Steph says seeing NM characters on-screen was surreal

Stephenie Meyer said she had a perfect vision of the characters in the "Twilight" saga as she was writing the series. But when those characters hit the big screen in the first movie and again in the soon-to-be-released sequel "New Moon," she said it was like watching her dreams come to life.

"It is crazy surreal," she said in an unaired interview segment taped during her recent appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

"The first time I met any of the actors, we had a dinner kind of just to get to know each other, and they had all been doing test shoots for hair and makeup and costumes all day, so they came in costume to dinner," she said. "And all of a sudden, Carlisle [Peter Facinelli] sits down across from me, and it freaked me out! It's so weird. You have those moments where you're so used to it, and then you'll be sitting there in the cafeteria, and there's 150 extras milling through a scene and who knows how many people involved in the filming, and there's this huge crowd, and you look around and say, 'This is all because I wrote that dream down.' It's very hard to process. ... Weird."

An avid reader, Meyer said she loves to dig into the classics, including Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, the authors she called the foundation of her literary life. Given the popularity of the "Twilight" series, Meyer said she's also recently gotten into reading more young-adult fiction, checking out "Leviathan" scribe Scott Westerfeld and "The Princess Academy" writer Shannon Hale, as well as her personal sci-fi hero, "Shadow Puppets" master Orson Scott Card.

Clearly deep into her obsession with science-fiction writing, no doubt due to work on the movie adaptation of her body-snatcher novel "The Host," Meyer said she's almost done reading Ron Currie Jr.'s "Everything Matters!," a book about a young man who knows from the day he is born when the world will end in fiery, meteoric destruction. "It's fascinating. It's science-fiction in a real non-science-fictiony way, and I have about a chapter left, and I'm dying to find out how this is going to end because I have no idea," she said