[Prestidigitweeze]

I haven't been back to this thread in months because I hated fighting with a writer who was openly discussing his ideas for new work, which put him in a potentially vulnerable position.

I'll leave all that aside to comment on this:

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

Your examples amount to exactly the same thing: It has everything to do with trying to appeal to YA, no matter what that does to traditional characters and tropes, in order to make a buck. Very few literary concepts have managed to avoid the "rebranding for profit" strategy; why should vampires be any different? . . . And again, I'm not defending or justifying the strategy, I'm just stating.

Actually, the examples I mentioned have nothing to do with appealing to a projected (and quite possibly fictional) YA. The reason I know this is because three of the authors I mentioned are personal friends.

John Shirley is a prolific horror and SF writer who has made his living from writing fiction since about the age of nineteen. He's also the person who came up with the idea of making a film out of O'Barr's graphic novel, The Crow. After John's treatment was made into a successful film, he was offered the chance to write an original screenplay for the first sequel, a project that would have made him a great deal of money. Here's my paraphrase of his reason for turning down the offer -- as conveyed to me in letters and conversations -- beginning with a direct quote as the first sentence.

Great art comes from inner outrage. When James O'Barr was working on The Crow, he wasn't trying to write a commercial story. He wasn't some sell-out motherf***er looking at a bunch of successful s**t and trying to imitate that. The reason he wrote that book is because he was shrieking inside. He was insane with grief over the loss of his girlfriend, burning candles and crying, listening to Joy Division and Iggy Pop and trying to find some sense of vindication. That's why the book was successful. And the reason the movie was successful is because, despite the Hollywood board meetings, despite the dilution of the gore and all the meddling and the pandering, 80% of the original story made it into the film.

Here's what I told the producers: If you're willing to lock the director and me in a hotel room for a week with a bag of opium, then shoot the screenplay we write verbatim no matter how it reads, then I'll do it.

So far, they haven't called back.

Same thing with John's vampire novels: We lived in different rooms of the same house when he wrote two of them, and he was pale and shaken during the process because what he was really writing about were his own addictions, his own experience of evil and redemption in the world.

All of which are about as far from the pandering of Twilight as you can get.