I’m trying to be offline this week so here’s something lighter for a change. I unearthed a bunch of funny Harry Potter mementos from my childhood, like this fanfic I wrote at age 11 or 12. Later, I wrote way more fan fiction and even had a small cult following online, under a Username That Shall Not Be Revealed…
But basically, this is a record of debts I owe JK Rowling. Listening to her conversations with Megan Phelps-Roper, I realized that despite having read hundreds of thousands of her words—over a period of time that stretches from childhood well into adulthood—I had never heard her voice. Yet she had kept me company when I was lonely. When my mom was sick, we retreated back into the world of Harry Potter. We went to midnight book releases and I read the books out loud in the car on the way home, way past everybody’s bedtime. During the worst of the COVID pandemic, I picked up the books again for the first time in over 10 years and found them just as I had left them: immersive.
Very bad drawings:
Rave review of The Prisoner of Azkaban, which came out when I was 12: "shiny face drunk herself Marge Dursley..." "... and can he trust his Professor Lupin-so kind, and yet always sick on the full moon?"
Still a big JK Rowling fan, it turns out.
“Excellent problem that is resolved very realistically…” ;-)
The zeal with which women have reviled Rowling’s character, since she began speaking out, has been shocking to me. They only read the slander of transactivists, but don’t read what she has actually said, to decide for themselves what she means. It’s depressingly ‘on brand’ for liberals and progressives, now, to be full of hate, yet ignorant of those they hate.
Oh, how fun to know this about you! You are a good writer. Seems you always had the gift.