Is That Your Nimbus 2000....

...or are you just happy to see me? Hello Hermoine!!! It's love-o-my-life J.K. Rowlings birthday this weekend, and although she's already comfortably married, I still harbor fantasies of marriage with Miss Rawlings and all the magic a Hogwarts Honeymoon would entail.

"Quiddith, anyone?"

When I read Order of the Phoneix last summer I just cried. I know what's it's like to be a younger writer who's piss poor and who writes and dreams and witnesses their vision blossom into fruition. Miss Rawlings constructs paragraphs of such sublime linearity that they could easily serve as a butress for Gothic Cathedrals. Attagirl J.K. !!!

Here's what the Writer's Almanac says this week about Miss Rawlings:

"As a child, Rowling was short and stocky and wore very thick glasses, just like Harry Potter. She says she was very bossy, very bookish and terrible at school. When Rowling started writing Harry Potter, she was unemployed and divorced and living on public assistance in a tiny Edinburgh apartment with her infant daughter. She wrote during her daughter's naps, at a table in a café. She couldn't afford even a used typewriter. Then the Scottish Arts Council gave her a grant to finish the book. She did, and in the U.S. it was called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1998). It was a dramatic overnight success. She was instantly famous and Harry Potter became a household name. She experienced a level of fame usually reserved for politicians and rock stars. On book tours, she spoke at big sporting venues, with images of her face projected on big screens behind her. At age thirty-five she was the highest-earning woman in Britain, netting more than thirty million dollars in 2000. Rowling has had the plots mapped out for a series of seven Harry Potter books since 1995. There's a book for each year that Harry spends at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. She said, "I want to finish these seven books and look back and think that whatever happened—however much this hurricane whirled around me—I stayed true to what I wanted to write. This is my Holy Grail: that when I finish writing book seven, I can say—hand on heart—I didn't change a thing. I wrote the story I meant to write."

Rowling released Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on June 21 last year. Within an hour, Barnes and Noble, the largest bookseller in the country, had sold 286,000 copies. That's eighty books per second. By the end of the day the book had sold five million copies total."