Two Robert-Galbraith.com Revelations

The Daily Snitch, a Rowling news aggregator to which I subscribe, today announced:

The link goes to http://robert-galbraith.com/. The site has links going back to 2015 and the release of Career of Evil; I’ve been to it several times the last few days in search of a quotation I was tasked to find (about which more on another day) and, if there have been any changes, I haven’t noticed. Perhaps the bulletin from ‘Daily Snitch’ is that there will be changes and an imminent remodel?

On the other hand, the home page is full of teevee show artifacts (most notably, the Bronte production Career of Evil script title page) and stills. Maybe this Robert.Galbraith.com is the new version though it has been up for a while and has links to older posts…

I needed a break from ‘Wizard Reading Formula’ efforts so I took a longer look at the site, just in case it was to disappear that night. [It has not.]

First, the notebook with a diagram in Rowling’s hand-writing (screen capture on left). It is the schematic of responsibilities in a small business; Robin is on the chart as the PA to the CEO. There are character thumbnail sketches keyed to each position on the chart.

I think there is a natural, unforced conclusion from this chart, as it isn’t something in any of the first three books: the chart is Rowling’s working picture of a Lethal White plot point.

Either Robin is leaving Strike’s employ in Lethal White or she is embedded in the charted firm as Strike’s partner to find out who the baddie is in that company.  [Read more…]

Learn the Seven Keys in Seven Weeks! Take Wizard Reading Formula with John

During yesterday’s ‘Seven Keys’ live webinar, I offered those in attendance what I have shared with the Potter Pundits Summer School students and the Roanoke Festival friends about ‘Wizard Reading Formula,’ the seven week online course I am teaching this September and October. Every week we will have three talks, office hours, and a live webinar from the platform we tested in Summer School, one we demonstrated was interactive, accessible, affordable, and, most important, conducive to transformative learning.

The webinar went well but ran a little long! I cut it down by twenty minutes in the screen capture video below. If you’re interested in joining us to learn the Wizard Reading Formula, the link for payment and registration is here. There are links below as well to the Potter Pundits Summer School classrooms, all the videos and downloadable pdf attachments, all of which come down tonight at midnight.

This is the first time I’ve offered the class online so I have priced it at the cost of the lowest price of an overnight stay at Universal Studios in Orlando, the price of one night in ‘the room beneath the stairs’ for seven weeks of dialogue and instruction about the Seven Keys to Harry Potter: three talks, office hours, a live webinar, and a new bonus package every week. Did I mention the ‘How To’ course in diagramming a story ring? For readers and writers, this is an avenue to a lifetime of greater reading pleasure and writing power.

And it’s free if you’re not delighted. Pretty straight forward: a 30 day Money Back Guarantee. I talk about the Formula in the video below  -the weekly vlog! — about the Seven Keys, probably the most popular and certainly the densest content concept per minute of all the talks I give, a flash overview of the Wizard Reading Formula, as well as a long look at the symbol in Deathly Hallows that the characters interpret at four levels for our reflection. Enjoy!

Save your Seat in the ‘Wizard Reading Formula’ Classroom — Closes at Midnight Sunday Night!

Tour the Potter Pundit Summer School web pages and Watch the Videos

See the Live Q&A Webinar with Oxford’s Beatrice Groves, Author of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter

Serious Readers and Writers Share Their Thoughts About John Granger

‘Seven Keys to Harry Potter’ Tonight!

As my swan song to Potter Pundits Summer School, I’ll be giving a free talk on the Seven Keys to Harry Potter tonight at 7 pm Central time via WebinarJam.

I’d love it if you could join me! Sign up here.

See you tonight!

John, in haste

Post: Please post the webinar link on your FaceBook and social media portals if you have a moment — thanks!

Post2: If you missed the sign up for Summer School, here is a direct link to the classroom:  https://potterpundits.com/summer-school-video-4/. I’ll leave the classes up until midnight Sunday in case you want to watch or download the transcripts and other materials!

Ian Rankin and Cormoran Strike

​​​​​​​For serious readers and fans of Robert Galbraith’s ‘Cormoran Strike’ mysteries, it’s been a busy week. There have been a relative flood of stories about the three novels because of the ‘Strike’ BBC1 television show premiere in advance and to promote the 27 August broadcast of the first ‘Cuckoo’s Calling’ episodes. No news about the publication date of the fourth novel, ‘Lethal White,’ but I’m hopeful, even confident that the five ‘Strike’ adaptations of the first two novels being broadcast this month and next are preamble to ‘White’s rollout in October or at the holidays.
 
My thoughts this week have been about Ian Rankin, the Edinburgh writer of detective fiction. His only relationship with the Cormoran Strike stories seems to be the kerfuffle he caused in 2007 when he told a book festival in his and Rowling’s adopted home-city that his wife had seen Jo Rowling scribbling away at a murder mystery at their neighborhood Starbucks (back then Rowling lived on the same street as Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith, which avenue became known as ‘Writer’s Block’). The Presence denied it and Rankin said he’d been joking.
 
That only became interesting in 2011 when Rowling signed with Little, Brown and specifically with an editor who specialized in working with very successful writers of detective fiction. Because the world didn’t know that Casual Vacancy was in the works, The Guardian speculated that her first post Potter novel would be a detective piece, as Rankin had suggested. Rowling denied this and said that the rumor started because she and Rankin had discussed how much whodunnit atmosphere there is in the Hogwarts Saga. Her representatives at the time, Christopher Little, said rumors that she was writing crime fiction were “unfounded.”
 
Which wasn’t true, of course. The rumors started in 2012 because of the editor she had made a deal with and the 2007 comments were about Rankin’s wife and what she had supposedly seen. And Christopher Little, though he didn’t know it, had already been passed over for Neil Blair as Rowling’s agent and may very well have been unaware of what she was writing. Still, a non-story.
 
Here are three other notes about Rankin and Rowling beyond this not-really-news story:

[Read more…]

BBC1 ‘Strike’ and the Canon Question

In my conversation last week with Oxford’s Beatrice Groves at the Potter Pundits Summer School live webinar, we were able to answer all the questions the global audience in attendance asked as well as many of the ones I was sent beforehand by those who couldn’t be present in the virtual classroom. You can watch the replay here on YouTube.
 
Only one Cormoran Strike point came up in a conversation focused on the Hogwarts Saga, one about canon. The question was about whether the ‘Fantastic Beasts’ films should be considered Harry Potter canon. Prof Groves said, no, only the books are canon (she restricts it to literary canon and the books are fixed no matter what the author says or writes later about it). She allowed, however, that ‘fandom canon’ included everything an author writes so, as Rowling wrote the screenplay for ‘Beasts,’ it might be considered canon in a way.
 
Enter ‘Strike,’ the BBC1 adaptation of the Peg-legged Private Eye’s mysteries.

[Read more…]