Source: http://www.bookbyyou.com/vampire/default.asp

Found it through twilightsucks.com… you can also try out a “free personalized demo” here .

Don’t know what I’m talking about yet?  I’m not sure you want to.

As the user glados209 said on twilightsucks: “That sounds almost ironic, it’s like Twilight, but where the main character is cast to represent the reader rather than the author.”

Read at your own risk. =(

In this personalized vampire romance novel, our heroine meets a mysterious hero whose passion is stronger than his bite. Perfect for fans of the Twilight movie and books!

Vampire Kisses begins with a chance meeting of our heroine and hero at a college library, but their encounter is short-lived as our main man suddenly vanishes… leaving our heroine lusting for more.

Their next unexpected rendezvous occurs at a campus alumni party, and after some clever repartee the hook is set, but once again our hero mysteriously disappears. Not to be outdone, our heroine and her best friend decide to hunt for their mystery man.  Little do they know the tables have turned, and they are the ones hunted!

Our hero is centuries old and doomed by a vampire’s curse. Luckily, his intellect and compassion enable him to control his primal instincts. Nevertheless, he shies away from our heroine, fearing his vampire urges will harm the one he both admires…and desires.  After much intrigue, our couple’s paths become entwined and it’s not long before cupid’s arrows find their mark and they fall in love.

The plot thickens when our hero’s unnatural habits give him away, and our boisterous beauty discovers that the man she loves has a bite that is definitely worse than his bark. They are forced apart; he by his worry of turning his beloved into one of his own, and she by the unsavory thought of becoming her love’s next meal.

But will love conquer all? Can our heroine live without her true love, or will our hero make her his mate for life and forever after? Vampire Kisses is full of intrigue and passion! Romantic Tip: For a little extra fun and excitement, include a set of vampire teeth along with this book. These can be found at costume shops or “dollar” stores.

Remember: You co-author Vampire Kisses by selecting the heroine, hero and heroine’s best friend – and even your dog or cat! Vampire Kisses is 175 pages, professionally bound, with over 26 characteristics to personalize making it a gift that is truly unique and sentimental. A gift that will be cherished forever.

With its personalized front cover, this book will look stunning on your coffee table or bookshelf. What a wonderful gift idea for all occasions! Why read between the lines when you can read between the sheets?

Follow your heart and give the gift of romance -
they’ll ♥ you for it!

Just saying.

Thanks to Twilight_sucks on livejournal for the link.

It is actually courtesy of the Twilight Addict that I give you this clip of the character Damon (aka Spike from Buffy reincarnated) making fun of Twilight, and telling his teenybopper girlfriend about real vampires.

But seriously:  new favourite show of the moment.  Besides Dollhouse.  (which you can learn all about here at whyiwatch.com)

But anyway, yeah.

Vampire Diaries makes fun of Twilight!  Completely made my day.

The person disabled embedding it, but if you click the above link, it’s just a short clip from Youtube.

Oh, and some PG-13 content.  The girl he’s talking to is in her underwear & they kiss a little.  But it’s from cable TV so it’s not that big of a deal. =)

I’m not an avid Vampire Diaries fan… In fact, I only just saw the first episode yesterday.
I’ve also never read the books.

BUT, I am already pleased with what I’ve seen. Even though so far the main vamp guy (Stefan, is it?) is without a doubt modelled after Robert Pattinson as Edward, he at least seems to, you know, have fangs & drink blood & stuff.

So, this is for any Vampire Diaries fans out there. Why it’s better than Twilight, according to the NY Post.

Listen up, Twi-hards!

“Twilight” may get all the headlines (”New Moon” Crosses $200 Mil Mark!” “Kristen Stewart: ‘I’m So Not Bella!’”).

But “The Vampire Diaries,” also a tale of the deadly undead, has quietly built a loyal following, first as a series of young-adult novels and now as a CW TV series.

The two may seem the same — both are high-school-set dramas about a young mortal girl in love with a brooding vampire guy — but “The Vampire Diaries” is no “Twilight” wannabe.

With the first 10 episodes of “Diaries” as evidence (all week, the CW is marathoning the season so far on Ch. 11, vamping until the show returns next month), here are five reasons it’s better than “Twilight”:

LOVE BITE: Nina Dobrev (left) and Kayla Ewell, from the breakout “Vampire Diaries,” are more fun than those mopey kids from “Twilight.”
1.) Believe it or not, “The Vampire Diaries” came first.

The “Vampire Diaries” book series, by L. J. Smith, started in 1991 — that’s 14 years ahead of Stephenie Meyer’s first “Twilight” book, in 2005.

The series went out of print until 2007, when creator Alloy Entertainment — the company that gave us the “Gossip Girl” book and TV series — worked on a reissue and shopped around a TV version.

“We certainly saw the success of the ‘Twilight’ books and felt that there was an opportunity,” Alloy Entertainment president Les Morgenstein told The Post.

2.) The Vampire Diaries is bloody, gory and full of killing.

In other words, it’s a more traditional vampire horror tale than “Twilight,” which is heavy on romance, light on murder.

And while they all look like models in both series, the ones on “Diaries” sometimes get dirty.

“The vampires, while pretty, are still sort of vicious,” explained Lindsay Soll, editor of MTV’s Hollywood Crush blog. “When they’re hungry and about to feed, their fangs come out — they don’t even have fangs in ‘Twilight’ — and their veins stick out. They’re not afraid to make pretty people ugly.”

They’re also not afraid to make pretty people die.

There’s already a sizable body count and, now that the people of Mystic Falls, Va., are gathering their stakes and fighting back, Morgenstein promised, “There will be more killings.”

3.) These sexy vampires actually have sex!

In “Twilight,” Bella and Edward lust after each other and yet miraculously manage to avoid having sex. Written by a Mormon, “Twilight” has long been considered an abstinence fantasy.

Not so “Vampire Diaries,” which has no falsely neutered innocence.

“We’re not pulling any punches,” said Morgenstein.

4.) Elena is an independent young woman.

Perhaps “Twilight” is so popular because Bella is a blank slate, an everywoman on which young girls can project fantasies of themselves.

But Elena, of “Diaries,” sets an example for young girls as a strong-minded woman.

“She doesn’t let her attraction to Stefan completely control her, whereas Bella is totally blinded by her passion,” Soll said.

“When Bella finds out that Edward’s a vampire, she acts like she’s just learned he went to the dentist — as if it’s no big deal.” “She gives herself over to Edward, while Elena questions it all, like most people would.”

5.) Had it with the Twi-hype? “The Vampire Diaries” is the underdog.

And who doesn’t love rooting for an underdog?

Evidently it’s a vampire’s world right now — but we get to choose which of many vampire tales to watch. (HBO’s “True Blood” will return next June, by the way.).

And since “Twilight” didn’t invent vampires, how about giving Bella and Edward’s vacant, lovestruck gaze a rest, and resting your eyes on “The Vampire Diaries.”

Source: nypost.com

Thanks to @melissa_marr, and @lotuselyse on Twitter for…. well, for tweeting about it and giving me the tip. =)

Oh, and to the obsessed Vampire Diaries fan I know who tells me to watch the show every chance she gets.

I’M WATCHING IT, OKAY??? xD

Vampax… Courtesy of Funny or Die. 

Umm… I think it goes without saying that there’s adult content?  Just references though.

Anyway… enjoy?

Twilight, the movie, comes out this week. It is based upon the bestselling novel by Stephenie Meyer, and, like the book, is said by many to be the “next Harry Potter,” meaning it is the first young-reader book series to come close to the astronomical sales of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Meyer still has a lot of catching up to do, having sold “just” 17 million books worldwide, compared to Rowling’s 400 million.

While both sets of books deal with children and their adventures with the supernatural, that is where the similarities end. Potter is aimed at a slightly younger demographic (9 to 12) and is loved by boys and girls alike; Twilight appeals mostly to older girls (14 to 19) and their sexually frustrated mothers.

The most startling difference between Twilight and Potter, however, is not demographical; it is ideological.

Put simply, Rowling and Potter live on the left; Meyer and Edward dwell on the right.

Both sets of books are popular in the United States, but I believe it is for drastically different reasons, however subconsciously those reasons may reside. Just as the nation continues to more of less split into the red and the blue (with high hopes that our President-elect can change this), the fundamentalist and the forward-thinking, so too does the world of children’s literature.

Read the rest of the Source Article here at racialicious.com.

It’s an interesting article, mostly talking about the politics behind Stephenie Meyer and JK Rowling’s different ideas.
Worth checking out, I’d say. =)

Source: http://www.applegeeks.com/

I was reading through a blog post today about the world of a fifteen-year-old as expressed metaphorically in young adult literature. There’s a brief mention of Twilight, towards the end, which is why I’m sharing this:

The creepiest baby in all of young adult literature, of course, is the one in Stephenie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn, the final installment of the Twilight vampire saga. Protagonist Bella is all about physical transformation. For her, death is a consummation devoutly to be wish’d, because it will entail eternal youth with forever-love Edward. But after the wedding she finally consented to in order to get some sparkly loving, she discovers an impossibly fast-growing pregnancy—a vampire spawn that kicks her still-human ribs apart, gives her internal bleeding, breaks her spine, and requires a gruesome Caesarian-by-teeth. (I am so looking forward to seeing how the movies handle that.)

The horrific pregnancy and birth, however, is followed by Bella’s own birth into her new life as a dazzling vampire, with self-control and abilities even other vampires find impressive. And, bonus, her child is also perfect: never cries, always loving, rapidly growing, and walking and talking by two months. The wages of sin might be death, but the wages of post-marital sex seem to be nightmarish pain, followed by eternal life blessed by a wonderful child.

Bella is often accused of passivity, but although there are certainly faults to be found with her fixation on romance to the exclusion of all other interests, she doesn’t actually lack forward momentum. She’s the sexual aggressor and instigator of change in her relationship, hurtling through milestones at breakneck speed—first love, first soul-crushing breakup, marriage, sex, childbirth, and motherhood in less than two years—before achieving her goal of eternity in a fairy-tale cottage with her loving family. Her transformation is agonizing and traumatic, but, aware of the risks and owning her choice, she pushes unrelentingly for it anyway. Although I do wonder if Bella’s really considered the ramifications of repeating high school over and over again, as her husband and new siblings-in-law do—after this ultimate transformation, she has perfection, but a static and essentially unchanging one.

The writer goes on to say that she prefers the sorts of books most of us seem to like, where the problems the characters faced were real in a way that they didn’t necessarily all end with “happily ever after” like twilight did. I can’t tell what Karen Healey (the author of the article) actually thinks of twilight in terms of her fan/anti-ness but it’s an interesting point none the less.
I think one of the biggest differences between twilight and some other YA lit I read is that I think the way Stephenie Meyer writes is an unintentional metaphor. When she has her characters do something, she thinks literally, but we read the undertones and don’t appreciate it. It is this that I think makes her seem so misogynistic, etc. to us. The fact that these crazy, unintentional themes are entwined with the reality of our world is confusing to us, especially at whatever age we’re at where we’re trying to figure out who we even are.
I agree with the author of the article in the sense that I personally prefer the more realistic versions of the stories. Life isn’t perfect now, and even if we get married and have kids, and live forever, it’s still not going to be perfect.
We realize that, and that’s why we’re more drawn to the more gritty, imperfect stories where people are flawed and where they triumph nonetheless because they’re normal like us. In Bella’s case, she was “special” to begin with, due to forces outside her control. She was saved by a beatiful stranger and her transformation into adulthood was either already there, or at least eased up a bit due to the fantasy she lived in. Her vampire transformation is the symbol of her transition into adulthood. It was easy for her, after the whole gruesome birth scene. Her rebirth showed her as the dream person, perfect and special in every way now that she’d grown up.
But we don’t want to be told that everything is perfect if you act like a stereotypical housewife. We want to be shown real, fantastically flawed, lovable in their own way characters!
Is that where Stephenie Meyer fails?

Haha, wow.
Tangent much? =P

Anyway, here’s the whole article if you want to read it. Please note: It mentions assorted other YA novels, and is more about the metaphorical hardships in YA novels than anything I just said.

So yeah.

Thoughts?

The Vatican has blasted New Moon, calling it “deviant” and a “moral vacuum”.

The Twilight sequel, which hits cinemas this weekend, has been criticised by the governing body of the Roman Catholic Church for its supernatural references.

“This theme of vampires in Twilight combines a mixture of excesses that, as ever is aimed at young people and gives a heavy esoteric element,” complained the Vatican’s culture council leader, Monsignor Franco Perazzolo.

He added, “This film is nothing more than a moral vacuum with a deviant message and as such should be of concern.”

The Vatican’s stance comes as something of a surprise as they have softened their stance on certain blockbusters recently – approving the most recent Harry Potter film and calling the sequel to The Da Vinci Code “harmless entertainment”.

Um… Wow.

The twihards are all pissed, but still.
Score 1 for the Pope?

Source