sprinkle on a little bit of grated cheese and leave under the grill till Doomsday

[philomel]

Lured in by the newest Neil Gaiman-based scents, I ordered some more BPAL a few weeks ago... and received them less than two weeks later, which has to be the quickest turn around from them I've ever experienced. It took me a while (they sent me 6 free imps, eep!) to make it through them all. Jotted down my reactions, and here they are:

Comments

[philomel]

you read a good book,and suddenly, the characters are not only real, they're almost part of your family. You cry for their losses and laugh at their jokes and never want to see their story end--you want to follow it and watch them continue to grow.

Absolutely well put. :) It's such an amazing thing, too, to have these characters and this world that originally existed only in one person's head be adopted and absorbed by other people, to the point where they're as integral and inseparable from the readers' lives as they are from the writer's. Obviously, that goes down to skill of the writers him- or herself. But to take what begins as a solitary thing and turn it massive... especially as massive as the HP phenomenon has become... well, that's friggin' impressive.

I did see something about an encyclopedia of sorts, along the lines of Hogwarts: A History that will go into greater detail than the epilogue. I'm very happy about that, partly for the hope of filled-in gaps, but mostly because it means we still have something to look forward to. Good to know the end isn't the end, y'know?

[cuppa_joe]

Stephen King made an interesting observation once about writing.

"What is writing? Telepathy, of course. All of the arts depend on telepathy to some degree,but I believe writing to be the purest distillation.
Look--here's a tble covered in a red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. In its front paws is a carrot-stub on which it is contentedly munching. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8.

Do we see the same thing? We'd haveto get together and compare notes to make absolutely sure, but I think we do.

...

The most interesting thing here isn't the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage, but the number on it's back. Not a six, not a four, not a nineteen-point-five. It's an eight. This is what we're looking atand we all see it. I didn't tell you, and you didn't ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room, except we ARE together. We're close. We're having a meeting of the minds."

Interesting. And to do it on a world-wide scale like HP...wow. Absolutely amazing. And it all started on a paper napkin in a diner.

[philomel]

Lovely quote. "Telepathy" is the most (eerily) precise way of putting it. :)