Rowling Runner up Time's Person of the Year

[Seafoam Understone]

When the last battle was over and the last secrets of the seven-book, 17-year journey were spilled, Jo Rowling did what grieving, grateful and emotionally exhausted people do: she ransacked the minibar.

She'd known from the start that Harry Potter would survive his ordeal; the question was how she would handle her own. This time a year ago, she was holed up on deadline in the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh to escape the bedlam at home, writing the climactic chapter in which her hero walks into the dark forest to give his life for those he loves. And while she knew that all would be well in the end, "I really was walking him to his death, because I was about to finish writing about him," she says. It's her favorite chapter in her favorite book — but when she finished, "I just burst into tears and couldn't stop crying. I opened up the minibar and drank down one of those pathetic little bottles of champagne."

Rowling calls her time with Harry "one of the longest relationships of my adult life," her rock through bereavement, a turbulent marriage and divorce, single motherhood, changes of country, fear of failure — and transcendent joy, on the day a wise man at Bloomsbury offered her $2,250 and agreed to print 1,000 books. When Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows went on sale last July, it sold 15 million copies worldwide in 24 hours, breaking the record that had been held by each of the previous three books. (To put that in perspective, 2005's Half-Blood Prince moved more copies on its first day than The Da Vinci Code did in an entire year.) Meanwhile, the movie version of Book 5 — Order of the Phoenix — made $645 million, and plans for an Orlando, Fla., theme park were unveiled. Forbes magazine put Rowling second only to Oprah as the richest woman in entertainment, ahead of Martha Stewart and Madonna — and as the first person to become a billionaire by writing books.

More: www.time.com/time/specials/2007/persono ... 36,00.html

Nice article to be read about one of our favorite lady authors.
Also a photo essay including a book burning of Potter books in Arizona (sad) www.time.com/time/photoessays/personoft ... 14,00.html

[Zahir]

Harry Potter is a boy who never lived. He was never really born, had no real parents and never really went to a totally fictional school where he learned lots of magic that doesn't really work. His best friends, Ron and Hermione, were no more real than he is--any more than are their teachers, like Professor Snape or Remus Lupin.

Yet they are real in the same way dreams and myths are real, in the sense they are TRUE without being even remotely FACTUAL. Rowling touched our hearts, fired our imaginations, made our blood boil and our eyes water. We number in the many millions. She has touched that many souls. All with the tale of a boy wizard who, although "The Boy Who Lived", is actually one never really born at all.

Save in our hearts.

That's what those photos made me think.

[Seafoam Understone]

That was simply... awesome Zahir.

Nicely put.