Finding Magic in Unexpected Places

You know that I am a sucker for magic. But magic can be conjured in many different ways, and found in the most unexpected places—sometimes between the covers of a book, and sometimes in real life when somebody says or does something brilliant and unexpected.

And sometimes you find it in places where magic should be but is rarely found.

My son sent me this link to a blog post by sports writer (emphasis on “writer”) Joe Posnanski about taking his daughters to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. I’ve not been to the WWHP-- I almost got to go there a few weeks ago when I was in Orlando for NCTE. But it didn’t work out. And now I find out that there really is magic there and I missed it. But read it for yourself.

http://joeposnanski.blogspot.com/2011/01/katie-prefect.html

Posnanski’s story reminds me of the time my husband and I took our young sons to Disney World. First, it was brutally hot, and then it began pouring down rain and then Eric threw up (a common response to excitement at that time.) We tried to figure out how to salvage something from an awful day. So my husband sat with Eric in the picnic shelter and held him while he slept. Keith and I walked out in our yellow Mickey rain slickers to watch the parade.

The rain had thinned the crowd, and so, for once, we stood right in front where we could see. We heard the drums and the music and the parade flowed toward us like a ribbon of color through the midsummer dusk. We stood there holding hands while the parade marched by, like vinyl-clad refugees from a damp disaster. The mist rolled up from the hot pavement like magic and we held hands and I cried then, too. 

Report from the Stacks (ALA 2009)

Unlike some people, I find it difficult to blog AT a convention. Let alone tweet. I mean, there’s too much conventioning to do. Plus my spouse was along, and he took up those snippets of time usually devoted to blogging. (Notice how I deflect blame?)
So now I’m home and blogging instead of tackling the BIG REVISION.
Chicago is a great city. My visit was a combination of business, pleasure, and pain. We got the pain over with early. That was the five-hour flight delay that cost us our first day in Chicago. Seems Continental forgot that they’d need a crew to fly the plane.
Our hotel was great, though—the Trump Tower Hotel.

We got a deal on the price, it was in a fabulous location, the room was huge, and it had a stovetop, dishwasher, microwave, and a refrigerator you could actually put things into. With a built-in ice maker. The service was gracious, but not stuffy. Imagine that—a luxury hotel that goes out of its way to make guests comfortable.

We went and saw the Harry Potter exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. It was focused on the movies (one of the guides said they weren’t supposed to talk about the books because it is sponsored by Warner Brothers). It included lots of props and costumes, such as Harry’s wand and Professor Mcgonigal’s dress robes, and recreated settings including Hagrid’s Hut and the Great Hall of Hogwart’s.

We also visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and the Chicago Art Institute.
My ALA experience began with the Voya/Scarecrow Press reception for Perfect Tens and Top Shelf Fiction. (Voya named The Dragon Heir a “perfect ten.”) And, frankly, that is the only way I’ll ever qualify.
Then we went to a “Newbery banquet alternative dinner” at Aria organized by the awesome Nancy Werlin . Visited with Kindling Words buddies Laura Rubie, Toni Buzzeo, and Frannie Billingsley. Web designer Lisa Firke and authors Delia Sherman and Annette Curtis Klause were also there.
After dinner, we headed over to the Sheraton to hear the awards speeches. All the chairs were filled, so we ended up sitting on a platform at the back of the room.
We arrived just in time for Caldecott winner Beth Krommes’s speech and heard Neil Gaiman (Newbery Award for The Graveyard Book) and Ashley Bryan (winner of the Laura Ingalls Wilder award). Gaiman’s speech was especially moving. He described himself as a feral child raised amid the stacks by librarians. I congratulated Krommes outside the ladies’ room and she let me hold her Caldecott medal. It was weighty. And I shook Gaiman’s hand in the receiving line and told him his speech was fantastic. “Really?” he said. “I was kind of nervous about it.”
Maybe greatness rubs off.

The next day was my signing. I spent the morning chasing key ARCs and buying a few books (still no Going Bovine, alas). Arrived at the Disney-Hyperion booth to find out they were already out of ARCs of The Demon King. Signed Heir series books and met lots of people I’d only met online before.

Librarians rock! Seriously.

The Last Great Harry Potter Extravaganza

I almost didn’t go. I mean, I bought my Harry Potter “line pass” at the Learned Owl Bookshop back in May when I had a signing there. Even then, I was #435. I paid nearly full price when I could’ve ordered it on Amazon at a deep discount and had it delivered directly to my home. Or I could’ve strolled into the bookshop one day next week and snagged my copy without fighting the crowds.
But there is something intoxicating about being part of a movement, of rubbing shoulders with throngs of people with one thing in common—the love of a book, and the characters in it. And this at a time when many people question whether ink and paper books have a future at all.
HP changed the rules and changed my life. The New York Times moved children’s books onto their own bestseller list after HP dominated it for months. Publishers learned that there could be big money in fantasy and writers of “adult” books showed a new interest in writing for children and teens.
As a fledgling writer of young adult fantasy, I’d been told that works for YAs couldn’t be longer than, say, 85,000 words. I was discouraged, because I couldn’t do my job within that space. I considered switching to writing mainstream fantasy for adults, with the hope that teens would cross over. But HP demonstrated that children and YAs will read longer works if the author is skillful enough to hold their interest.
HP is, in fact, a phenomenon, and I wanted to participate in history.
And so I ended up in downtown Hudson, Ohio on a Friday night, in a crowd of witches pushing strollers, wizard-cloaked students in round glasses, zigzag scars and Hogwarts school ties, grandparents dressed as house ghosts, professors and headmasters. Teenagers in punk-wizard garb clustered with Abercrombie-clad muggles who rolled their eyes. Hermione and Harry walked arm and arm across the green, sharing kisses every few steps. It was Hallowe’en in July, replete with Slytherins, giants, goblins, mudbloods, house elves, down to obscure Harry Potter walk-ons that only the obsessed would remember.
There was quidditch on the green, wandmaking at the Grey Colt, HP cupcakes at the bakeshop, Venus flytraps for sale at the florist’s, and a sorting hat in the Learned Owl itself. Vendors sold wands and glow-in-the-dark jewelry. I bought earrings for a dollar. We shouted out a countdown to the parade of lanterns and the light show that fizzled in a good-natured, small-town way. There was kind of a Times Square at New Year’s energy and cohesion, without the freezing weather, heavy drinking, and peeing on the pavement.
And finally came the lineup of people clutching bright orange line passes, spilling onto the main street despite the efforts of harried but good-natured police. More people than anyone expected, even with 1200 copies of the book pre-sold. Families argued over who got first dibs on a shared copy. I stood next to a fourth-grader who’d read all the HP books and was devouring the Lord of the Rings trilogy and was totally indignant that the movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix cut out so many of her favorite parts.
I handed her bookmarks for The Warrior Heir and The Wizard Heir, and told her to let it go. A movie isn’t a book, after all.