J.K. Rowling

Cafe Society
1

I think we’re watching a slow-motion crash-and-burn.

Years from now, children will say, “How come there were only five Harry Potter books?” Or, “I like the first four, but…” And we’ll have to explain to them, “They were very, hugely, immensely popular for a while. People stood in line to get book 4 at midnight the day it was released. Then the first movie came out, and people went nuts…but we kept waiting and waiting for the fifth book…and when it finally came out, it was like, we waited so long there’s no way it could have been good enough. And the sixth one was really not good. Not many people have read the seventh. I know how it ends, but that’s it.”

In this week’s Entertainment Weekly, Chris Columbus is quoted as saying, “Get off her [Rowling’s] back! We’re talking about one of the greatest fictional series ever written. Only HACKS make novels appear on a certain date.”

Is it being a hack to honor one’s contract? Or, if the contract does not specify deadlines, is it being a hack to set a reasonable deadline, and then meet it? I know quality takes time, and all that, and I’m not saying “There absolutely must be one a year!”, but the publishers should announce a definite date, no matter how far in the future it may be. What’s making me apprehensive is all this “Fall of '03?” “No, I heard it’s summer of '03.” “No, I think it’s Christmas of this year.” I’d just have more confidence in Ms. Rowling (or Mrs. Whatever-she-is-now) if I knew she had a target date for the manuscript.

It’s sad, but it may very well be what I think: that she plowed right through book 1 because she was doing it on spec, and now that she has all this pressure, she’s blocked.

[sub]Daniel Radcliffe is smokin’. At least, on the cover of this week’s EW.[/sub]

2

Gee, you must not be a Thomas Harris fan, since it took him 11 YEARS between Silence Of The Lambs and Hannibal.

Answer me this, are you in any sort of a position to even know if Rowling has any sort of dealine or are you just throwing that out there.

I love Douglas Adams quote about deadlines, “I love deadlines. I love the WHOOOOSH they make as they fly by.”

The book will get here when it gets here, no sooner, no later. In the meantime I have more then enough reading to keep me more then occupied.

Chill.:cool:

3

Although I very much think that quote was ill-placed for the many authors that do meet their deadlines, I do not think missing deadlines is necessarily a bad thing. Many of my favorite producers of entertainment are infamous for missing their deadlines, yet the wait always tends to be worth it. For me, it’s always more important to finish the work, and not rush it than it is to meet an arbitrary date.

4

I’d rather wait for a good book than hurry up for crap. YMMV

5

Bear in mind, dear Rilch, that we’re not talking about a journalist who’s been ordered to bang out a thousand words on this Harry Potter bloke by five o’clock, and if she doesn’t make it, well, we’ll just make the picture bigger to fill the space. This is an author whose entire literary reputation rests on each book being as close to perfect as possible. I have no problem at all with Rowling taking a while to make it that way.

Sure, we’re waiting, but it’s not like we’re waiting. No one’s camped out in front of bookstores until the next book comes out. We camped out the night before to get HP IV, then we read it and went home to wait for the next one. In between, we went to school, went to work, watched the movie and lived our lives. We didn’t stay up and eat only jellybeans until the next one came out.

6

The only thing that concerns me is that the movies will catch up to the books and then the kids will outgrow their parts.

7

My complaint is about the evasiveness of the publishers, which leads me to wonder if anything is being written. I’m not the only one who feels this way. (Top of the screen.)

WSLer: Yeah, but Harris didn’t mark SOTL as book 1 of a series. All I know is, books 3 and 4 had release dates announced well in advance, and now that more time has gone by than elapsed between 3 and 4, people are wondering what the h we’re waiting for.

Netbrian: Has everything really been worth the wait? What I’m wondering (and should have mentioned in the OP) is that the finished product might be substandard compared to the first four because Rowling is running dry for good ideas, and it’s taking this long to cobble something together. Time spent does not always match quality.

Tars and stankow: Yes, I want a good finished product too. Yes, I’m able to go on with my life in the meantime. Now, I’m not being the Comic Store Guy saying, “She owes us!”, but I have invested a lot of time in the first four, and have high expectations for the last three. I would hate to have my speculations above come true, or to see a decline in popularity if the book gets a Phantom Menace-esqe backlash.

That’s really the heart of it. Whether they were being reasonable or not, a great many people felt let down by TPM. I feel about Harry Potter the way many people feel about the Star Wars franchise, and since I’ve already seen what can happen…

Yookeroo: Yeah.

8

It seems like a long wait to us, yes. But in the long run, we’re not the ones who are going to be judging these books. I suspect that our children and grandchildren are going to be enjoying these books too, fifty or a hundred years from now, and a hundred years from now, is anyone going to care that the series took fifteen or twenty years to write? They’re going to be able to check out the whole series from the library the week after they read the first one.

9

According to Newsweek “…the three young stars are aging faster than their characters, and may need to be replaced for the fourth film…”

In the meantime director Chris Columus (who’s now in post production) says this does it for him. He wants to see his wife and kids again. Adios, Chris.

Warners short list for director of “Azkaban” (scheduled for 2004–yes, the studio will skip a year) includes Callie Khouri, Kenneth Branagh and–no kidding–Alfonso Cuaron (as in “Y Tu Mama Tambien”).

Considering all the detail of the book that Rowling insisted getting in the first movie, can you forsee the nightmare of filming “Goblet of Fire?”

I’m willing to wait for the next book. I’m a little surprised at the delay because Rowling has said in interviews that she saw the whole story in a flash. Could she be getting bogged down with the details?

10

Not if they’re good! :slight_smile: But this is now. I’m anxious right now. I want this to be an entity, like the Ring Trilogy, not a mishmash like the Star Wars series. You suspect, on the side of certainty. I hope, on the side of uncertainty. If the last three aren’t good, future generations won’t know the difference. But I will.

Again I say, this is not about “Wah, I want the next book right now!”

**

As am I.

**

That’s what I’m on about. This just doesn’t bode well.

11

The fourth book was dreadful compared to the previous three. Really over-inflated and indulgent. Needed a damn good edit.

12

Well, I imagine she is blocking out every major event in the next three books, all at once. I mean, all the foreshadowing she does…all those characters who become important later…and the legions of obsessive fans who will get upset if she has a left-handed character pick up an object with his right hand…

I think she knows what she is doing. She’s just taking the time to work out ALL the details, so it all fits just right.

I read a ?rumor? that Scholastic has the outline of the basic story through book 7 locked up in a vault, in case something happens to J.K. and another writer needs to finish it up.

sigh…still waiting.

13

I read a ?rumor? that Scholastic has the outline of the basic story through book 7 locked up in a vault, in case something happens to J.K. and another writer needs to finish it up.

That sounds a bit urban legendy to me. I know that Rowling has the last chapter to the whole series safe deposited - she wrote it right at the beginning to reassure herself that she would finish the series.

14

Rilchiam writes:

> I want this to be an entity, like the Ring Trilogy . . .

I’m not sure what you mean by the Ring Trilogy. If you mean The Lord of the Rings (which wasn’t a trilogy of novels, but a single novel split into three volumes for its first publication), then it’s already clear that the Harry Potter series isn’t like that at all. The main action of The Lord of the Rings takes place over a period of about six months. That’s why it was possible to film all three of Peter Jackson’s movies of it at the same time. There are some flashback scenes to earlier times, but the main action takes place over six months, so it’s not necessary to worry about characters aging. The entire novel of The Lord of the Rings was finished before it was accepted for publication.

The Harry Potter series is an entirely different thing. When the first book was accepted for publication, Rowling had only a plot outline of the rest of the series. The action of the series takes seven years. Movies of the books have to be spread over about that length so that the child characters will age the proper amount.

And for what’s it’s worth, the Harry Potter series is overrated. It’s a decent enough work, but I don’t even consider it to be one of the ten best children’s fantasy series.

15

I’ve never read a Harry Potter book – I just opened this thread because I saw Wendell has posted and I enjoy reading his posts – but I’m somewhat taken aback by the notion of the whitebread, entirely underwhelming, pedestrian Chris Columbus thinking he has a handle on the definition of a hack. Columbus is the very essence of hackdom–an invisible, utterly unremarkable director. Do the words “A Chris Columbus Film” really make anyone shiver in anticipation?

He was hired for the Potter job, most probably, specifically for that reason–they didn’t want a director with vision or idiosyncracy, they wanted one who would take orders from Warner Bros. and J.K. Rowling, and make a movie that looked exactly as described in the books. And whose price was right, because after the floppity-flopness of “Bicentennial Man,” job offers were probably not pouring in.

16

OK, I’ll bite. Which are your favorites? (I loved the “White Mountains” books - is that fantasy or SF?)

17

Ok, Impatient for Harry Potter?

One name: Diana Wynne Jones.

One of my all time favorite children’s fantasy authors. If you liked Potter, you’ll love Christopher Chant: “THe lives of Christopher Chant” is the best place to start with her work.

And The Homeward Bounders may be the most incredible piece of children’s fiction ever written.

The White Moutain books are The Tripod Trilogy by John Christopher. Very, very, very good books, though technically SF, if you are being picky.

And I agree about the edit on the Goblet of Fire: frankly, the mytique of the lone crative genius hurts alot of authors: they get so famous that their editors no longer have the freedom to hack away at he deadwood. Furthermore, if the editor is mainly concerned with a big weighy book, he may actually be encouraging the deadwood.

18

If they do one movie a year, they should be aging right along with their characters. Although Hollywood tends to cast “overage” kids so I can see them hitting puberty too early.

Good.

And A Little Princess

I can almost seeing this split into two movies.

19

shelbo asks:

> OK, I’ll bite. Which are your favorites?

O.K., just to mention a few series:

The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
The Time Quartet (A Wrinkle in Time, The Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters) by Madeleine L’Engle
The Earthsea Books by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander
The Wizard of Oz (and its many sequels) by L. Frank Baum (and several other people)

There’s also The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (a single book, not a series). I suppose I could consider it a series if I included The Lord of the Rings, but that’s clearly not a children’s book. (I suppose someone will start an argument about whether some of the ones above are children’s books.)

There’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, but maybe two books doesn’t make a series.

I like a lot of Daniel Pinkwater’s books. He’s clearly writing surrealist books, and they may be considered fantasies, but there’s no overarching series there.

Does anyone else want to recommend a few children’s fantasy series? I regret that I haven’t read any Diana Wynne Jones or John Christopher, whose books are mentioned above.

And I’m only modestly well-read in children’s fantasies. I have a friend who’s read a lot more children’s fantasies than I have, and he says that he wouldn’t put Rowling’s books in his top thirty series. This doesn’t mean I think Rowling’s books are worthless. They have a lot of clever ideas in them, and I like many of her names for things (some of which involve British puns that probably go past American readers). I don’t think the books are well plotted though. I don’t think she worked out the background of her world carefully enough. I think the situation of Harry in the Dursley’s house is so melodramatically overstated as to make it ridiculous. I don’t think her books are well edited.

20

John Christopher I remember as being pretty freaky. I remember being a bit taken aback at some of the things that happen in the Tripod series at 14, so I’d be curious to see what, say, and 8 year old thought of them.

Chronicles of Prydain! Loved them! Read them all when I was 7 at the suggestion of my little brother’s best friend (who was 5 at the time). He’d loved them, I loved them, read them all back to back. A significant amount of stuff from them was incorporated into the games we’d play. I went back and re-read The High King a short while ago, that really holds up well.

Bit of a highjack there, what? :slight_smile: