As I wrote last week, I’m really looking forward to touching down and catching up with friends and serious readers in Orlando this July at Ascendio 2012. I’ll be giving a talk, as always, this time an advanced course on Ms. Rowling’s alchemical-ring story scaffolding, and I know I will love doing that presentation and the Gilderoy time afterwards in which I sign books. This is my sixth HPEF gathering — that’s three in Orlando, one in Vegas, San Francisco, and Toronto — and each one has been better than the one before in variety of programming, professional organization, serious reading discussion, and thoughtful scheduling.

If I could only do one thing at Ascendio 2012 besides the talk I’m giving, it wouldn’t be Starkid Productions (surprise!), Wands by Wands Magical Wizard Revue (though that is tempting!), or Connie Neal‘s Keynote, all of which promise to be SRO events. It would be the spectacular ‘Quill Track’ event HPEF has planned.

[Read more…]

On my way home from Scotland, I read a detective novel called Trouble Brewing (great fun) and a history of The Johnstown Flood. Both were gifts from friends attending the Harry Potter conference at St. Andrews and they were a great distraction from the madness of flying 5,000 miles – at great altitude  – in a pressurized steel tube    – over endless ocean  – at night! Really, flying on broomsticks at midnight with Mad-Eye Moody or on Thestrals with friends traveling to rescue Sirius are arguably safer and more rational choices (if I’m not sure I’d enjoy the trans-Atlantic version of those options). I was glad and grateful to have the reading I did, consequently, to divert my attention from the power of any turbulence able to shake a bird the size of the one I was in.

I had all but stopped work on all projects in the weeks leading up to the St. Andrews conference, so I arrived home to the reality of an overflowing inbox and too many to-do items requiring my focus and attention in six directions simultaneously. As I did on the plane, I chose to do the brave thing, of course, by despairing of even making a good beginning and sat down to read. Here I read an intriguing bit of Harry Potter fan fiction that a writer calling himself ‘Willard Binns’  (Prof Binns?) has started to sell online at his website and at Amazon.co.uk.

It’s called In Defence of the Dark Arts: Lord Voldemort Reveals the Truth Behind the Harry Potter Stories and I think it’s worth reading and talking about for at least three reasons.

[Read more…]

Is Joe Posnanski the Best Sportswriter in America? Almost certainly. The Best Writer in America? My gut says he’s in the running. Which probably means, Joe tells me, that I’m way off base.

Two examples of why I love Joe: On Saying What You Think Is Right Without Evidence (real title: ‘The Toughest Three Outs’).

Maybe the throw-away line that “the last three outs in baseball are the hardest” doesn’t make you flinch. Joe explains not only why this talking head cliche is nonsensical, he leaves a reader wondering how often s/he says things that just ‘sound right’ but have no substance or link to the way things really are. Posnanski seems to be writing about baseball; he’s really jump starting a discussion of epistemology and psychology that is visceral and important.

I write about Joe here today only because of something he wrote recently on the Death of Donna Summers (‘Last Dance’) that, again, is less about the late great (?) pop star than the inside bigger than the outside. He drops a Harry Potter reference in one of his opening paragraphs:

[Read more…]