Annoyance of the day:

The Baltimore County Public Library posted its If You Liked Harry Potter, Try... list today, and it was picked up by librariansindex.

The list is ENTIRELY fantasy. Lord of the Rings. His Dark Materials. Faerie Wars. The Dark is Rising. Etc.

I am irritated beyond the telling of it.

The reasons why will have to wait for a post to come after August 13.

Editing to add: And yet another all-fantasy next reads list, this time from Common Sense Media.

What's that phrase? Common sense is usually neither?

Tags: harry potter, rants
126: rushed
780: thanks for the memories even if they weren't so great

One of my favorite moments of Return of the King (the movie, not the book, because the particular incident I'm talking about can't really be duplicated on paper) is seeing Minas Morgul come to life. There's a gathering tension, then a moment of silence, then an explosion with green light everywhere and marching armies of Minas Morgul baddies.

That's what watching the Harry Potter fandom is like right now.

We're in the middle of the growing tension, and like Frodo and Sam I'm feeling the serious need to go run and hide behind a rock while I watch. The army is gathering and there is much darkness. Saturday will be the hours of silence as everyone leaves the internet to read. And on Sunday, the explosion.

The Potter fandom has been an integral part of my life for the past five years (am planning a photo essay!), but on Sunday I might just spend the day reading Numb3rs fic. I can't deal with all the noise.

Lily Allen - Everything's Just Wonderful

Tags: harry potter
126: excited

Well, first, writing fic is fun. It's no-stress writing (short of fest deadlines). It's my chance to experiment with different writing styles, exploring different characters, etc., without the stress of having to juggle all the balls of writing your standard novel.

Besides the fun factor, though, is my personal feeling that no matter what happens in Deathly Hallows we will never have a truly closed canon.

Think about it. There are about 135 characters that appear, for however long or short a period of time, in OotP. That's 135 backstories waiting to be told, 135 ways of living and speaking, 135 personal histories that got them to where they appeared in the books. There is No Way J.K. Rowling, despite her verbosity, can completely close the canon, telling us everything we ever wanted to know about everyone we've ever wanted to know about. I have doubts that I'll ever learn what I've truly wanted to know since PoA: the reason Peter Pettigrew betrayed the Potters to Voldemort, and leading up to that, why no one, particularly Sirius, saw anything in Peter beforehand that would lead them/him to think that Peter might not be all he says he is. I also want to resolve the ongoing (very friendly!!) argument I have with psychic_serpent over whether Percy is a spy for the Order or not (she says yes, I say no). I want to see more of Narcissa Malfoy because I think she's tough and sharp. I want to know exactly how one gets a job working as a curse-breaker for Gringotts. The list goes on. There's no way all of that can fit in the books.

Then, there's my personal rule: I like to finish what I start, even if it takes me forever. I can say "Canon-compliant through the end of OotP; does not include information from HBP and DH" with the best of them. Just because X amount of canon exists doesn't mean you have to incorporate all of it into every single fic you put out. It works for TV show fandoms and there's no reason it shouldn't work for book fandoms. Despite the overwhelming RL work load (it's a 2007 thing; I ended up on way too many committees the same year I took on a major writing project, plus my regular reading and work), I do try to tickle my fics every once in a while. They WILL get done (I promise, ellen_fremedon!!), but alas, sometimes RL has to come first.

Lately all I've wanted to do is sit around and watch Numb3rs. That is, when I'm not reading Numb3rs fic. I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR ANOTHER FANDOM. ACK.


Audioslave - Set It Off

Tags: fandom, harry potter, writing
126: hopeful

Since everyone else is doing it...

I guess I'm the second-worst kind of Harry Potter fan there is, because I read this Washington Post article on spoilers for the books and thought, "You know what? I don't care."

I will have my cell phone on, as always, all weekend as I read. I will be online looking for people to discuss the book with. I don't care if someone driving down 18th Street at 12:05 a.m. yells out the ending of Deathly Hallows from the window of his car. I don't care if someone who steals a copy of the book early walks in front of me wearing a t-shirt pronouncing all the deaths in the book before the release. I am not creating a spoiler-free filter for this journal (though I am not so inconsiderate as to not cut them for a week). I won't be locking entries in which I discuss the book.

Why? Because for me it's about the journey, not the destination.

Let's say Harry dies. I don't know if this will happen, though given the following of the hero's journey tale it's unlikely. But let's say it does. If you want to flip to the end of the book and yell at me, "Hey, Cedar, Harry dies!" you won't get much more than a shrug and an "Oh, really? Okay." To me, it's not about the events of the book, but how we get there. I want to see the process and the battles and the build to the turning events. I want to read all the dialogue and see the alliances and betrayals unfold. I care more about HOW Lucius Malfoy gets out of Azkaban than whether he does or not. So unless you plan to sit in front of me and read the book aloud cover to cover (which I actually wouldn't mind too much, as I love being read to), you're not going to upset me by posting anything about the events of HP&tDH. I am not so fragile as to be upset over the events, or lack thereof, of a book. When you listen to a sports report, you want to hear more than something like "Cubs won, Sox lost." You want to hear about the major plays, the good calls, the questionable calls, etc. It's about how the game got to those final scores, not just about who won or lost. (And really, by the time someone got around to tell me all the spoilers I wanted to hear, told me about the processes that truly interest me, I'd be done with the book because I read pretty fast.)

Feel free to put me on all your spoiler and discussion filters, if you're making them. Spoiler-free people, to me, are like people who drink pulp-free orange juice. It's totally fine for them and I'm glad pulp-free orange juice exists so no one has to be denied their vitamin C goodness. But I want my orange juice to be practically chewable.

(Although I WILL become angry if we never find out why Peter Pettigrew betrayed the Potters. I still don't trust Sirius's explanation of "Peter was weak" any further than I can throw it.)

Alice In Chains - I Stay Away

Tags: harry potter
126: cranky

Release date of Harry Potter 7, yadda yadda yadda.

In the squeeing over the release date, I noticed this: The retail price on this book (hardcover edition, not the deluxe, afaik) will be $34.99.

Compare this to the cover price of HBP: $29.99.

Compare those to Eldest by Christopher Paolini, which is 704 pages and retails for $21.00

This could mean several things:

1. The books will have a supershiny cover, be printed on some kind of special paper, maybe have the edges done the way the Series of Unfortunate Events is, or have other decoration that drives up the price.

2. We get some kind of goodie with it. A CD, perhaps, or a pen? I love pens.

3. These are going to be the biggest books any of us have ever seen short of the OED.

I'm off to the gym. I'm going to need to step up my weight training regime if I'm going to be schlepping that thing around. Who wants to join me?

Tags: 2007, books, harry potter
126: intimidated
780: there's a lot of honey in this world

Once upon a time, kennahijja and I were bemoaning the fact that both of us missed merry_smutmas signups this year, her because she has a life and me because I live in space, so I said to her one day, "Shall we do a Hijja & Cedar holiday fic exchange?" She wrote this really cool fic that I confess I have not yet had the time to finish because I still have about six books to read before 2 p.m. on Saturday, ack.

About Hijja: She is one of my oldest fandom friends. Betcha didn't know that. But I've known her since the fall of 2002, when she commented on one of my fics. Not only is Hijja a good reader, but she is a good writer, too. Want some kickass genfic? Check her out. Yeah. She's one of those people it's easy to stay friends with even when you don't talk for months, and I am delighted to have written this fic for her.

About this fic: Hijja said, when I asked her if she had any special requests for her fic, that she really liked Gryffindor/Slytherin interactions. Of course, anyone who reads her fics knows this *g*. I'm in the middle of a long H/D fic right now and Lucius wouldn't talk to me, but there was this idea I'd had around for a while, maybe not for a fic, but something I wondered: If we find out in Harry's fifth-year Care of Magical Creatures class why Harry and Neville can see thestrals, why don't we ever find out about the "stringy Slytherin boy" mentioned in the same paragraph, who turns out to be Theodore Nott?

It probably wasn't what kennahijja was expecting, but I hope she likes it anyway.

( Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Acts of Duty, Harry Potter/Theodore Nott, rated PG-13 )

Crossfade - Cold

Tags: fics, harry potter
126: dizzy

First and most importantly: Happy birthday to the brilliant, fun, and beautiful deralte.

Sigh. YA books are all about sex. Again. I missed the news because I don't get home from work until 7 p.m. on Mondays, but argh. YALSA-BK is all craziness. But a good kind of craziness. Professional-like. I think I'm just all aboggle at this big important article published by NBC where the journalist has clearly not read the books, nor talked to anyone who's an expert in the field. I thought journalism was about reporting, like, the facts.

So. Let's talk a little bit about why Harry Potter is a young adult series, rather than children's. All my reference books on this subject are, of course, at home, so forgive my faulty memory.

Young adults as defined by YALSA are 12-18. This distinction isn't perfect, of course. There are a lot of books that cross over between children's and YA, like Holes and House of the Scorpion, and YA books that won the Newbery or the Newbery Honor for children's literature, like The Blue Sword, because the Printz didn't exist until 2000. Because of this, I can see the argument for SS and CoS as children's books, and even though I think CoS is more YA, I'm not going to go to battle over it. PoA on up, though? Classic examples of YA lit.

Not too long ago, I wrote an article for a YA lit encyclopedia on why HP is a YA series. I used the criteria from Literature For Today's Young Adults, which has a six-point list of the things that separate children's books from YA. Some factors, like a diverse cast, cross over from children's to YA, but others, like the role of parents, don't. (My book is at home, my paper is at home, yada yada.) When I consider Donelson and Nilson's criteria, HP fits all of them perfectly. It's true that some children's books carry traits of YA, but these criteria are hardly one size fits all.

Disclaimer: There are always exceptions to every rule, and I'm just providing examples. It is impossible to get all YA lit into six categories, but most of it covers at least four of the six. Also, I have read every book I mention.

Some of my arguments for HP as a YA series are:

1) Lack of parents. It's not just Harry's parents who are gone. In the setting of Hogwarts, EVERYONE'S parents are absent. With their parents out of the picture, the teens are free to go about their adventures and grow as individuals. Parents in YA lit are often a source of strife, and more often than not one of them is dead or otherwise out of the picture. Some exceptions to this rule: My Heartbeat by Garrett Freymann-Weyr, The Cat Ate My Gymsuit by Paula Danziger (although the father is Marcy's premier antagonist), Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie by David Lubar (must pimp this book as often as humanly possible). Even with the parents in the picture, most of these books take place at school or at friends' residences, leaving the teens to act independently. I'm not saying there aren't children's books with no parents; look at From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. In children's books, however, the parents play a much different role. They influence their children's decisions more, like in Charlotte's Web, or they shape who their children become, maybe their children want to follow in their footsteps.

2) The age of the main character. Yes, maybe this is somewhat of a duh, but I've seen a lot of outrage from parents who don't want their third-graders reading a book with lots of kissing and a sexual awakening (Harry's). But that's what a good young adult book incorporates: the physical and mental changes that all teens go through. In Time magazine, article here, J.K. Rowling says:

"There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She's become irreligious basically because she found sex," Rowling says. "I have a big problem with that."

So do I.

One of the things I admire most about JKR's writing is her attention to the feelings of teenagers. Harry isn't just The Boy Who Lived. He's The Boy Who Lived To Develop A Crush On His Best Friend's Sister And Really Screw Up His Relationship With Cho Chang. It's Harry's jumbled feelings, so normal to teens, that make him likeable and make the reader able to relate to him. By ignoring Harry's emerging sexuality, JKR would have done a huge disservice to her teen readers. HP would have been the Michael Jackson of YA lit: a teen protagonist with a child's mentality. I think a lot of people still expect it to be that way. Too damn bad. We cannot expect readers to go from Bridge to Terabithia to The Color Purple. YA lit is the way to bridge that gap. HP is unique in that he ages and grows over the series, and it seems to me like many readers have a hard time accepting the inevitable: All people change as they grow older. One of the joys of YA literature is witnessing these changes firsthand and seeing them treated so well, with so much care, by YA authors. I sure as hell couldn't do it.

That, and the fact that any other book where the characters smoked, drank, beat each other up, kissed, had obvious sexual longings, bled every other page, talked back to their teachers, and fought for their lives against evil would go straight to the YA section of any library.

3) Questioning authority. Again, this does happen in a lot of children's books, but realizing that authority figures aren't always right and don't always have children's best interests in mind is a primary theme of many YA books. Look at just about anything written by Nancy Farmer, Edward Bloor, or Robert Cormier. The best part of this aspect of Harry Potter is that not only is Harry questioning his superiors, he has to put his life in their hands. Think Snape in OotP. It's not that younger children in children's-not-even-close-to-YA books don't question their superiors or parents, but unlike in YA lit it is sometimes (often? jury's still out on this one) the parents and/or authority figures that bail characters out of bad situations with their peers, usually through advice. Example: Ole Golly in Harriet the Spy.

4) Diversity of cast. We're all familiar with this one. No one at Hogwarts cares if your last name is Patil, Mal