Happy Potter and the Order of OfficeMax
From the AP wire
J.K. Rowling, well into her seventh and final "Harry Potter" book, says the writing is going fine despite one annoying obstacle: the lack of paper.
"Why is it so difficult to buy paper in the middle of town?" the author, a resident of Edinburgh, Scotland, lamented in a diary entry posted Wednesday on her Web site, www.jkrowling.com.
"What is a writer who likes to write longhand supposed to do when she hits her stride and then realizes, to her horror, that she has covered every bit of blank paper in her bag? Forty-five minutes it took me, this morning, to find somewhere that would sell me some normal, lined paper. And there’s a university here! What do the students use? Don’t tell me laptops, it makes me feel like something out of the eighteenth century."
Three things immediately leap out to me
1) Just how damn big will this last Harry Potter book be if she's consuming college-lined pulp like an addict.*
2) You are J.K. Rowling, whose books have defoliated whole forests. There's something darkly humorous about a woman who has so many books in print can't find paper to jot a day's work on. Maybe use the rejection slips given to the tens of thousands of other authors.
3) Again, you are J.K. Rowling. Flash your Almighty J.K. Rowling Badge of Power +5, and tell some office supply store you are commandeering their stash for the greater economic good of publishing and children's fantasy. Failing that, I'm sure you could hold the publishing world hostage by saying, out loud in a public venue, that you can't write another word of the most anticipated novel in the history of the world until someone gets you a pad of paper, a few pens, maybe a cup of chai tea, and a comfy pillow. I'm sure you could eventually work up to getting your own airplane or small island if you held out long enough.
I hear that's how Dorothy Parker did it, until she went too far, climbed the Empire State Building, and got shot down by marauding biplanes. Sad, really. All for the want of a pack of cigarettes and the head of Ernest Hemingway.
I'm not sure about the biplanes, so don't quote me.
*I should talk. I have a virtual sea of notes, from legal pads to post-its, in and around my office. But I can quit any time. Honest!
