April 13th

Oooo it's Friday the 13th! How spooky!

Naturally as I fell into sleep last night I realized what I should have written about. The Casual Vacancy! For those of you who ignore the news and don't care one lick about literature or Harry Potter, you're probably wondering what the heck I'm so excited about. The rest of you know that The Casual Vacancy is the title of JK Rowling's new book for adults. The title was announced yesterday morning along with a short description and a release date of September 27th. The book is about a small English town where a town council member ends up dead. Then the town is thrown into chaos because all the groups are competing against each other for the spot. I expect a good amount of dirty play and some skeletons in the closet. I also expect that the death of the council member wasn't entirely natural.

There has been a lot of discussion about the book in my Harry Potter circles. First because the dead council man is named Barry Fairweather. The lovely Lauren Fairweather was incredibly excited and everyone immediately thought of her when they read the description. Of course we have no evidence that Jo named the character Lauren, but it seems likely that she heard the name through all the HP stuff Lauren does and remembered a unique last name. Suppose that can go on the list of questions to ask JK Rowling one day.

Then of course we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the book is all about. As Harry Potter fans we are pretty adept at theorizing about possible story lines and plot twists and everything else that could possibly be written. Of course lots of our HP theories and predictions turned out to be completely wrong, but that wasn't the point. It's a thrill to be back at guessing and posturing and pretending that we have some sort of idea what is going on in JK's head.

The most interesting thing for me is that this is NOT a book I would normally pick up. It's for adults first off. I spend most of my life reading teen books, so I probably wouldn't even see it on the shelves. On top of that it's a political intrigue (and perhaps mystery) story which isn't really remotely close to my almost exclusive fantasy and science fiction reading list. Yet, I preordered the book first thing yesterday morning. Why? Because I spent 10 years being thrilled by JK Rowling, and I have no reason to doubt her now. Maybe it won't be my kind of book, but her writing has proven brilliant thus far, and I'm willing to give it a try for only that reason. And I know I'm not alone in this, as a lot of other Harry Potter fans will be joining me. I'm sure the sites will be full of reactions, and I'll have the book in my hands at midnight so I can read it like everyone else and comment and react as quickly as possible. We're Harry Potter fans, that's just what we do.

250 remaining words and I've pretty much exhausted my speculation on The Casual Vacancy. Today I worked from noon to eight, and since I didn't get out of bed until almost ten and since I got home I've just been writing, I don't really have much else to talk about. I have plans to go see the Hunger Games movie again (which you should see if you haven't already). I was pleasantly surprised by that movie and I'm excited to see the next installment (even if they are going to change directors). Going to movies reminds me how much I really wish I was involved in film. Which in turn reminds me of the script frenzy musical that is still sitting at a stunted two and half pages. Somehow the words just don't flow like I want them to. I'm not sure if it's because I didn't have a truly fleshed out idea, or I can't write lyrics quickly, or musicals maybe aren't my thing, but I'm stuck. Yet, I've been watching a lot of movie trailers and shorts and web series on YouTube and all I keep thinking is, I could totally do that. A lot of them don't even involve many special effects. Hopefully the music video project that I'm working on will help me get over my creative hump. And maybe from there I can come up with a web series idea. Something simple but intriguing. We'll have to see what tomorrow holds.