"I thought I'd make enough to pay off the car," said Meyer, 33. Now the minivan is paid off, the Visa bill is history, and she's working on her fourth book in the series, as well as an adult science-fiction novel.

No one in her family saw Meyer as an author.

"She's always been very creative, but she didn't write a lot," said her father, Stephen Morgan, of Cave Creek. "We always thought she was going to be a painter."

Though she was an avid reader who got an English degree from Brigham Young University, she wasn't planning to become a writer, either. Then, on June 2, 2003, she had "the dream."

She saw "a beautiful, sparkly vampire with no fangs" in a meadow. It was so vivid, she said, she didn't want to forget it. So she jotted it down.

The next day, she churned out 10 pages. After that, she obsessed over what the characters would do next. She mulled over the story and plotted it out while sitting at her boys' swim lessons.

'Twilight' finished in short time

"I never finish anything," she said. "My kids' scrapbooks are half done."

Her sister, Emily Rasmussen, encouraged her to publish it, so Meyer researched the business online. "I realized you can't just send it to a publisher like they do in the movies," Meyer said.

Instead, she racked up eight rejection letters and received no response from the five e-mails she sent. But the manuscript landed in a slush pile at one New York agent's office where an assistant picked it up and couldn't put it down. She gave it to her boss, who also got sucked in.

Jodi Reamer, an agent with Writers House, sent it to nine publishing houses and got a pre-emptive offer from Little, Brown. The initial print run was 100,000. Meyer's third book, Eclipse, due out this month, is slated for a first run of half-million.

"One hundred thousand means they're really behind the book, and they're expecting great success," Reamer said. "Five hundred thousand is Harry Potter realm."

Vampires, werewolves = humor