Dark Lord's Birthday (was some questions

[Talisman]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, Kathy King <kking0731 at g...> 
wrote:
>Talisman terribly snipped:
>In the end, there is no way to determine the exact time these 
>details entered her plan, at least from extant books and interviews.

>Snow:
>In 1999 the plots were fully worked out. If you add the time she 
said it
>took; five years to finish, two years for COS and one year for POA. 
Walla
>you have the year her Mom passed away.

Talisman:
Well, I'm not sure about that math, but, at the risk of making you 
terribly snippy, I will point out that you should always be able to 
trace Rowling's HP work back to 1990, because that *is* the year she 
started writing the series.  

gBut in 1990, my then boyfriend and I decided to move up to 
Manchester together. It was after a weekend's flat-hunting, when I 
was traveling back to London on my own on a crowded train, that the 
idea for Harry Potter simply fell into my head. 

******                                                               
                
I began to write 'Philosopher's Stone' that very evening, although 
those first few pages bear no resemblance at all to anything in the 
finished book. I moved up to Manchester, taking the swelling 
manuscript with me, which was now growing in all sorts of strange 
directions, and including ideas for the rest of Harry's career at 
Hogwarts, not just his first year.h
J.K. Rowling Official Site, Biography 

Her mother died at the end of that year, after the project was 
underway.

You can certainly say she's done more HP writing since her mother's 
death than she did prior to it.  There is no doubt that all of the 
books have been (or will be) finalized and published post-death.

 But that's a different proposition entirely than identifying 
whether any given detail was scribbled on a notepad, or included in 
that swelling manuscript,  before December 30, 1990.  

That includes any idea to begin and end with a Janus motif--which--
once assigned to Voldemort, would indicate association with the 
change of year.

We actually do know that Rowlingfs motherfs death *had impact* on 
her writing. 

Again, from the JKR Site Biography:
Then, on December 30th 1990, something happened that changed both my 
world and Harry's forever: my mother died.

But even this does not mean that everything written after that time 
was written because of that event.  In particular it doesnft mean 
that she placed Voldemortfs birth on the cusp of the new year 
because that would be *almost* the same date as that of her mother's 
death.

Indeed, Rowling sees the impact of her mother's death as 
unintentional, and mostly to do with a better empathy for Harryfs 
own bereavement:

Amazon.co.uk: Are any of the stories based on your life, or on 
people you know? 

Rowling: I haven't consciously based anything in the Harry books on 
my life, but of course that doesn't mean your own feelings don't 
creep in. When I reread chapter 12 of the first book, "The Mirror of 
Erised," I saw that I had given Harry lots of my own feelings about 
my own mother's death, though I hadn't been aware of that as I had 
been writing. 
"Magic, Mystery, and Mayhem: An Interview with J.K. Rowling," 
Amazon.com, Early Spring 1999

Snow:
>I may be viewing this badly but I have always felt, through her 
interviews,
>that she is totally connected to the series i.e. Hermione was the 
younger
>version of herself, but she is like Harry, dementors being like 
depression,
>etc.

Talisman: There is no doubt that, like all authors, she draws on her 
life experiences.  She does a pretty good job of identifying *bits* 
that relate to her RW: e.g. her experience with *false memory,*  her 
sister's scarred forehead, her baby pictures (Dudley-esque beach 
balls), Sean's turquoise Anglia, etc.  Rowling has it thus:

 Of the many, many characters in your books, whose personality is 
most like yours?

There is a theory that every character is an extension of the 
authorfs character, which makes me one of the most disturbed 
people, I think. [Laughter]. 

I do not know how many characters Ifve got, but it is nudging up 
towards 200, so I am really in trouble. 

Hermione is a bit like me when I was younger. I did not set out to 
make Hermione like me but she is a bit like me. She is an 
exaggeration of how I was when I was younger. 

Harry is a bit like me. If you squeeze together Harry, Ron and 
Hermionec I find them quite easy to write, and I think that that is 
because they are a bit like different parts of my personality. 

When you get to someone like Dolores Umbridge, no way? I am 
absolutely not like her. She is a horrible woman.
J K Rowling at the Edinburgh Book Festival, Sunday, August 15, 2004.

And so, I return to where I began.

You prefer thin biography.  While acknowledging inclusion of life 
experience, I suggest there could be unrelated artistic 
motivations.  No amount of math or psychology will resolve the 
question, only JKR knows. 

In the end, itfs a tizzy in a teacup.  Ifm not sure that it takes 
us anywhere, and so, I will leave the field, with these parting 
thoughts:

The evening of July 31st is the commencement of the Feast of Lugh, a 
celtic hero associated with holly, whose mythology includes: a 
prophecy, an attempt to murder him while a babe, a hidden childhood, 
an upbringing by sorcerers, a character with an silver hand, killing 
the evil leader with a stone, and an eventual rise to heroic 
leadership. 

That was the substance of my very first HP post, years ago.

Cheers,

Talisman