Dawn of the Undead

"It was the summer of Harry Potter. I thought I'd get steamrolled," Meyer confesses. But Eclipse's first-day sales of 150,000 copies bested Potter, and the media appointed Meyer the next J.K. Rowling, a title she's still uncomfortable with. "I forget all the time I'm supposed to be some kind of minor celebrity because that's not who I am," she says. "I'm a very normal, quiet person, and then I had to say, 'OK, I really am a writer now. I'm not just playing at this.'

"The sad part was, I'd be writing and it would be one o'clock in the morning, and then it would hit me: Edward's not real. But for the last six hours, he was," she says. "And then he would not be real again. Oh, it was heart-breaking." While she was writing, Meyer also began hearing songs to match her characters' personalities and created chapter-by-chapter soundtracks for each book on her Website. "I listen to music always when I write," she says. "When I hear music on the radio, I'm like 'Oh! That's a song for this character' or 'This one would so fit that character in this mood!' "

Though her current tastes lean towards alternative and progressive metal, Meyer cites strict parents as why she didn't listen to much music during her Mormon upbringing ("They wanted to listen to everything before we listened to it, so basically we wound up listening to Lionel Richie and Chicago"), and says college was a crash-course in music ed. Interpol, My Chemical Romance, Vampire Weekend and Stars are among her current favorites.

Meyer's Twilight saga playlists are culled from a combination of what she was listening to as she wrote and songs that spoke to her from a particular character's perspective. The soundtracks are so indicative of the plots that Meyer waits to post the song titles until after each book is released, for fear the song choices offer spoilers. Frequent appearances are made by Linkin Park, and Meyer's favorite band, U.K. prog-rock trio Muse, who she discovered while listening to Sirius radio in her car one day while working on New Moon.

" 'Time is Running Out' came on and I was just like, 'Wow, what is this?' " Meyer recalls. "And I turned it up and made everyone in the car shut up. I Googled them immediately and listened to 'Hysteria' and I was like, 'Where has this been all my life? How have I lived without this?' " She dedicated Breaking Dawn partially to the band, "for providing a saga's worth of inspiration" and jokes, "I'm probably the only mom driving a minivan with a Muse sticker on the back."

Meyer discovered Blue October in a similar way: she heard the bitter farewell of their single "Hate Me" while in the car and "it was like Edward was singing out of my radio." When Justin Furstenfeld, Blue October's lead singer-songwriter first heard about the Breaking Dawn series, "the way they explained it to me was that she's got the pull of Harry Potter, but with more of a dark atmosphere," he says."It totally made sense to me. My songs are romantically dark, and her books are romantically dark." Meyer flew to Austin a month ago, where Furstenfeld was at work on Blue October's next album, to hear the band's new music and go over the songs that inspired her writing, including "Hate Me." Though Furstenfeld had heard Meyer's name, he'd yet to read her books and dove in immediately. "To me, it's this whole new world I'm opening up to," he says in his dressing room before their debut New York show.

"You can see from the line around the building that these kids have been involved in this world for quite a while, and they're pretty obsessed with it. It's like there's a show to see Jesus and I'm just the disciple," he jokes. He isn't far off: When Furstenfeld opens the show later that night, the screams are ear-splitting and the crowd is silent when he plays — but it's sheer chaos when Meyer walks onstage to answer questions. Cheers interrupt every answer, whether she's talking about what pushed her to get Twilight published or whether she shared Bella's wishes of wanting to become a vampire. Meyer jokes all she has to do is say her characters' names to get a response. "Edward!" she tries. The noise is deafening.

After the Q&A, Meyer brings Furstenfeld back onstage. She talks about the first time she heard "Hate Me," and sits on a couch next to him, silently mouthing the words as he plays. "It's an honor," Furstenfeld tells Meyer. "It's really weird," she responds. "To have amazing musicians want to come and do this with me is crazy!"

On the next page: Meyer explains her Twilight playlists