Depending on where you teach, you may even be able to get an author to come visit if they live in the same area. I might even pair some sort of writing exercise with this, and have the students write a short story then interview each other afterward and they would get to see how the author felt about talking about their book.
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