With sales of more than 70m copies she is the queen of teen vampire romance, but Twilight author Stephenie Meyer has announced that she's "a little burned out on vampires".
Asked on the Oprah Winfrey show if she'd consider writing another book in the Twilight quartet, Meyer said that she had no immediate plans to return to the story of human teenager Bella and her vampire love interest Edward. "I think I need a little break," she said. "I've got to cleanse the palate ... I'm a little burned out on vampires right now."
Her next book, she said, was likely to be a follow-up to her one adult novel The Host – about the invasion of earth by a species which takes over the minds of humans while leaving their bodies intact – which she sees as a trilogy, but it could also be something "completely different". "I have another book that's kind of been itching in the back of my brain, that's completely unrelated, totally fantasy. So fantasy it'll have a map in the front – that's always the judge, right?" she said.
Having envisioned it as a longer series and "know[ing] what happens" to Bella and Edward in the future, Meyer said she "may" come back to the world of Twilight, but "I wrapped up [fourth novel] Breaking Dawn in a way that I felt satisfied with, so if that moment didn't come I'd feel OK".
She's also musing over whether to go back to Midnight Sun, which tells the story of the romance from the perspective of vampire Edward. An unfinished draft was leaked on the internet last year, prompting the author to put the project "on hold indefinitely".
"I need to feel alone with something to be able to write it and I do not feel alone with that manuscript at this point. So many people have chimed in on it," she said. "I'm over the shock of it but not over the feeling that everyone's involved now, and it doesn't feel like mine so much anymore. I 'm hoping that with a little time, time to write something else, get my head out of it for a while ... it's so clear in my head, I'd like to go back to it."
The film of New Moon, the second book in the series, is released this week.
