Will there be an announcement for Book 5 before 2003?

[theo_kestrel <theo_kestrel@yahoo.com>]

I know everyone's on pins and needles waiting for news on OotP, and
must be sick of everyone asking when it's going to be out, so let me
take a slighly different tack.

Back around the time when the CoS movie was premiering, I recall
reading a short interview with JKR on BBC Newsround, in which she
revealed that there would be 38 chapters, and she needed time for
tweaking the book-essentially stating that she's done but wanted to
fine-tune it.  I think I even remember something about it taking some
weeks to do so.  Now, the tweaking part I wasn't too excited about-I
vaguely recall similar comments around the August-September timeframe,
so to me it sounded like more of the same.  But the revelation of the
number of chapters and the "weeks" portion (if I'm not totally
dreaming up this whole thing) made me think that we might get an
announcement that she's handed in her manuscript before the end of the
year.  Does anyone have any thoughts on the likelihood of such an
announcement?  Even if she did turn in the manuscript to the publisher
for editing and whatnot, would they even publicly release that
information?

I'm just curious, since I'm also eagerly awaiting the next book in
George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series, and he's been
pretty accessible to fans about the whole thing, giving glimpses into
the process and even giving some insights on his struggles to finish
the book(he has a website he updates every couple weeks or so).  He's
also read select chapters (not finalized of course) from "A Feast for
Crows" (his next book) at various Cons.  It's interesting to see the
contrast between two very different authors writing two very, very
different stories.  I realize that Harry Potter has a much larger
following than ASOIAF could ever achieve, and thus JKR is under a much
bigger microscope than Martin, but at times it seems that JKR is
almost too tight-lipped about the whole process.  In the time since
GoF was released, I wouldn't have minded if she just came out and said
"Hey!  OotP isn't going to be out for a long, long, time, so please
stop badgering me about it."  But instead, we have numerous "release
dates" given out by Amazon and other various booksellers, which were
never publicly refuted to be wrong until it became obvious that it
just wasn't possible-contrasting that to GRRM, who states quite
clearly on his site that he has no idea where Amazon got the publish
date and page count, since he's not done and hasn't handed anything in
to his publisher yet-and he's also quite candid about missing target
dates.

This isn't intended to be a flame for JKR-I love her stories, and
greatly admire her persistence in getting her stories written and
published.  It's just that I wish she had handled the "between time" a
little differently, so that the wait wouldn't have been as painful.

theo_kestrel

First Post-hope I don't get too much flack for it.

Winter is Coming-House Stark