I was on fire, burning in a lake of boiling tar. I could no longer see, I could no longer hear or smell or taste a single thing. I had no sense of time. I had no sense of I.

It went on forever. It never ended, never would end. The pain was all that there had ever been or would ever be. I wished I could die, rather than endure so much pain. I was burning.

I was burning.

Oh, god, I was burning.

My heart was the first to go supernova, if there could be such a thing as first or last in a space unjoined from time. I knew then that I would not live long: plenty of humans didn't survive the transformation. I would be one of them. When I could think at all, I thought of this, too certain of my imminent demise to even fear it.

But I couldn't think for very long, or very often, before I was sucked under again, forced into the void, every cell in my body expanding until it burst. In my ears were the dulcet sounds of metal on metal, of nails on teeth. Ice-picks tapped gently and lovingly at my bones, scraping them inexorably away to nothing. My eyeballs dissolved into my skull; I felt the retinas twist around each other until they snapped like dried twigs. My nostrils inhaled molten acid, poured it generously into my lungs where it could eat me away from the inside.

Now my bones were made of glass, and the glass was cracking and shivering and splintering into droplets, molten in the heat of this infernal blaze.

Now my eardrums were pincushions, and needles of infinite fineness sprayed licentiously through them.

My throat was packed with tinder: I couldn't swallow past it. I would choke on my own body, die choking, still be choking as my ghost drifted away from everything I knew. It occurred to me, a lifetime or several lifetimes later (I would never be sure exactly how many stars were born and died in the span during which I burned) that the heat had receded from my toes and my fingers and my legs and arms and even from my heart. It had all congealed in my throat.

I managed to swallow a gasp of air, and the tinder ignited.

No snarky author's note today. Instead I am going to ask something of you.

There is a reason my author's notes are so angry. There is a reason that I have focused the overwhelming portion of my time and energy on this author, on these stories. Twilight encapsulates a perfect storm of everything that is wrong with my country. Whoever SM is as a human being, as a writer she is nothing more than a propagandist for those who would oppress the masses, those who believe themselves above the law. And consistently, overwhelmingly, the law agrees. I spend, word for word, as many hours writing my A/Ns as I spend on the actual story. That should tell you something. I don't do this for fun. This country is toxic. SM's failure to include a representative number of complex, important, non-white characters stems from the same social, economic and political system that has United States police brazenly gunning down the citizens they are sworn to protect, blatantly ignoring American citizens' constitutional right to due process and freedom of assembly. The hyperbolic wealth of the Cullens and the extralegal loopholes that their wealth allows them is very directly related to the inability of the poor to afford the legal justice that is their basic human right.

Please consider donating to the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, The Leadership Center, Civil Liberties Defense Center, the Center for Constitutional Rights, or Human Rights Watch. (The first five are American organizations, the last one operates worldwide. Sorry to all my non-American readers for not having a more thorough international list! Feel free to mention overlooked organizations in a review or PM and I will look into including them here.)

I have a great deal of trust in the goodness and sincerity of my readers; your reviews and the ensuing discussions that we've shared have proven to me again and again that I am surrounded by smart people who care about doing right in the world. Talking about the flagrant injustice embodied in Twilight is good. Fighting to eliminate that injustice is better.