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A claim that J K Rowling's fourth Harry Potter book plagiarised a work by author Adrian Jacobs may be thrown out of court by the end of today.

Paul Allen, trustee of the estate of Adrian Jacobs who died in 1997, has accused Rowling and her publisher Bloomsbury of plagiarising Jacob's book Willy The Wizard when she wrote Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. He has been attempting to sue Rowling for £5m.

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Pottermore has responded to retailers' frustrations over being unable to sell the Harry Potter e-books, saying the idea was to "ensure ease of availability across all reading devices".

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Madonna has had a pretty colorful life, and pretty soon you’ll be able to see it in full color. Independent publisher Bluewater Productions has a new comic book coming out in August based on the star’s life.

Female Force: Madonna is the illustrated story of the star’s life as written by CW Cooke and drawn by Michael Johnson. The book tells the story of how a struggling dancer in New York became one of the biggest pop stars in history. The book also highlights Madonna’s influence on other artists. “Most pop stars owe everything to this woman. It’s amazing all of the things that she’s done in her lifetime, and I have a feeling that this is still only the beginning,” stated Cooke.

Bluewater’s Female Force series featured other prominent women, including: Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, JK Rowling, Ellen Degeneres and Sarah Palin.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

I came across this trailer recently and surprised myself at how emotional I became. It's not like I cry at all movie trailers. And in fact, I wasn't crying because of the trailer; I was crying because it is the absolute end of the Harry Potter reign. While Rowlings' books will live forever (and the movies) and probably become classics for my grandchildren, there will be no new adventures--no more Harry Potter and gang acting brave and foolhardy. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: This report from the midnight screening of "Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows" comes slightly overdue, but on the heels of a very successful Thanksgiving weekend at the box office, the insights on a magical draw over Gen  Y remain just... Read the rest of this post

HP, Circa 2001.

My literary addiction transferred to the movies, which is why I’m writing this blog entry: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, comes out Friday. I’ll get into all the hype about the newest flick later. For now, I’d like to take a look back at Harry Potters past. It’s jarring to watch all the movies in one week (which is exactly what I’m doing). It’s easy to forget certain details of each film, which dwindles the Harry Potter 7 experience. And I would hate to do that. So here we go …

2001. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
This film introduces the world of Hogwarts to an unlikely, lonely kid named Harry Potter. Everything is new and shiny—for Harry and for the viewer. Voldemort is trying to come back from “the dead,” after an infant Harry seemingly sent him there. Hidden deep within Hogwarts castle is the sorcerer’s stone—exactly what Voldemort needs to come back. Harry and his new friends, Ron and Hermione, have to stop this from happening. The special effects were mind-blowing. Everything looked just as I’d pictured in the books, including the Hogwarts sport, Quidditch. (Damn, that was thrilling.) The kids couldn’t really act in this one. Yet, they each looked the part, and so my fondness for Daniel Radcliffe began …

2002. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
Holy crap, the boys hit puberty. All of a sudden, they had deep voices. Weird. Anyway, in this one, Dobby (not to be confused with “Dobie”), a house elf, appears to Harry and tells him not to go back to school. Harry doesn’t listen, of course, and soon, students at Hogwarts end up petrified by some monster from the so-called “Chamber of Secrets.” Harry realizes he can speak parseltongue—or speak to snakes, just like Voldemort. AND Kenneth Branagh makes an excellent cameo as Gilderoy Lockhart. At this point, the Harry Potter movies still have happy endings. Not so for much longer.

Sirius Black.

2005. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
My favorite book. Yessir. Darn good m

Last night, I plucked up the courage to ring Dotun Adebayo’s Virtual Bookshelf. Readers of this blog will know I’m a fan. Normally nowadays I can’t listen live, as the phone-in takes place between 2am and 3.30 (not great when you have to out the house for 6.30 to get to work). However, I’ve taken time off to write Johnny Mackintosh’s third adventure (provisionally Battle for Earth) so I, like Dotun, can afford to be up all night.

I telephoned to nominate Harry Potter – the entire series – for a place in the list. Dotun, lovely man that he is, allowed this, which did rather set the cat amongst the pigeons. Do the rules of the Virtual Bookshelf allow a boxed set? Everyone hates listening to their own voice but, for the next few days only, that shouldn’t stop you hearing my praise of the boy who lived and his magnificent creator on the bbc i-player: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00vc2dl/Up_All_Night_18_10_2010

I’m between 1:21:25 and 1:29:30 (a whole 8 minutes).

The nomination caused much heated debate, with many voices against (and every vote against cancels one for), but at the end of the phone-in Harry won the day and made it on as Book 60. However, Harry Potter still needs your help. Next week, Dotun and his literary reviewer (last night it was Hephzibah Anderson) invite listeners to remove one from the most recent ten titles on the list. Harry creates strong feelings in people and Dotun suggested he was in danger of being removed after only one week.

Don’t let that happen. I propose the AA Road Atlas of Britain (currently in place 51) should go as it doesn’t really compare with Rowling’s great work – I would be more lost without Harry than I would without a map. So next Sunday night/Monday morning, I say the atlas has to go.

Note this blog entry contains spoilers about the final two Harry Potter books

It’s a truism that cinematic adaptations often pale besides their literary counterparts. An obvious counterexample is Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner but, off the top of my head, I can’t think of more. For those who’ve only seen the film, it’s well worth reading the Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to see just how different it is, but to explain some elements of the screen version you’d have to gloss over otherwise.

Read the book to discover why the Blade Runner owl is artificial

A wonderful thing about a book is that everyone’s idea of it is unique. The reader converts the printed word from the page into a world of their own imagination. How I see the Imperial Palace on Melania in my head, is different from any readers of the Johnny Mackintosh books. Perhaps that’s why film adaptations so often disappoint, as the Director is competing with thousands of movies that have already run within a reader’s head.

There’s no film I can remember that’s disappointed me more that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, directed by David Yates with a screenplay by Steve Kloves. As someone who loves the stories so deeply, it horrifies me that this pairing were also asked to make the double film of the final book. While I think the quality of film-making in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince isn’t terrible (though it is weak), what I can’t fathom were the drastic, totally unnecessary changes to the plot that were introduced, diverting from Rowling’s marvellous story architecture and characterization.

[spoiler alert]

Yates and Kloves think they know better than JK Rowling

With a long book, why introduce a mad scene where Bellatrix Lestrange destroys The Burrow? Where will they hold the wedding in the next film, or has that been scrapped too?

A more important example was the death of Dumbledore. In the book, Harry is powerless to act, hidden under the invisibility cloak with Dumbledore’s body-bind curse on him. He would do anything to fight to save his pseudo-grandfather figure, and knows all too well the Hogwarts Headmaster is dead when the curse lifts. If the film, Harry is hiding in the background, and chooses simply to watch and not act, perhaps due to some bizarre element of cowardice that Yates and Kloves wanted to introduce into Harry’s character. There are numerous other examples and a lot concerning Dumbledore’s relationship with Harry: in the books, our hero is kept in the dark and has o puzzle things out for himself; according to this film, Harry is Dumbledore’s confidant.

When I write the Johnny Mackintosh books, I confess I sometimes have a secret nod to possible future film adaptations. I know a fair amount about film theory and structure, and sometimes I’ll be particularly proud of a passage because I know how well it would translate onto the big screen. I see the same in Jo Rowling’s writing at times, where she’s gone a little out of her way to write a beautiful, cinematic scene for her directors, knowing how much it would enhance the film. Yates completely ignored this. There ar

When you’re a writer you have a clear idea of your story in your own mind, but inevitably you wonder how much of that your readers will actually “get”. I’ve been so lucky with the Johnny Mackintosh: Star Blaze reviews so far, because everyone who’s looked at it seems to have picked out different elements that delighted me.

The latest is Danielle Mulholland, whose written a detailed and thoughtful piece for the Australian website Media-Culture Reviews. The way she summarizes the story at the beginning of her article shows how perfectly she’s grasped it, before going on to say:

“This is a well written book with wonderful descriptions, exciting new concepts for the young adult mind and set in a futuristic world where space travel and various gadgets are common place for Johnny Mackintosh, the protagonist and albeit unrecognised and unknown saviour of the world.”

Danielle stresses that anyone reading a book series should start with the first one, and of course that’s absolutely right. I worked very hard to make Star Blaze work as a standalone book and some reviewers have picked up on that, but it’s absolutely the case that someone’s enjoyment will be deeper if they follow the story from the beginning. A paragraph follows that:

“Having been compared to J K Rowling, Mansfield has certainly used her tried and true double life technique to justify his main character’s peculiarities. In his ‘normal’ life, Johnny has Mr Wilkins to give him grief like Harry Potter had the Dursleys making his life miserable. In his alternative life, Johnny confronts other enemies, similar to the Potter versus Voldemort saga.”

There are plenty who’d claim to be Jo Rowling’s biggest fan, but I’d put myself forward as a contender for the label, and may at least be her number one author fan. It was a great honour to be able to write the Sunday Telegraph’s Harry Potter quiz a couple of years back. Until I read the Potter books I’d only written for adults, but I fell in love with her story and knew I could be passionate about writing for a similar audience, in a way that wasn’t reflected so well in my more grown up scribblings.

I think to really love a book you’ve got to be able to empathize with its characters. That’s why I didn’t write Johnny Mackintosh as “A long time ago in a galaxy far away”. I’m delighted Danielle’s review has picked up on Johnny’s double life, and the problems he has at his children’s home, of course compounded by goings on at school. That’s because I want my younger readers to be able to put themselves in his shoes (or maybe trainers) so they can relate to half his life, while wishing the other half is something that may just happen to them. Personally, I never found myself longing to be a wizard, but as a child I always dreamt of being whisked off into space by aliens.

It goes without saying that any review of Johnny that also mentions the Harry Potter books is going number among my favourites. As a writer, the most impressive thing about Rowling is the architecture of her story, over all seven volumes. If you re-read her books (and I’m a great re-reader) you’ll be amazed at the clues planted in the first couple that point the reader all the way through to the end of the story, without giving too muc

I am a fan girl of many authors, some of whom I'm fortunate enough to have actually met, and others of whom I feel like I know, even though I've never met them and probably never will. JK Rowling falls in the latter category.I admire her on so many levels - as a writer, as a woman, as a formerly single mother, a social activist.

It all started when my son and I began reading the first Harry Potter book together in the summer of 2000. Son was about to enter second grade, and we had moved from England the previous year. The second grade teacher had been reading Harry Potter to her class and they all thought he looked like Harry Potter. When they heard him speak and heard his English accent, they told his teacher, Mrs. Schutzman, "He IS Harry Potter!!!"

Here's son before he grew a zillion inches and lost the round Harry Potter glasses. He's pictured here with then Senate candidate and current CT Governor candidate Ned Lamont.



In a sense, JK Rowling kick started my writing career, by earning me my first byline in the Greenwich Time. I was reading Reader's Digest in a doctor's office waiting room and there was an irate letter from a reader that they had featured JK Rowling on a previous issue, because her books featured "un-Christian" topics like witchcraft and wizardry. I was furious that anyone would attack my beloved Harry, and wrote a humorous piece about what this woman would make of my childhood favorites like the Wind in the Willows (in which Toad drinks and drives and cross dresses as a washer woman) Alice in Wonderland (psychedelic drugs) and of course, THE BIBLE, which has incest, murder, you name it. I concluded that I was glad that my son was reading a terrific book like Harry Potter, and that it had encouraged so many reluctant readers to pick up a book in the first place.

It was that irate column that first got me published in 2001. I've been writing regular columns for the Greenwich Time since 2003. Thank you JK Rowling!

My son and I shared all of the Harry Potter books together, except for the last one, which came out while he was visiting his dad in England and I was on vacation in Canada. We each got a copy and read them separately, but were both devastated that our favorite character, Dobby, perished in the final struggle.

I've listened to the books on tape and reread them several times and new cease to be amazed by Rowling's ingenuity and humor ("Spellotape" alone makes me crack up every time - but you might have to have lived in England to get that one).

There's so much to admire about Rowling as a writer, but I'm a fangirl of her as a person, too,
because she is open about having suffered from depression, and as someone who has been down that road myself and who deplores the stigma that is often still placed on those who suffer from mental illness, I'm always glad when people who have lived through it successfully speak out and give hope to others.

I admire Rowling also because she spoke to some of the the most Type A, overachieving graduates in America about the importance of failure, even if some of them (supposedly the "best and the brightest") were too arrogant and clueless to get it.I see the pressure that is put on kids in my town to achieve, achieve, achieve and make money, money, money. When I speak in schools, I don't deny that one has to make a living, but I talk about trying to find a way to make a living out of your passion.

I'm so excited to hear that Rowling is busy writing, because I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.

And this devoted fan girl will continue to dream about sitting down and having a cup