Harry Potter Day!

I got up early and wrote this morning, and it feels good. After not writing consistently every day this week, and really needing a few more hours sleep, it wasn’t as easy as it has been to jump write back into the story. But once I got going, the words flowed, and before I knew it, I had almost doubled my daily goal, which was good as it made up for not writing anything yesterday.

Current word count: 11,633

Words written today: 570

Words to goal: 28,367/ 350 words a day til the end of the September

Today we’re calling Harry Potter Day around my house. With the movie adaptation of the sixth book coming to theaters on Wednesday, my husband and I invited a bunch of friends over for a Harry Potter mega marathon. We’re starting this morning and will watch all five movies already out. Lunch and dinner are being taken from the Potter books, with sandwiches piled high with roast beef, cheeses, etc., for lunch, Cornish pasties for dinner and lots of sausage rolls, rock cakes, scones (the proper British kind — i.e. like American biscuits but smothered in jam instead of gravy) and jelly beans throughout the day. In fact, I was up late making the Cornish pasties last night, and for my first ones (even though I am British), I think they came out pretty well.

Corny? Of course. But it should be fun. I even joked that all the Americans should speak with British accents all day and say they have to go the “loo” every time they need the bathroom, but that might get to be a bit much after a while. 🙂

For me, although I’m really looking forward to the food (I haven’t had a good sausage roll in years), I think mostly it’s going to be a blast being at Hogwarts all day. I think J.K. Rowling did a fantastic job with these books, building characters that we can identify with and care about, a story that’s adventurous, and a world that’s just pure fun. I think that’s one of the reasons the books have been so successful: They don’t try to be anything too grand, just deliciously fun.

In my research for the food for our marathon party (yep, I researched it, I couldn’t remember everything that was in the books, and look at this amazing list of Harry Potter food), I found this online essay that, while maybe wasn’t trying to be critical, says that the food at Hogwarts isn’t healthy. Here’s a quote:

“No little amount of imagination is required to explain why there are so few obese wizards and how come that they are not suffering from constant lack of vitamins, various heart diseases, glycaemia, strokes and other dreaded consequences of unbalanced diets.”

But that’s exactly my point. In Hogwarts and the magical world, the characters, and us as readers, don’t have to worry about how many servings of vegetables we’ve had that day. It also serves as a comparison to Harry’s world in his muggle home. Hogwarts is filled with lots of goodies he will never get at the Dursleys. And that’s a difference J.K. Rowling was trying to make, I think, to demonstrate the two worlds of Harry Potter.

But for us readers, it’s the same. In our real world, we have to consider our caloric intake (maybe not the yound readers, but their parents are considering it for them). Inside the Harry Potter books, however, we can imagine eating goodies and doing magic and battling evil (and winning, of course). In short, we can have fun. To me, that’s what the books are all about.

And that’s what Harry Potter Day is all about too.

Are you looking forward to the new movie? Got any plans to celebrate?

Write On!