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By Brendan Gullifer

Yes, it’s true! There may be another Potter book afterall.

Author JK Rowling has just announced she’s thinking of a Potter encyclopedia. You can read about it here.

Another great writer, American poet Charles Bukowksi (pictured) died in 1994.

But before he left, he gave some wise advice to anyone who wants to be a writer. It’s in the form of a poem, and is called ‘So you want to be a writer?’

This is a slightly edited version.

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

and there never was.

I look forward to meeting with Scotch’s budding writers next week!

By Brendan Gullifer

In 2005, I was in London with my oldest daughter. Just over a week earlier, the bombs had gone off on the underground. Many stations were still closed. Large parts of the train network remained shut down.

But we had an important job to do.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was about to be released. At exactly five minutes past midnight we joined an excited queue of almost 100 people at a bookshop somewhere in the city.

I remember a father behind us saying to his son: ‘I reckon Dumbledore’s going to die. And Ron and Hermione are going to get together. What d’ya think?’

There were guards at the front door. They let in three people at a time. We purchased our copy and raced back to the hotel. I went to sleep. My daughter, who was then 15, finished it at 7 am that morning.

I’m sure it was similar in bedrooms, hotels and houses around the world!

‘You know, Dad,’ my daughter said last week. ‘I’ve grown up with Harry Potter.’

And she’s right. In the last 10 years, 360 million copies of Harry Potter books have been sold in 64 languages

It’s a publishing phenomenon.

Commentators, schoolteachers and other brainy people say the Internet has actually helped the series’ huge popularity. People have read the books and become fans, then spread the word digitally.

Harry is a special sort of boy. Like many heroes, he comes from humble circumstances. He shows courage. He overcomes his fear. That’s true bravery! And he’s honest, and will stand up for what’s right, even in the face of scorn or possibly awful consequences.

Maybe JK Rowling’s time working with Amnesty International – a worldwide organization that campaigns against human rights abuses – taught her the importance of justice and fighting for what you believe in.

Here are some other interesting facts about the book’s remarkable author:

· JK Rowling says the description in the Philosopher’s Stone of photographs of ‘what appeared to be a beach ball wearing different colored bobble hats’ could just as easily have been a description of her as a baby.

· JK Rowling’s sister has a tiny scar just above her eyebrow (sound familiar?) from when she threw a battery at her sister when they were kids.

· She spent much of her childhood swapping made-up stories with her sister, and remembers playing on the stairs in their childhood home.

· There were lots of children in the same street, including a boy whose surname was Potter. But JK Rowling said he is definitely not Harry. She just liked the name.

· JK Rowling said her grandmother died at the same time the family moved to the country. This may have affected her feelings about her new school, which she didn’t like at all.

· The original Ford Anglia car was actually owned by a friend of JK Rowling’s, Sean Harris, to whom the Chamber of Secrets is dedicated. Some of her happiest teenage memories are of zooming round the countryside with Sean in his car. Sean was one of the few people to whom JK Rowling confessed her ambition to be a writer. And he was just about the only person who encouraged her.

· When JK Rowling first thought of the idea of Harry Potter she was on a train – but without a pen! She now thinks this was good because she had four hours’ thinking time before starting to write.

· Parts of the first book were written in Portugal, where JK Rowling was teaching English. This was after her mother had died. JK Rowling says much of Harry’s sense grief about the death of his parents comes from her own sense of loss.

· Other parts were written in a local café. JK Rowling says there were times when she was working on the manuscript that she really hated it (all writers experience this!)

· The first agent JK Rowling sent the book to knocked it back. And the second took more than a year to find a publisher.

And the rest of the story is one of the most remarkable – and successful – in the history of modern literature.

So if, over coming weeks, you’re locked away in your bedroom devouring the new Harry Potter book, and your parents remind you about homework, or walking the dog or stopping to eat, you can tell them this.

That the last time any author had such worldwide success was in the time of Charles Dickens (1786-1861). People used to queue up on the docks for the latest installment of Dolby and Son.

And then you can ask them if they read Enid Blyton as a kid.

‘Do you remember the Famous Five, Mum?’ ‘Do you recall the Secret Seven, Dad?’

And when their eyes go all misty and they get a gentle smile of recollection and longing, you can quietly close your bedroom door and continue reading.

www.brendangullifer.com

1. A bicycle can’t stand alone; it is two tired.
2. A will is a dead giveaway.
3. Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
4. A backward poet writes inverse.
5. In a democracy it’s your vote that counts; in feudalism, it’s your Count that votes.
6. A chicken crossing the road: poultry in motion.
7. If you don’t pay your exorcist you can get repossessed.
8. With her marriage she got a new name and a dress.
9. Show me a piano falling down a mine shaft and I’ll show you A-flat miner.
10. When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.
11. The guy who fell onto an upholstery machine was fully recovered.
12. A grenade fell onto a kitchen floor in France, resulting in Linoleum Blown apart.
13. You are stuck with your debt if you can’t budge it.
14. Local Area Network in Australia: The LAN down under.
15. He would often have to break into song because he couldn’t find the key.
16. A calendar’s days are numbered.
17. A lot of money is tainted: ‘Taint yours, and ‘taint mine.
18. A boiled egg is hard to beat.
19. He had a photographic memory which was never developed.
20. A plateau is a high form of flattery.
21. A short fortune-teller who escaped from prison: a small medium at large
22. Those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the end.
23. When you’ve seen one shopping centre you’ve seen a mall.
24. If you jump off a Paris bridge, you are in Seine.
25. When she saw her first strands of gray hair, she thought she’d dye
26. Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead to know basis.
27. Santa’s helpers are subordinate clauses.
28. Acupuncture: a jab well done

Mrs Sweeney

(image: http://www.nowgasm.com/laughing-buddha-maitreya-cybele-la.jpg 17/4/08)

The John Marsden competition for young Australian writers closes on the 15th August. See here for details.

Do you love unusual, tongue-twisting, ugly or beautiful words?

How about:

gobbet – piece, lump – especially of raw flesh or food ( plenty of those in the Lord of the Rings movies!)

lunisolar – of the sun and the moon

lumpenproletariat – ignorantly contented lower orders of society (a great way to insult people without them realising it!)

and last of all, one of my favourites,

mellifluous – sweet as honey – applied to voices or words. (Try using this one on your girlfriend.)

???

Tell us some of your favourites.

The kids at insideadog have come up with some mind-boggling ones!

Mrs Sweeney

Let The Right One In

Oskar lives with his mum in a high rise building in the western suburbs of Stockholm. It’s the early eighties and he likes listening to Kiss on his Walkman, solving puzzles-including the Rubik’s cube-and pasting grisly murder stories from the newspaper into his scrapbook.

Oskar doesn’t have many school friends, but is interested in the strange new neighbour next door. Eli introduces herself but she’s a little strange-she smells bad, doesn’t feel the cold at all, even in November, and from time to time her hair has a lot of grey.
Soon after Eli’s move to Blackeberg a child’s body is found hanging from a tree. The media think a serial killer is wreaking havoc in the town and affecting everyone’s lives, but they’re wrong-it’s a vampire.

This extraordinary and powerful novel is part horror, part comedy and mostly love story. (Penguin)
The perverse and ugly violence in this novel may put off some people – definitely not for younger teenagers.(Mrs Sweeney).

The Shadow Thief

Amazingly, Alexandra Adornetto was only 13 when she wrote this enchanting book. She is now 14 and working on the sequel!

‘Drabville is a model town, where Milli Klompet lives with her slightly offbeat family and spends her time longing for adventure. Then one day, along with her cautious best friend and amateur geologist, Ernest Perriclof, Milli discovers ‘Hog House…but the afternoon’s entertainment takes a different turn when they are held prisoner by the wacky Mr and Mrs Mayor and a cohort of evil magicians , led by the sinister Aldor. ‘ (Harper Collins)

Someday Angeline

This is the new one from Louis Sachar ( author of Holes and Small Steps). Angeline is a ‘genius freak’ who could read before she was old enough to turn the pages of a book, and mastered the piano without a single lesson. Despite this, life isn’t much fun until surprising things happen when she makes friends with a boy who tells the best jokes and a teacher who loves tropical fish. (Bloomsbury)

Fox Hunt

For all James Phelan’s fans…an international crisis…an ex-navy hero…time’s running out.When the world faces a deadly threat from a lost weapon, Lachlan Fox, disillusioned ex-Navy operative, is forced back into action. James Phelan is a guest at our Literature Festival, so you can quiz him about the inspiration behind this book! (Hachette Books)

The Ghost’s Child

Sonya Hartnett is one of my favourite authors, a master of imaginative, suspenseful and unusual stories. Less dark than previous novels, The Ghost’s Child is ‘a fractured fairytale about an engulfing yet impossible love between an ardent young woman from a privileged background and a feral young man with an affinity for sea birds and the ocean’ (Rosemary Neill’s review – The Australian June 30).

(Penguin)

King Dork by Frank Portman

Frank Portman (aka Dr. Frank) is the singer/songwriter/guitarist of the influential US punk band the Mr.T Experience (MTX). MTX has released around a dozen albums since forming in the mid-eighties and continues to record and tour. King Dork is his first novel, and it’s receiving rave reviews.

‘If you’re in a band or wish you were, if you loved or hated The Catcher in the Rye, if you like girls or are one, King Dork will rock your world’ – John Green, author of Looking for Alaska.

‘King Dork is well and away the best YA book I’ve read this year and Frank Portman is definitely someone to watch out for. It’s inventive and sexy, it’s fun to read and provides endless food for thought – everything I want from a book.’ – Melvin Burgess (Penguin)

For complete lists of items purchased by the library over the last 3 months see ‘New Items’

Mrs Sweeney

Have you read any fantastic books lately, or any that you’d definitely discourage others from picking up? Tell us what made them so great (or unappealing). Were they the sorts of books you usually enjoy? What do you plan to read next?

 Who said this?

Reports of my death have been greatly exagerated.

 Do you know who wanted this on his headstone?

I TOLD YOU I WAS ILL!

Mrs Sweeney

????

OK guys, what did you think of the movie?
Were there favourite bits of the book that just didn’t feature in the movie? How did this movie compare with the previous ones? Are you glad the director (David Yates) will also be directing at least the next one in the series?

What would you have done differently if you’d been the director?
I wish we’d seen more of Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange!

The New York Times has an interesting discussion comparing the five movies to date, with video clips illustrating how Harry, Hermione & Ron have changed with age, how the special effects in the movies have become much more sophisticated and how the genre of the movies has gone from Disney style PG to horror movie/political thriller.

Also see this review of The Order of the Phoenix.

Read alert (July 13) has links to some very funny send-ups of Harry & JK Rowling. Have you ever noticed the plot similarities between Star Wars & Harry Potter?

Do you wonder what will happen to the characters in HP when they leave school? JK reveals all in this exclusive interview .

(By the way, Draco will go into fashion…. )

“Draco has always had an interest in labels. You’ve seen him on Diagon Alley. His eventual goal is to design upscale handbags, sunglasses, and footwear.”

Mrs Sweeney

The recent awarding of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize to Lloyd Jones for his novel Mister Pip prompted me to wonder about the relevance of Charles Dickens’ writing to school students today. I’ve never forgotten the response of one boy in my high school English Literature class to Great Expectations.

Ian was not doing English Lit. because of his love for books. He had chosen the subject because it was likely to get him higher marks than English for his TAE (Tertiary Admissions Exams). I was doing physics for the same reason, so whilst Ian occassionally helped me out with the more abstruse laws of physics, to him I illuminated some of the subtleties of Shakespeare. However, when Ian read Great Expectations his face lit up without any help from me – something, and I’m not sure what, struck a chord. Ian was hooked.

It would seem the novel made a similarly lasting impression on some of today’s best writers. Peter Carey based his Miles Franklin award winning novel Jack Maggs on the convict Magwitch from Great Expectations. He explains in this interview why he felt a strong connection with that novel.

Lloyd Jones’ winning novel is about a white man on war torn Bougainville during the 1990’s, who transforms the lives of his students by reading to them from the same novel.

One reason, then, to read Dickens and other great authors from the past is so that you won’t miss the myriad of allusions to their work in contemporary novels. Sure, you can still enjoy the recent novels without this knowledge, but it’s a bit like enjoying a delicious sticky date pudding without cream or ice-cream.

???

What is it about Great Expectations that captures the imagination and holds on to it? Have you read it? Was that because it was a set school text?Did you like it? Did you find it dated? Were you tempted to read more of Dickens’ work?

Have you read any other contemporary novels that refer to, or are partly based upon novels from the past?

Mrs Sweeney