This was one of the three quotations on Google’s Quote of the Day gadget today:
Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
– Flannery O’Connor
Never were more apt words spoken in the age of Twilight.
I am not a violent person, but if I hear one more gush about the books or the movie, I’ll break something. If I see one more clip from the movie with dialogue that would make Ed Wood say, “Uhm, not so sure that’s gonna fly,” I am going to scream.
No, I haven’t read the books. No, I won’t. I’ve seen enough reviews from a wide enough variety of people, and seen enough passages from the book excerpted in those reviews, to know that I’d be wasting my time and raising my blood pressure for no good reason. The only reason I can see for bothering would be to know how not to write bad romance. And I have read enough other bad romance to already know what to avoid.
My advice to the Twilight junkies: Go read Chelsea Quinn Yarbro‘s Saint-Germain books. You’ll get vampires that can walk in daylight (without sparkling!), amazingly researched and historically accurate settings, romance that is rooted in the way people really relate to each other, and horror that has a lot more to do with what human beings are capable of doing to one another than anything else.
Please.