Okay. There are some things I need to say.

Only the people who knew me at the time know how much I was in love with the Twilight Saga. And not just in love, I believe the word obsessed is the right one. But what can I say? I was fifteen and the biggest bookworm I knew. All of a sudden, this rush of danger and romance all rolled into one took up all my attention. And the rest of the world with me.

Since then, I have grown up. It’s been about ten years since my initial obsession, and after a while – as with all teenage obsessions – it ebbed. I stopped to listen to what everyone was saying for the first time. And yes, now that I looked at it with new, adult eyes, Edward was a creep, and not just that. Very clearly emotionally abusive. None of that is as clear as it is in Midnight Sun. In fact, I messaged my friends about it every time something jumped out at me – which was much more often than I’d hoped. Edward is a stalker and constantly takes choices away from Bella, acting like she’s his property and belongs to him. It shocked and disgusted me.

But here’s the thing, even though I know it’s not just inappropriate but awful, the teenage girl who fell in love with Twilight was back. And somehow these two people existed. Half of me cringing at all the creepy things Edward thinks – and there are a lot – but the other half of me was absolutely living in this story. I couldn’t put it down. It’s 756 pages long (just longer than Breaking Dawn), and I read it in a week and one morning.

And I have been ashamed to admit it to anyone. Why? Because it goes against everything I fight for in my own writing. Everything I want to promote. This is the opposite of what I want to promote to teenage readers and YA writers. I don’t want people to think that Edward’s behaviour is okay. It’s despicable. And yet, I couldn’t stop reading. This all felt like a pressure building in my heart, like a dark secret.

But then my friend Jem told me that I shouldn’t be ashamed of what I like to read, and I realised vampire trash had always been my guilty pleasure, and why the hell should I apologise for that? I shouldn’t be afraid of what I like to read. I shouldn’t be ashamed of the things I like. I shouldn’t be so scared about what people will think.

So that’s where this long-winded explanation comes from. I’m not saying Midnight Sun is a work of art. I’m not saying it’s a masterpiece. I’m not saying you’ll like it. All I’m saying is that it turned me back into that hungry fifteen-year-old bookworm again. So much so that I finished the book and didn’t know what to do with my day. But I’m twenty-five now, so I pulled myself up, sat myself at my desk, and decided to tidy a few things before work.

What I’m trying to say is, I don’t want my enjoyment of reading Midnight Sun to mar everything I stand for. But I also can’t take it away from the teenager still curled in my heart, wanting nothing more than for me to read all of the Twilight Saga again so she can re-live it. So I can be that little reader again.

But most of all, this book brought back the most intense feeling I’d ever felt when I first finished Breaking Dawn. And that is the need to write.

So I don’t care what your critics say, Stephenie Meyer. I will always be eternally grateful for your world.

It gave me the courage to write my own.