Category: personal

Pottermore

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 7 Comments

I’ve only dipped my toe into Pottermore, which I finally got access to this morning. Actually, I didn’t find out about it until I got to work this morning. So there I am, overwhelmed with stuff to do and looking at a busy week ahead of me, and now they decide to give me access? Murphy (of Law fame) is obviously their head membership bigwig.

Anyway, the website is down for the moment, so I thought I’d record a few initial impressions. The main one which is, the “new content”? LOL, I will bet all my sickles and knuts the “new content” is coming straight out of Rowling’s old story notes and discarded word count. Any writer (even me of overwriting fame) has a ton of content they wrote way back when that didn’t make it into the final draft, not because it wasn’t good, or relevant, or “the wrong direction for the story”, but just because it was tangential, or background information. Or became tangential/background info as the plot of the story developed.

So how much of this “new” content is new from Rowling’s POV? Probably none of it. But as someone who enjoys deleted scenes on DVD extras, and writer/director voice-over versions of movies/episodes explaining their creative process, I vote this “pretty darned cool.”

ETA: And now that the site’s back up and I’ve read along a little further, I have found the page where she admits to all this. ; )

9-1-1

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 6 Comments

Ten years ago, I was living with my friend Kevin in his apartment in the Haight district of San Francisco. I used to wake up to the classical music channel every morning on the clock radio (I don’t even use an alarm clock these days–no point). I remember waking up to music, but then when the music faded, they broke for a news report about the one of the twin towers in NYC being hit by a plane. No one knew why yet. I think everyone assumed it was a really incompetent pilot.

So I went in to work, and heard about the other planes hitting their targets. I spent the rest of the day glued to streaming video news on my work computer. I watched the towers crumble. The ATPo board was full of anxious posts as we worried over our NYC friends, and waited for each to check in (http://www.atpobtvs.com/existentialscoobies/archives/sep.html).

At some point, it was revealed that one of the planes, the one that crashed in rural Pennsylvania because the brave passengers took it away from its target, was originally bound for San Francisco. Many SFers were on the plane. None that I knew personally.

I went to New York in July of 2005 along with many ATPoers to hang out with each other and see the city. midnightsjane and I took a double-decker bus ride around lower Manhattan, and saw ground zero, among other sights.

I guess the closest I came to losing anyone I knew in the disaster was wondering if that week was the week my writing coach was supposed to go to NYC to do a writing seminar for some New York executives in the tower. Turns out, it wasn’t.