Dawn of the Undead

It's a humid August afternoon outside the Nokia Theater in the middle of New York's Times Square, and a hundred girls have already been in line for up to 16 hours. They're holding posters, screaming and wearing T-shirts identifying themselves as members of Team Edward or Team Jacob. Most passersby assume Edward and Jacob are part of a band, with one confused father asking his teenage son, "Is Jacob a Jonas brother?"

Edward and Jacob aren't real, though. They're the creation of author Stephenie Meyer, and they live inside the world of her Twilight series, where Edward is a vampire and Jacob is a werewolf and they're battling for the love of a human girl named Bella.

Tonight, 2,000 rabid fans showed up to see Meyer debut her Breaking Dawn Concert Series, four events scheduled around the release of the fourth and (for now) final installment of the Twilight saga. More than just a typical stop on a book tour, the concerts are a chance for Meyer to explain her stories through the music that's inspired her writing.

"One of my problems with going on tour generally is that you get all these kids screaming for a rock concert, and then they get me," Meyer, 34, says in a New York hotel room the day before the tour begins. "When [my publicist suggested] we do a rock concert, I was like, 'Yes! That is what needs to happen!' " They reached out to some of Meyer's favorite acts, including power-pop treadmill dancers OK Go, electro-pop band Shiny Toy Guns and rockers Blue October, ultimately constructing a show that's part performance by Blue October's lead singer, Justin Furstenfeld, part Q&A with Meyer and part Behind the Music, where Meyer discusses the impact Furstenfeld's songs had on her books. It was unconventional, unintentional and a huge success — much like Meyer's career thus far.

Meyer's ascent to literary stardom began just over five years ago, on June 2nd, 2003. That was the morning Meyer — who dabbled in painting, majored in English at Brigham Young University and considered becoming a lawyer — woke up from a vivid dream about a male vampire and a female human in a meadow, talking about how they were falling in love even though the vampire thirsted for the human's blood. "It was so singular," Meyer recalls. "I really don't think you get a dream like that more than once in your lifetime. And I didn't need it; once I had the story and it unlocked the writer inside me, I had enough ideas on my own."

The book became an all-consuming task for Meyer, a then-29-year-old married mother of three young boys living in Arizona. Meyer says she was "obsessive all the time," hiding her writing from her family while she ferried her kids to swimming lessons and refilled juice cups. "I'd hear the characters say things that I'd want to write down, so I was scribbling on the corners of envelopes and napkins, anything I could get my hands on so I wouldn't forget." After three months, the tale was complete.

On the recommendation of her older sister Emily, Meyer landed an agent and signed with Little, Brown and Company, publisher of the mega successful Gossip Girl series, all before New Year's Day 2004. "My life twisted around into 'I have an agent,' 'I have a book deal,' 'I have a career' and 'Wow, I'm going to be a writer, how odd is that?' " Meyer remembers, laughing.

Twilight hit shelves on October 5th, 2005, and New Moon, the darkest chapter of Meyer's vampire love story, arrived 10 months later and spent more than 30 weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list, but nothing could prepare her for 2007. "Last year was like 10 years' worth of stuff crammed into one," she says. Meyer put the finishing touches on Eclipse, the third volume in Twilight, and penned both Breaking Dawn and The Host, her first adult novel. She embarked on another book tour to promote Eclipse's release and saw her audience multiplying. But she still didn't want Little, Brown to put out Eclipse on August 7th, just two weeks after the final Harry Potter book hit stores.