Do you remember what you were doing in 1999?
For many of my readers it’s a ridiculous question. If you’re a teenager right now, 1999 isn’t memory, it’s history.
Others might remember 1999 for all the hand-wringing about the Y2K bug, which, you’ll recall, came and went without a blip. 1999 was the year the Cleveland Browns returned to the NFL and Star Wars returned to the movies (both of them landing with a thud). Mandalay Bay popped up on the Vegas Strip and Spongbob Squarepants arrived on Nickelodeon.
In 1999 we got nostalgic for a Prince song from 1982, we entered The Matrix, and we learned the first rule of Fight Club.
And many millions of us stumbled onto a phenomenon in children’s literature called Harry Potter.
Harry Potter wasn’t born in 1999–book 1 was released in England in the summer of ’97, but the phenomenon didn’t really get cooking until the summer of 1999, with the US publication of Chamber of Secrets on June 2.
I read Harry Potter 1 & 2 over the course of three nights in the summer of 1999, and, like so many, had my mind blown. I’ve been a voracious reader since childhood, and have had many fabulous, even magical, reading experiences. But never before had I encountered an author with so much command of the story she was telling.
Fourteen years and seven novels later, I can say that I became a novelist during those summer nights in 1999, even though I didn’t know it at the time. I was a high school English teacher back in those days. I also had a script for a feature film in my pocket (the as-yet unproduced masterpiece titled A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Toxic Waste Dump).
But it was JK Rowling who really got me interested in the art of the novel. After finishing those first two books, I went to the used bookstore in my neighborhood and picked up copies of comparable books I liked when I was in gradeschool. The Chronicles of Prydain, The Dark is Rising, A Wrinkle in Time…for the rest of that year, I did more than re-read all my favorites from childhood, I studied them. I went at them with an eye for what made them work, and tried to decipher why even my favorites weren’t nearly as compelling as Rowling’s masterpieces.
That’s when you know you’re onto something you’re meant to do. When you are studying novels to figure out why some are more interesting than others, even taking the time to write detailed notes about what works and what doesn’t, all without any teacher telling you to, well…it didn’t take long for me to take a crack at my own novel.
Prisoner of Azkaban came out in the fall of 99, but all future Harry Potter books came out in the summer, and wouldn’t you know it, I can’t think about summer now without remembering how fun it was to read those books for the first time. I remember when Goblet of Fire transformed the series from tightly paced kids books to fantasy epics that took our breath away. I remembering going to the midnight release party for Order of the Phoenix, and laughing at two preteens who had matching T-shirts, one of them claiming Gandalf was greater than Dumbledore, the other claiming the opposite.
I remember reading Half-Blood Prince in one marathon sitting that started late at night and continued deep into the next day. And I remember the admiration I felt for the author at the end of Book 7. Writing one great novel is a major accomplishment. Writing seven of them, a new one coming out every year, in one continuous story that builds to a satisfying conclusion–to me, that was unprecedented.
In my post on Monday, I promised to tell you why a July 11 release date was significant to me. Harry Potter, and the memories of enjoying those novels in the heat of mid-summer, is the reason. I’m so stoked for you all to get Girls Wearing Black 3 in your hands. I wouldn’t dare say it will provide a comparable reading experience to what JK Rowling gave us, but I think it’s my best work to date, and I’m hopeful that it will provide fond summer memories to you, just as JK Rowling did for me.
I need to wrap up this post. Oddly enough, at this very moment I have two children begging me to read Harry Potter aloud to them before bedtime.
See you on Friday for the title and cover reveal for Girls Wearing Black 3.
