PerNoFiMo Check-in

All right, because I need to be accountable to somebody for my Personal Novel Finishing Month, I've come to tell you guys my progress.
I am now at 58k on my W.I.P. Whew!
I think I'm going to be closer to 65k when I finish, but I tend to underwrite my first time through, so after everything goes through and it's finished, it should be longer.

And, to amuse you, a video called Harry Potter in 99 Seconds. Because I am both a nerd and easily entertained.

Just another Harry Potter post...

I know everyone's going crazy about the fact that the last movie is coming out and writing blog posts about it. I wanted to as well.

But I couldn't.

I tried to think of something to blog about. Whether I should talk about some of my favorite characters (how do you even choose?) or background information on the myths J.K. Rowling put in the series, or perhaps writing techniques to pick up from the books.

I tried all of these, and I couldn't put my heart into it.

It's not because I don't love the series and I don't have anything to say about it (sometimes I think people would wish I'd just shut up about them). It's because despite how exciting this is, it's the end of an era. Of course, as Rowling said at the London premiere, Hogwarts will always welcome us back home, but there's no denying it's not the same now. And it's not because the books or movies have changed, or that the magic has faded. It's that with the completion of Harry Potter comes the completion of my childhood.

My generation had a very unique experience with Harry Potter. We always waited for that next book, that next movie, we grew up with the characters. I don't know if adults can really grasp how much this made our childhood, even as parents. The experience of a child and an adult are so different, even watching a child's excitement isn't the same as feeling it. My mom never blew out her birthday candles wishing for that Hogwarts letter even though she read the books. I did wish that, with all my eleven-year-old heart.

I've always been a huge bookworm. I've counted down the days for several books, bought them the day of their release, and waited for many movies that had been adapted from a favorite book. Yet Harry Potter stretched out for much of my childhood, opposed to any other book series I read before. Seven book, eight movies. Everything was a surprise, more than Christmas. When would they release the next book? When would we see a trailer for the next movie? What kinds of twists will be thrown at Harry and his friends? Who will survive the war? This occupied more than half of my life, and as I can't remember the first few very well, it feels like nearly all of my life. I've known little else, other than waiting for the next thing in Harry Potter.

Waiting is coming to an end. The final battle is near. Harry and his friends will all be grown. I've stepped with them through my entire childhood. They face the last evil in this movie, and childhood is done and over; Hogwarts is done. I'm done. I'm not a child.

But just as Harry and Ginny, Ron and Hermione, all send their children off to Hogwarts in the epilogue, I hope to do the same with my future children (someday far, far in the future). Just as James, Al, and Lily, Hugo and Rose, will have a different experience from their parents, so will my children. They won't know midnight releases and years of patience (if I'm lucky, they'll pick up the next book as soon as they finish), just as the Potter and Weasley kids won't know Triwizard Tournaments and Albus Dumbledore firsthand. But they'll experience Hogwarts as well, in a different way.

I'm sorry if this post was scattered, but it's a strange time and I can't seem to organize my thoughts.
Last thing though, a little something from BYU's Divine Comedy, which I think sums up the Potter generation to perfection.

The kids in books grown up

Ok, so my posts are very geared toward plotting and writing out a first draft of a book right now because, well, that's the stage I'm in with my writing, I have a WIP. When it's done and I start revising, you'll probably see a shift in subject.

So what else has kind of been floating around in my mind is this:

Not the movie. Well, okay, I am super excited about that and it has been floating around in my mind. But what I've been thinking about is if in books for the younger crowd having the characters grow up, get married, and have kids, is something they want to see.

Now, I'm fine when I read a book and I get an epilogue that shows the characters in the future. But, for some reason, I also think that authors get backlash from the young fans of the series (a good portion readers of children's books are also adults) if they do this.

Harry Potter. We get an epilogue. I've heard complaints about it. Although, I don't think it's because it shows the kids as adults, married, with their children. I think for Harry Potter, it was more of the fact that everything seemed overly cheerful, perhaps, after such a dark journey.

However, there are definitely two YA novels that have gotten some backlash from fans in this sense. Breaking Dawn and Mockingjay.

Breaking Dawn does not have an epilogue, but the fact that Bella and Edward have a baby was definitely a turn-off for some Twilight fans. Maybe it's because two thirds of the book dealt with this child in some form, readers were overdosed with it, opposed to another series which will mention children for a few pages at the end. But I did notice in my days of Twilight craze (yes, I admit that I was once obsessed with this series) most of the people who had problems with this plotline were teens. Bella and Edward suddenly had a disconnect from them. They were parents. I'm not sure what they're saying about teen pregnancy these days, but I'd wager most of the teens who read Twilight were not teen mothers. The older fans, it didn't bother them as much as, say, the absence of an epic battle at the end. But the older fans were generally mothers or close to motherhood and thinking about it more (sorry if you're a Twiguy and I'm leaving you out with most of these "how fans react thing" by referring to them all as female). Anyway, point: pregnancy and babies seem to estrange readers in the YA range when they are heavily dived into. Marriage...at least in Breaking Dawn, I don't think as much.

Mockingjay is very, very, very, very different from Twilight. But, it too got some backlash from fans and part of that was the (in my humble opinion) brilliantly beautiful epilogue. Katniss ends up with Peeta, and they have two children. Right as soon as I discussed the book with other fans, the epilogue was slammed as being horrible and unnecessary, and oh my gosh Suzanne Collins, you shouldn't have even written it! There were children. How could Katniss possibly have children? I think part of it may have been the fact that through the series, Katniss thinks she's not going to have children. Period. End of story. And then at the end, we find out Peeta's talked her into having kids. Now, I dug it because to me the kids showed how much their world had changed, that Katniss felt safe enough to have children. But some people didn't like it. And, again, I feel most of those people were teenagers and I think most of those people in general did not want children in the first place, so a point that they connected with Katniss had been severed.

So, my conclusion: Young adult readers can handle epilogues with their characters married and with children, just don't make it sappy. However, teens do not always bode well with reading extensively about life changes that they are not familiar with, like children. As for marriage, I'm not as sure how much a YA audience could handle. Generally, if a character gets married, it's at the end of the book and it's just the wedding. I've yet to see YA that delves into the realm of marriage in and of itself (Breaking Dawn mostly focuses on Renesmee). And, finally, readers don't like to see huge character changes in epilogues, even if they're amazing and make perfect sense (I mean really, I don't think Suzanne Collins could have done the epilogue better, I don't understand why some people don't get it. If you can't tell I love Mockingjay's epilogue).

As to where this leaves me...well, I don't know. Once I finish my WIP I'll still have two more books until I get up to this point and make a decision.

Setting

On my eleventh birthday I greatly anticipated my acceptance letter to Hogwarts. I didn't get it (to which I thought, It's because I'm American, isn't it?!). I had done more than fall in love with the story and characters in Harry Potter. I had fallen in love with the setting as well. So much, that I wanted it to be real, and I was sure it was. There was no way that J.K. Rowling could have made up such a place! It was too thoroughly described to not be real.
I've come to realize that I suck at setting. But setting is important. Imagine Harry Potter with a weak setting. It wouldn't have done nearly as well--and forget about a theme park. The world our characters inhabit should be as vivid and real as them. Something else to add into my  list of improvements on writing.

But a trick I learned in creative writing today is to write the setting as if you're shooting a movie, and "pan" through the setting. Start out broad, and then move in through the setting and into the characters and the situation. In fact, if you look at a lot of scenes describing setting going this way, only now I realized how people used it.

Of course, now I want to go to the theme park in Florida to see Hogwarts. Because now it is real.