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Stephenie Meyer's Xmas Greeting at her personal MySpace
December 23, 2007

Happy holidays, everybody!  I hope you are happy, healthy, surrounded by loved ones, warm, and done with your shopping.  I'd love to run around giving all of you Porsches this year, but, since I can't, my gift to you is a peek at the Japanese illustrations from Eclipse, which are in my photos in a brand new folder.  Enjoy!

My gift to myself is the best one I could have possibly given me!  December 22nd, at around 1:20 a.m., I finally finished the rough draft of Breaking Dawn.  Hallelujah!  It feels amazing to have that boulder-sized weight off my back.  And now I get to relax and have fun on Christmas instead of writing all night like I have been doing up to this point.

Please, please don't read this and begin a slew of "If Breaking Dawn is done, why can't it come out NOW!" comments.  I finished the ROUGH draft.  Very, very rough.  To put this in perspective, it took over two years from the rough draft stage of Twilight to the book being on store shelves.  In general, I spend about a year to a year and a half editing a book.  Don't cry, though, because both I and Little Brown's editorial staff are going to do everything in our power to get Breaking Dawn out Fall 2008.   So, fingers crossed, it will be on time.  Just don't ask for it to come out early because my head is already pretty close to exploding right now.  (To get the rough draft done this week, I shattered a personal record by writing 40 (FORTY!!) pages in one day.  That kind of thing takes a toll.)

Because I know you all love insider information, here are some stats on my other books as they compare to the length of Breaking Dawn*

* Remember, the BD numbers are based on the rough draft and will change in the editing process, but this will give you the general idea.

TWILIGHT
Pages on my computer:  475
Word count:  118,501
Pages in book form: 498

NEW MOON
Pages on my computer: 528
Word count: 132,807
Pages in book form: 563

ECLIPSE
Pages on my computer: 611
Word count: 147,930
Pages in book form: 629

BREAKING DAWN
Pages on my computer: 775!!
Word count: 192,196!!
Pages in book form: barring some kind of massive editing cut, I'm guestimating right around eight hundred pages!!

There you go, fun statistics from Stephenie's computer.

Once again, enjoy your holidays, everyone! 

XOXO
Steph