Lara Zielin

STATUS: Deathly Hallowed. I stayed up late last night reading the last Harry Potter and, I gotta say, I’m bummin for all sorts of reasons. One, because I stayed up late and that always makes me a little grumpypants. Two, because so many amazing people die, die, die, left and right, in the final installment of Mr. Potter’s adventures. And third, because the ending is so …well. I can’t say that. I don’t want to be a spoiler. New York Times I am not.

There is an interesting part in the book where Harry reads a tombstone and it says, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” This is from the Book of Matthew in the Bible, though J.K. never lets on that it’s scripture. Jesus does not seem to exist in the Harry Potter books though curiously they do say “Merry Christmas” to one another, and Draco at one point is home for “Easter holiday.” I’m not advocating that Jesus should exist in the books, btw. I’m just making a point.

Anyway, swell music, fade out, wipe tear.

Move on.

The paperwork is all signed on DONUT DAYS. And I got an email from Susanna saying that we’d be starting edits in September.

Yikes! I’m supposed to have all the edits done by October, according to the contract, which makes me a little stressy stressy, but hopefully the edits won’t be too extensive.

Also, I have my fingers secretly crossed that the book will come out in fall 2008 and not spring 2009. In the book world, they release the “heavy hitters” in the fall, just like they do the movies. The Oscar contenders, the Pulitzer books – everybody with heft comes out swinging in the fall. Putnam was thinking they’d hold off on releasing my book until the spring because then it wouldn’t get lost in the shuffle, thrown to the ground under the weight of massive sellers like THE HISTORIAN. But I also don’t want DD coming out as a “light spring read” and everyone assuming that just because it’s funny and quirky, that it doesn’t have something really important to say.

I guess in the end Putnam will decide all this for me, which is weird in and of itself. I learned with my last book that you lose control of a lot of things in this process. The good news is that this time around, I have the publishing world’s version of Ron and Hermione there to make sure I’m okay in the end.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 1:50 pm and is filed under editing, other writers, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.