Thoughts on Richard Brautigan

I've been reading Richard Brautigan on and off for about twenty years now.  I started with Trout Fishing In America.  It was amusing and strange, and full of strange turns of phrase, and comparisons that made sense but were also very strange.  One of my favorite quotes from TFIA is something along the lines of "The smell of sheep was loud, like a thunder clap in a cup of coffee."  That one has really stuck with me over the years.

Trout Fishing In American felt less like a novel, and more like a collection of prose poems or something like that. After that, I read Willard and His Bowling Trophies, which I also quite enjoyed.  Compared with Trout Fishing, it had a lot more coherent story lines worked through it, but there were still a lot of completely random thoughts and images inserted throughout the book.  

In Watermelon Sugar was somewhere in between those two - some through lines, but a lot of strange bits and pieces, too.  It's post-apocalyptic, sort of.  It wasn't my favorite.

Next, I read "The Hawkline Monster," which I quite enjoyed - maybe I just like novels that have a mostly discernable plot, around which all kinds of weirdness can be added.  I read each of his books because I was oddly fascinated by his writing, and his ability to create imagery using nonsensical comparisons.  The Hawkline Monster was the first of his books to inspire me as a writer.  After Hawkline, I started thinking about the every day absurdities that creep into a normal set of circumstances.  It can be a lot of fun to let oddball thoughts and alternate streams of conciousness creep into a story as it's being written.  

I picked up a copy of his poetry anthology "Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt," and enjoyed it, even though I generally don't read a lot of poetry.  If I wrote poetry, I think I would try to write like Brautigan.

Most recently, I've started reading Dreaming of Babylon, a 1940's private detective novel.  I'm about a third of the way through.  It's in the vein of Hawkline Monster, with what feels like a pretty steady through line.   

What I've learned by reading Brautigan:  It's okay to let your mind wander through a story.  Why tell a story the way people expect it to be told?  Your characters have minds that wander, your readers have minds that wander, why should my mind wander, too?  Maybe by the end of the story, my mind will have wandered someplace interesting and unexpected.  Maybe.

Olympics idea #2 - The Octahydron

This came out of a brainstorming session my wife and I had around the other 7 ways to improve the Olympics.

In Track and Field, there is the Decathalon and Heptathalon.  There's also the Triathalon, and in Winter, there is the Biathalon.

I love combinations of sports like this, which require more than one type of fitness to excel.  To be good at these types of sports, you have to have all-around fitness.

Thinking about having 4 different Olympics, one for each season, etc. led to the consideration of having other sport multiples that people could compete in to showcase total fitness in a given area.

The "Octahydron."  8 water-related sports:

1. Swimming:  50m Freestyle
2. Swimming:  400m Medley
3. Swimming:  1500m Freestyle
4. Diving:  10m platform - best 3 of 6 dives
5. Diving:  3m springboard - best 3 of 6 dives
6. Kayak:   200m sprint
7. Canoe:  1000m
8. Surfing - whatever rules get used in Tokyo 2020

I think this would be really interesting to watch, because right now, athletes that excel at any one of those sports tend to have a similar musculature and body type.  So what would an athlete look like if they did well at all those different sports?

Also, it's not so far-fetched to think of a person doing canoe, kayak, and surfing - sports that require the use of aparati, because in the other multi-sport groups, apparati are used as well.  Cross country skis and rifles, for example.

7 Ways To Improve The Olympics

I love the Olympics.  If I didn't love the Olympics, I wouldn't care enough to write this post about some ways things could be improved.  Here are 7 ideas I have for improving the Olympics, in two major categories - Big Picture Stuff, and Viewing Choices.

Big Picture stuff:

1.  Have an Olympics every year.  Right now, there's one every two years, and that's cool.  The winter sports get their own thing, and everything else is in the Summer.  The problem is that there are so many different events in the Summer Olympics.  In the Winter Olympics, at least there are some common threads that bring the events together, like needing ice or snow as part of the sport, right?  In the Summer, it's basically "Does it not require ice or snow?"  What if there were also a Spring and Fall Olympics?  It think it would be pretty easy to create a kind of "anchor" sport for each one.  Swimming, Track and Field, and Gymnastics seem like the Big 3, and might be good ones to coalesce things around.  Track and Field would be a great Spring sport - those athletes were really suffering and struggling in the heat there in Rio.  Swimming is perfect for Summer, because it's the Summer.  Water in general, right?  And gymnastics, along with many of the indoor competitions, is great for Fall.

This would make it a lot easier to do #2:

2.  Have more different sports.  Not necessarily a ton more, but more.  There are some great sports out there that people do, but there's just no room in the existing framework to add them.  Maybe I don't pay that much attention to handball or water polo, but I appreciate that they're happening.  I caught some women's rugby this time around and pretty much watched with my mouth hanging open the whole time - it's an amazing sport!  I want to see more diverse sports being competed.  I love variations on themes, too - You know how in swimming there are dozens of different events?  I want to see more events around archery or shooting, for example - I saw one each.  But if you can swim a 50m Freestyle, and be part of a medley, and do the 100m breaststroke, etc. and win 10 gold medals for being the best swimmer ever, I'd like to see an archer be able to show their skill in 5 or 6 events, if they qualify, and show how they're the best archer in the world at all kinds of archery, and not just the one event we get to see.

3.  Location, Location, Location - the world championships of all kinds of sports happen where there are existing venues.  I get that the Olympics are supposed to be this big economic boon to the countries and cities where they are held, but everything I've read about it shows that it actually destroys everything it touches.  The number of places where it's possible to host a Winter Olympics is dwindling.  Why not establish a rotation of around 10 or 12 locations worldwide where the Olympics will be held.  If new cities and countries want to host an Olympics, maybe they start out hosting world championships of particular sports, and go up from there.  I'm just tired of hearing about all the human rights violations, destruction of historic areas, and stuff like that to pave the way for an event that may cause more problems for the host country than they solve.

Viewing Choices:  This encompasses a lot, but in the age of the Internet, I feel like something better is possible than filling up my DVR with hours and hours of programming.  

4.  Stop showing me half of an event.  The commercial interruptions of "live" coverage seem a little absurd.  I'd rather have a 15 minute delay or something, and not miss the beginning or ending of an athlete's performance.  If any sponsors think I'm going to buy their product when it was their commercial that kept me from seeing the beginning of one of the ribbon dancer's rhythmic gymnastics final, they're insane.  Also, I DVR'd it, so I just fast forwarded through the commercials anyway.

5.  I like to see athletes from all over the world.  Maybe there are specific athletes from different countries, or whole countries whose athletes I'm interested in.  For the most part, the way Olympics coverage works now, unless something amazing or terrible happens, I'm only watching events that have Americans in them.  

6.  Make better use of the Internet - I know there were more Internet options this year, and there were On Demand options, but both were a little clunky to me.  I mean, you've got this portal where people can dig deep into something they're interested in, right?  So why is it that when I go to the Olympics coverage at NBC, and pick Archery, I get to watch one 2-minute clip?  This should be the way I get to watch 7 hours of Archery coverage.

7.  I want being an Olympics fan to be part of my daily life - Do I?  Sure I do.  Every 2 years, I get exciting about watching thousands of athletes compete in hundreds of sports, some of which I don't understand in the slightest.  Cable TV is the perfect place to have an Olympics channel.  Year-round Olympics.  Retrospectives, biographies, controversies.  In the months leading up to an Olympics, highlights and events showing how different athletes are progressing toward the games.  It was really fun this year watching the Olympic Trials in Track and Field this year - I was able to see a little more of the "Road to Rio" and be rooting for some specific athletes as they competed in their events.

Thoughts on Seveneves

This post contains spoilers of the book.

Sometimes I really enjoy a book overall, but never really think about it again when I'm done.  Does that make it a good book or a bad one?

On the other hand, sometimes I enjoy a book, and I keep thinking about it afterward, but what I think about isn't the content of the book - the story, characters, language, etc. but rather the odd choices made by the author.

I think if you are reading a book and you wonder why the author made a certain choice, that that's a problem.  Unless you're writing a book where the author is a character, then I feel pretty strongly that the author shouldn't be noticed while you're reading.  It's kind of like watching a movie and having a weird moment where you say "That was a really weird scene break," or, "Is that actor wearing a different shirt than they were five seconds ago?"

Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson, is a book that I enjoyed while reading, but when I think about it now, it's almost always about what I don't like about how it was put together.  Before I go any farther, I just want to say that the main audience for this blog post is myself - I'm not trying to get a secret message to NS or anything like that.  It helps me to write my thoughts down, and I like to write my critiques in a blog, and there you go.

Let's start with the title.  "Seveneves" is a palindrome, which is fun and cool.  It's also a key thing in the book that you don't get until way far into it.  "Seven Eves" could just as easily have been the title.  The problem I have with clever titles like this, where there's a palindrome and a hidden meaning, is that it suggests to me as a reader that the author may have thought of it first, and then beat everything about the story into some awkward shapes so that he could in fact have 'seven Eves' as part of the plot.   From the story itself, the number of Eves that help humanity bridge the gap between fleeing Earth and returning to Earth is mostly arbitrary.  It could have been five or nine or twenty, and it wouldn't have affected the structure of the novel, the way it's currently written.

Speaking of that, let's look at the whole structure of the story:  Part one is present day, and part two is 5,000 years in the future.  You can read that much on the back of the book.  After finishing the book, my thought was "is that it?"  It seems to end in an arbitrary place, like Neal was tired of writing it and his editor was asking him for pages and so he was just like 'Fine, here, this is a whole book,' and sent it off, and started writing something else.  Is it a book about humanity's fight to survive against certain extinction?  If so, then there are at least two other epics to track.  The fact that the vestiges of humanity that went into space survived for 5,000 years and flourished has a diminished meaning when you discover that humanity also survived underground and in the oceans.  But all we learn about those societies are some really unfulfilling narratives about some of the mechanics of living a long time in those places.  I think it's a bit silly to think that Dina survives the Epic as one of the Seven, and her family coincidentally survives to bring about the underground society.  Given the quantity of fiction about long-term survival after an apocalyptic event, I was wondering how many other businesses, societies, governments, etc. attempted the same thing.  I'm sure they did.  Why wouldn't they?  But there's no mention of any of them.  There are certainly larger cave and mine systems, with deep water access, where something could have been established.

The underwater group was interesting, too, but there was even less information about how their journey unfolded.  Very frustrating, and ultimately reducing the value of the effort of the space faring group.  If they hadn't survived, life would still have gone on on Earth.  Granted, the surface of the Earth only became habitable again after the spacers started re-terraforming it, so that's at least one key element of the story moving forward.

Forward?  Oh right, there isn't anything moving forward.  There's the story of the Seven, and then there's some fun exploration of how the technology of the Seven evolved over 5,000 years into fun and interesting chain-link and bolo technology, and there's some characters that look like they might be important, representing some underground society trying to bring about some unknown change, but then that guy gets killed, and I don't really care because I didn't really know him as a character.  And then one of the 'good' guys betrays the rest, but no one is surprised because, you know, racism.

So.

If I were writing something like this, what would I do?  I think I would have made it a series, first of all.  It really lends itself to long-form sequential storytelling.  It makes me think a little bit of Dune, in that, after the initial trilogy, each installment takes place at a vast separation of time from the previous installment.  Here we have the place where everyone is starting - Earth.  And we have doom coming.  We have a Big Plan to keep humanity alive, and even though everyone involved knows it's just theatre, they're going to try and do it anyway.  We've got Neal Degrasse Tyson reassuring the people of Earth that everything is going to be fine, while travelling up to the space station to help actually save humanity.   On the ground, we have a couple of brief stories, but mostly nothing.  At all.  About anything.  I think i would have changed that, and added narratives in which other characters on the ground are becoming invested and/or disillusioned in the space effort, and trying to put together their own plans for survival, either underground or underwater.  That would have created at least 3 parallel narratives, as groups of people start to coalesce around their survival ideas, and crazy stuff happens that could make one or more of them fail.  And someone who might be Hillary Clinton hijacks a rocket to go to the space station, but maybe she did that because the people on the Underground team manipulated her into thinking that would be her only real choice for survival.

Book One is at least a thousand pages long, and takes all three narratives up to the White Sky.  In fact, maybe that's what I would call book one, at least as a working title.  The White Sky.

In Book Two, I'd go all "Two Towers" meets "Foundation," on the readers, and focus my storytelling on one of the groups, and tell a series of short stories about how they get along over the next 5,000 years, with interesting and engaging characters telling a small story against a backdrop of an evolving society.  Book Two would be in three chunks, telling about 5,000 years of evolution for each of the three narratives from the previous books, up until the moment when the space people finally, really return to Earth - essentially about two-thirds of the way into Seveneves.  At that point, I'd have a rich and varied history for all of the players, and sympathies for a variety of perspectives.  I'd probably want the Dinans to succeed, but I'd understand why the underground people would be so skeptical and dismissive of the spacers (well, in my book I would.  In Seveneves it felt like that tension was manufactured out of nothing).

And then Book Three would involve the three groups nearly extincting each other again before they figure out a way to get along, in the face of the larger threat that comes along.  What's that larger threat?  Well, it could either be the force that blew up the moon in the first place, returned to harvest what it thinks will be a dead planet full of mineral resources, or it could be the Martians - the group that split away in the Epic to try and reach Mars and is never heard from again.  Well, they survived, and they have key information about the Thing that made the Event happen.  Or something like that.  Honestly, I don't care about the Martians, except that it would have been nice in Seveneves if someone at some point had gone through the trouble of tracking that cluster of ships down and seeing what happened to them, to add their story to the epic.

Or...

Maybe I would have started Seveneves at 5,000 years in the future, and told more of the Epic through flashbacks.  There are some really cool moments in the book where people are watching footage, quoting their favorite lines, stuff like that.  I think it could have been really cool to cut out about 80% of the first 600 pages, and just interspersed clips of things that were officially and unofficially recorded.

I think that about summarizes it.  Maybe next time I'll get annoyed with Reamde.

Joni Mitchell and ideas from a musical

First, I'm really enjoying this album - I picked it up at Value Village on vinyl for a dollar, and it's been great.  I particularly enjoy the version of Both Sides, Now - I was familiar with the version from the movie 'Love, Actually' but I hadn't heard this version from a younger Mitchell.  Take a listen:

Second, I watched a high school production of the musical Beauty and the Beast.  It's the musical version of the Disney cartoon.  As I was watching it, I got to thinking about the character of Gaston, and what an empty role it is.  I don't expect a lot from Disney in terms of multi-dimensional characters, in particular the villains.  Disney likes heroes with one or more dead parents, and villains with no depth, so it's easy to kill them at the end of the movie.  Gaston is this horrible man who wants to force Belle to marry him because she's the prettiest girl in town, and he's willing to do anything to make that happen.  But why?  What is Gaston's motivation in this?  Firstly, Belle is beautiful, sure, but she's also the village pariah, and everyone thinks she's weird.  Her dad is an inventor that everyone thinks is crazy.  She's not much of a catch, even if she is beautiful, from the perspective of any person of that time period.

And then there's this continuous need on the part of Gaston to have other people tell him how great he is.  Psychologically, that suggests something going on internally, a void that he's constantly seeking to be filled.  He's down when Belle rejects his proposal, and is only cheered up by the village idiot telling him over and over how great he is, and all the ways he's great.  What do other people get out of telling him he's great?

While I was watching the play, I thought about how interesting it would be as a director to instruct all the village characters to play their roles as if they really hate Gaston, but they're supporting him and reinforcing his self-image because they want something from him.

Anyway, I think it would make a more dynamic storyline if Belle was cut of a similar cloth to Gaston, if they were always considered meant for each other because they possess all the best characteristics of the village, they bring together two great families, blah blah blah, right?  And then Belle's father is a noble man who may have become a little eccentric in his later years, maybe he went a little nutty after his wife (who we never hear even one word about in the entire play) died.  Crazy Old Maurice goes on a journey, gets lost in the woods, and ends up a prisoner of the Beast.  Belle has evidence that he's lost in the woods, and goes after him.  Maybe Gaston goes with her and they get separated.  Belle decides to stay if Maurice can go, and Maurice makes it back to town, where Gaston is having a rough time of it since he couldn't find Maurice and lost Belle in the process.  Maurice telling him that Belle is in a magic castle with a big beast doesn't help his mood any and he tries to placate the old man with pandering, but has the boys escort him back home when he won't let it go.

Belle, meanwhile, succumbs to Stockholm Syndrome, and begins to develop feelings of sympathy for the Beast.  Over a period of several months - not like, 24 hours, which is the period of time the play seems to take place in. Belle is desperately homesick, but she also starts to see the there's more to the Beast than she thought, and that her and Gaston's life and worldview might be the more monstrous.

Maurice goes crazier every day, wandering in the woods searching for his daughter, until Gaston has him locked up for his own good, and he wastes away in an insane asylum.

Belle and the Beast get into an argument, and she runs away, and the Beast saves her from ravaging wolves, and she realizes he's actually a good person who has shut himself away from the world for so long he doesn't know how to relate to people.  Or whatever.  She falls for him, and he realizes he has to let her go, and he shows her her father wasting away in the asylum and she leaves the castle and goes to the asylum to get her father released.  Gaston hears about it second-hand, and it really angry that she returned but didn't even bother to tell him herself.  He finds out she's in love with someone else and is like, What?  That's what you've been up to these last few months?  And I've been here totally worried!  And she's like, Yeah.

And then she goes off to be with the Beast again, not realizing that Maurice is legit crazy now, and thinks she's under a spell and the Beast is going to eat her or something.  So Maurice gets Gaston and the village worked up, showing them the image of the Beast in the magic mirror and convincing them all to go save her in the woods.  And they go off and have a battle.

Meanwhile, Belle and the Beast kiss and break the enchantment, then discover the castle is under seige by the people of the village.  Or something.

List of plays to read

I write plays and novels, when I can.  I'm working on a play and a novel right now, and it's kind of annoying because I get caught up in one and the other kind of falls apart, and then I go back to the other and try to get some good energy going and the first one starts to flounder.  I need to focus on one until it's completed.

In the mean time, I need to read some more plays that involve science and science fiction themes.  I heard about this book called "Science On Stage; From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen," by Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, and found part of the annotated list of science plays in the appendix by doing a google books search.

Here's some intriguing ones:

R.U.R., by Karel Capek (1922) - Robots
To The Stars, by Andreyev Leonid (1907) - Astronomy
A Number, by Caryl Churchill (2002) - Cloning
Calabi Yau, by Susanna Speier (2002) - String theory

I just finished reading three plays that were science/science fiction oriented:

The Nether, by Jennifer Haley - This was a tough play.  Basically, it's set in The Nether, a fully immersive virtual world.  An investigator is trying to catch someone who has set up a virtual environment where people can act on their fantasies involving children.
Constellations, by Nick Payne - This play has been getting good reviews, but I was a little disappointed.  Payne uses repetition of scenes and dialogues with subtle differences in word choice and tone to suggest that there are multiple universes in which different choices lead to different results.  Centering the play around the variations of a relationship between a man and a woman felt like an easy choice - they get together, they are together, the break up, they see each other again and then?  The mechanics of the play reminded me of one of Davice Ives' short plays in All In The Timing, but I can't remember which one.
Twilight of the Golds, by Jonathan Tolins - This was another one where I was hoping for a little more science fiction.  It was still pretty interesting, if a little dated (1983, I think).  Basically, the husband works for a company that's studying human genetics.  They have a process where they can look at a the genetic code of a baby and predict all kinds of things about it.  The husband and wife decide to see what their unborn baby will be like and discover that the baby will be gay, like the wife's brother. They tell their parents and their brother, and then try to decide if they want to keep the baby or not.  Gripping emotional drama ensues.

I love science and science fiction on stage.  It's a great vehicle for asking interesting and tough philosophical questions.  I like the Nether and Twilight of the Golds more than Constellations because the science is part of the drama - it generates the crux around which the characters have to find their way.  Constellations feels more like a love story with an interesting framework.

Harry Potter and the Wait, Magic Kids Get Homeschooled?

I was completely distracted in a meeting the other day wondering where magic kids go to school before they go to Hogwarts.  A quick search on the internet revealed that JK Rowling thinks most kids who are from magical families are home-schooled prior to attending Hogwarts.

Okay, so what did we figure was the number of magic kids born every year in the Hogwarts service area?  About 40.  That means there are about 440 kids aged 0-10 who will eventually attend Hogwarts and be expected to perform at a minimum level.  It seems a little bizarre that a society with only 40 new members per year into a pool of about 3000 wouldn't take a little more care of its early learning responsibilities.

There are 4 basic types of 0-10 year old in the Hogwarts universe:

1. Born into a magic or half-magic family, home-schooled.
2. Born into a magic or half-magic family, Muggle schooled.
3. Born into a Muggle family, Muggle schooled.
4. Born into a Muggle family, home-schooled.

Let's break those down a little bit.

1. Born into a magic family, home-schooled.  Draco Malfoy and Ron Weasley are both in this camp, apparently.  In Ron's case, his family is poor and has few resources, relies on hand-me-down items, books, and clothing, and has to seriously budget for school related expenses.  In Draco's case, there's lots of old money, and Draco probably has some grim-faced tutor that teaches him stuff.  In either case, performing magic isn't allowed.  In Ron's case, even knowing how magic works isn't allowed, since he believes "Sunshine daisies, butter mellow, turn this stupid fat rat yellow" is a real spell.  Ron's dad works with Muggle artifacts, but is painfully ignorant of Muggle life, and one would expect his children to be slack-jawed at the sight of someone from the Muggle world.

2. Magic born, muggle schooled.  Who would do this to their kid?  "Hey Billy, I know you're only six years old and all, but if you say one word about magic to any of your classmates, people will show up from the Ministry and freaking erase their minds!  So don't make any friends, or even talk to people."  Maybe in the case of mixed parents, where one is Muggle and the other is Magic, and they're not sure if their kid will be magic or Squib, and they keep magic mostly hidden from their kids...

3. Muggle/Muggle - Harry Potter and Hermione Granger.  This is the general situation most kids reading Harry Potter are in.  Finally, they get to leave the horrible, boring world of school, where they have to learn about stupid stuff like science, literature, math, art, history, languages, and culture, and go to a school where they don't have to know anything about the 7 billion other people in the world they live in, and can just focus on learning about one small aspect of life on Earth with about 3,000 other people.  Sounds like a dream come true.

4. Muggle/Home-schooled - There are a lot of different reasons people home-school, ranging from extreme religious/political reasons to difficulties with the school system to disagreements with public school curriculum and more.  I can imagine for some parents, a kid displaying magical abilities would be considered possessed, and they would take what they consider appropriate action.  For other parents, I'm sure it would be just as 'exciting' as for public/private school parents, to learn that their child is eligible to go to a magical school they've never heard about and be taught by people who don't understand the first thing about their life or experiences as a Muggle.

With 40 new kids each year, let's make some assumptions based on what we know.  In Harry Potter's year, at least 3 kids were magic-born to magic families, and were probably home-schooled: Draco, Ron, and Neville.  At least 2 kids were raised by Muggles: Harry and Hermione.  Dean said his dad was a Muggle and his mom was a witch, so he might have had either experience.  There doesn't seem to be a lot of other examples of muggles and witches marrying, however, so I'm assuming that's an unusual circumstance.  Harry and Hermione went to muggle schools growing up (at least, I think Hermione did - there's no reason to think otherwise).  So, I'm going to assume that out of 40 kids, half are born into magic families and are home-schooled in some way.  Then there's probably about 19 kids who are born into Muggle families and go to regular schools.  And there's 1 each year who has some less common situation.

Rowling's answer to the question about schooling, that most magic born kids are home-schooled or go to regular Muggle school, reveals that she didn't give this part of magic kid's lives much thought.

Given a Ministry that is incredibly invasive into magic-user's lives already, I find it hard to believe there isn't some type of early learning initiative in place, either approved home courses or testing or monitoring to ensure that kids preparing to go to Hogwarts are going to be prepared for the level of academic rigor they have to display upon entry.  And yet there are kids from Muggle families that would know absolutely nothing, NOTHING, about magic and all it's intricacies, sitting in classes with kids who have been surrounded by magic all their lives, and expected to learn and progress at the same rate.

It would be like the situation we have in the regular world with technology - kids who grow up in homes with ubiquitous computer technology - smart phones, tablets, computers, video games, etc. will have a much easier time adopting the increasingly common practice of using computers to do and turn in school work than students who grew up without that access, either because of economic or philosophical reasons.  That creates an advantage gap that is harder and harder to bridge as kids get older.

For the wizarding world to actually expect to produce wizards at their best level, there should be more resources in place to get young children from non-magic families familiar with their abilities and the world those abilities open to them.

Harry Potter is not a very interesting person

I've been thinking about this, and maybe I mentioned some of this in an earlier post, but HP isn't a very interesting person, considering who and what he is, and what he's been through.  Consider:  Here is a boy who was traumatized as a baby and left on his relatives doorstep.  At some point not long after that he was given a bedroom in a closet, and treated like garbage by his caregivers.  The only other child in his life, his cousin, is spoiled rotten and given every advantage, and not punished for bullying and/or demoralizing Harry.  Meanwhile, weird stuff happens to Harry that no one can explain.  His hair won't stay cut.  What's up with that and why is that magic?  Magic people don't get to get haircuts?  Seems odd.  He's never gotten any mail.  He doesn't have any friends at school.  The only other adult in his life is a creepy lady who shows him pictures of cakes or whatever.  Never mind that it turns out she's a spy for Dumbledore, in the first book she's a throwaway character that Rowling never planned to use again, until she started working on Book 5.

So Harry should be straight-up scarred for life.  If he were like most kids who go through similar experiences, he would have some serious trouble relating to others, trusting anyone, or making friends.  He'd have a difficult journey just to start feeling like he's a normal kid.  Being part of a secret society where everyone has super powers would make some parts of that journey more difficult.  On the one hand, he'd have a group of peers with which he shares a similarity - that would be good.  On the other hand, that similarity is a thing that alienates them from all but a few thousand people.  On earth.

If I were exploring a character like this, I might read up on some psychology studies about kids who have lived through childhood experiences like Harry's.

Next, and this has nothing to do with his crappy childhood (How is it better than just growing up around magical people?  They could have sent him to live with the Weasleys, fellow members of the Order of the Phoenix, right?  Or to some childless magical couple that have been yearning for a child of their own but haven't been able to have one.  Oh right.  The only thing Harry gets to have in his life is utter isolation from anyone who might care about him.  That's healthy.)  Harry should have some quirks.  Why?  Because everyone has quirks.  No one goes through their day as a blank slate, waiting to be filled up by other people's personal expectations.  Harry is an empty shell that we pour ourselves into as readers, so we can live through his experiences and be amazing.  He's a video game avatar in the world's longest first person cut-scene.

He collects things that no one else thinks are particularly interesting, maybe.  We learn that quirk about Ron in the first five seconds after meeting him - he collects those wizard trading cards.  Of course, Harry would not have been able to collect anything too normal, in his life under the stairs, but it's possible he could have developed an attachment to some thing in the real world that connects him to his childhood, or to the world of magic, in a way that he doesn't realize until later.  I was thinking he could collect playing cards, then secretly practice card tricks in his cupboard, knowing that his aunt and uncle hate magic of any kind.  Maybe he saw a magician on the television when he was a kid, and was amazed by the tricks until the channel was changed.  Later he sneaks a deck into his cupboard and practices different card tricks.  Later, he could impress his magic friends with sleight-of-hand tricks - that reminds me a little of Willow, actually.

He could draw.  Maybe he's a really good artist, and he draws very detailed pictures of mystical animals and magical looking places.

He could really love hats.  That doesn't have anything to do with his magical background, but so what?  He freaking loves hats and has a collection of forty or so that he takes everywhere and wears for different occasions.

He could be a neat-freak.  Loves to sweep, especially.  Has actually made his own brooms.

Quirks help give a character a personality, and add a dimension to their experiences.  A character with some quirks will say and do things in various situations that express those quirks.

Harry Potter and the world of magic only gets one sport

Quidditch.

Where do I start?  On a first read-through of the description of Quidditch, my assumption would be that Rowling is one of those people who doesn't really like sports that much, and finds all the rules and regulations and traditions to be incomprehensible to right-thinking people.  Therefore, she decided to make up a sport that is actually incomprehensible, and claim that the participants actually enjoy both playing and watching it.  After reading the books several times, my assumption has not changed.

Only one thing matters in Quidditch, in 90% of the games played, and that is catching the Golden Snitch.  All the other stuff, tossing the balls through the rings, avoiding the bludgers, etc. is just a meaningless distraction.  The other members of the team have almost no reason to be there.  And yet somehow the sport has been enjoyed throughout the ages, without making the kind of changes that all sports undergo over time to either make it more interesting or make it safer for participants, or both.

Also, just one sport?  Even a small town high school has five or six sports that kids engage in.  Wouldn't some wizard version of "track and field and sky" be something worth looking into?  Something endurance related?

No.  A small percentage of students get to play the one sport the school has to offer, and everyone else is just out of luck.

Like the Tri-Wizard Tournament, Quidditch seems needlessly thrown away in the writing.  You can make it both silly and interesting and actually potentially fun to play and watch if magic were real and people could ride on brooms.

Why is there a golden snitch at all?  Without it, the game is structured a lot like soccer or water polo or any of a dozen other team sports that involve trying to get a ball past another team, past a goal keeper, into a goal.  The addition of bludgers makes for a fun twist on that theme, and makes for great comedy.  Then there's this golden snitch that invalidates everything.

You get a ball through a hoop, and that's ten points.  Why ten?  The basic unit of point for any sport, ever, in the history of all sports, with the possible exception of tennis, is 1.  Even in games where you can have different scores for different things, there is still a way of acquiring a single point.  In basketball, baskets are 2 or 3 points, except the free throw, which is one.  In American football, most scores are 3 or 6 points, but after a touchdown you get to kick for an extra point.  In Quidditch, a score is worth 10 points.  It could just as easily be 1 point, there's no lower score possible than 10.  Catching the golden snitch is 150 points.  It could just as easily be 15.  It's the same spread relative to the 1.  For a team to win without the Golden Snitch, they would need to score 15 unanswered goals against the other team.  In most sports between teams of similar levels, that kind of spread doesn't happen very often.  Maybe in basketball, but can you imagine a soccer match with a score of 20 - 5?

If I were developing a team, I would be tempted to try a couple different things.  One would be to focus on offence for the rings, and defense for the snitch - in other words, put a lot of power into making those goals, and tell the seeker to just keep the other seeker from getting anything done.  The other strategy would be to reduce my energy in the regular game by taking one of the beaters and having them fly with the seeker, to maximize the ability to see the snitch, and fend off the other seeker.

If I were coming up with a wizard-centric school sport, as a writer, I'd want to create something with some familiar elements, add some silly and/or fun elements that can only be done with magic, and think about how it would be fun and exciting for both participants and fans.  In other words, I'd keep all the elements of Quidditch except the Golden Snitch/Seeker piece, and I'd probably add a time limit.  If I wanted to do something bizarre with the time limit to make it possible for the game to go on and on, I'd do something like "the game is 60 minutes long, but every score adds 5 minutes to the clock."

Also, and this is something I find a little bizarre also, each school team only plays 3 games in an entire year.  With four teams, each playing 3 matches, that's 6 games in about 9 months, or about a game every 6 weeks for spectators, and one game every three months for participants.  On top of that, unless a team wins all three matches, there's a high liklihood of a tie record between two teams.  Say, for example, that Gryffindor beats Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff, but loses to Slytherin.  On other other hand Ravenclaw loses to Gryffindor, but beats Hufflepuff and Slytherin.  Then Slytherin loses to Ravenclaw, but beats Gryffindor and Hufflepuff.  Hufflepuff has a losing season, and the other three houses tie with 2 wins each.

So lame.

How about every team plays every other team 3 times.  That's 9 matches for each team, which comes out to 18 total matches for the year.  At the end, the two teams with the best records play each other for the title.

Expanding out into the rest of Britain and Ireland, apparently there are 13 teams.  At 7 people per team, that's 91 players at a given time.  It's been established that there are about 3,000 wizards living in Britain, of all ages, about 40 new ones being born each year.  I am assuming, based on some observation in the movies, that most pro-quidditch players are probably in the 18 - 30 year-old age range.  I could be wrong, but it does seem like a sport that favors youth, speed, and strength.  So that means there's a pool of about 500 wizards who could be on these teams.  I'm guessing that any pro team would have at least a couple of people ready to play if one of their team becomes incapacitated. So lets say 10 players per team, for 13 teams means 130 people out of a pool of about 500.  Then you have your fans, right?  Fans for 13 teams?  Let's say they have roughly equal fan-bases. That leaves about 220 fans for each team, of all ages.  And that's only if every wizard of every age is a fan of quidditch, which we know isn't true.  The math just doesn't work out very well for me, in terms of creating a believable scenario for a professional sport.  On the other hand, maybe most Quidditch players have day-jobs, like the Olympic-level curling teams we cheer on every four years in the Winter Olympics.

Harry Potter and the vague system of magic

Magic in fantasy is like physics in science fiction.  There are rules, and then you set about cleverly breaking or bending them, without destroying the whole system.  In science fiction, this is usually done by describing some method by which faster than light space travel is possible.  Any space-faring version of humanity either needs to figure out how to travel faster than light, or needs to have a method of space travel that accounts for the vast amount of time it would take to travel to even our closest neighbors in the cosmos.

In worlds of fantasy, there is often a system of magic, and within this system there are certain rules about how magic works.  Unlike physics, which has rules that are agreed upon in the real world, magic has rules that are determined by the author of the story.  Authors have the choice to either be very vague about how it all works, or very specific.  However, it's important for the integrity of the story that the system function according to whatever conventions the author sets forth, and if those conventions are broken, it's purposeful and not accidental.

Let's take something like the Dragonlance Chronicles.  Not the best written series by any means, but fun, high fantasy adventure.  Reading them is like reading the description of a Dungeons and Dragons session.  The rules about magic in Dragonlance are simple, but powerful.  Basically, magic is hard to hold in your mind.  So, magicians spend part of each day memorizing the spells in their spellbooks.  This is exhausting.  Once they've used a spell, it's gone from their mind and they have to spend time memorizing it again.  This sets up various possibilities for tension in the story:  What happens when a wizard has said all their spells?  Where can a wizard learn new spells?  Is there ever a time when a wizard remembers a spell without having to memorize it again?

Another interesting system of magic is from The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud.  In that series, 'magic' has nothing to do with spells, or inherent power or anything like that.  Magicians learn to summon spirits and geni of different levels of power.  If they do it correctly, the spirit must do their bidding.  Magicians can see these spirits, or at least, they can see some of them, while ordinary people can't.  So, when a magician puts a spirit to work, ordinary people see the outcome as magic.  If the magician does not say every word precisely right, or make every drawing just so, demons can escape from the confines of the summoning, and kill or enslave the summoner.  This creates some great tension for the story, and plenty of options for interesting storytelling.  Every summons is a risk, and everything said by a summoned demon is questionable, because they're always trying to trick their summoner into making a mistake.

In Harry Potter, there is magic.  That is evident from the get-go.  How magic works is not entirely clear.  All the things that belong in the magical world have been separated from all the things that don't belong in the magical world.  Who decided what was magical and what wasn't is not entirely clear.  Wizards and witches can use magic.  Magic is something you are born with.  Growing up, weird stuff will happen around you.  If you're in a muggle household, this weird stuff might make you or the people around you think you're going crazy, but no one from the magical world is going to tell you anything until you turn 11 and get invited to go to magic school.  On the other hand, if you grow up in a magical family, then you know all this from the start.  That kind of sets up an unfair advantage at school for those born in a magical family.  This dichotomy is never really explored in the books, except through some of the statements by Draco and friends about purebloods being better than mudbloods.  And, if you're magic and you have magic and your magic could destroy stuff on accident, and if magic happens in the muggle world then you get in trouble and people's memories need to be wiped, then it would make a lot more sense if magic users were identified when they are very young, and the kids and their families are brought along in some way so that when a child accidentally blows up their aunt, or their hair won't stay cut, the parents/caregivers won't start trying to get an exorcism or put the kid in an asylum.  Which is what would happen in this world, at least some of the time.  Other parents would try to keep it hidden, or make their children feel ashamed of it, or, conversely, would seek to capitalize on it, taking their kid on the road and making a side-show of their abilities.  But that doesn't happen for some reason in Harry Potter.

If you're going to do magic on purpose instead of by accident, you need a wand.  Wands are all unique-ish, and 'choose the wizard.'  This suggests that every wand in a wandmakers store has an eventual wizard partner.  With only 40 new wizards per year, and about 3,000 wizards in all of England and Wales, it seems like it would be hard to make a living as a wand-shop owner.  You've spent all your capital on a massive quantity of stock, but you only have customers about one week out of the year: when 11-year-olds are buying their first wand.  The rest of the year, you might have a handful of customers - wizards who have lost or broken their wand, and need an new one to choose them.  It seems like, from a business perspective, a wand-shop would need to have other goods or services to carry through the rest of the year.  In addition, Hagrid suggests through his recommendation of Olivanders for wands that there may be other wand sellers someplace.  If that's the case, then the right wand for the wizard could be at a different shop.  What if the right wand for you is at the shop in Edinburgh?  Or Paris?  Alright then, I guess, like love, there could be an array of wands that are a good fit, and some might end up being really good fits while others are marginal.  In the case of Ron Weasley, just use a hand-me-down wand.  How the hell does that work?  The wand was originally owned by his older brother Charlie.  Does that mean that it chose Charlie, but only for a while, and now the romance is gone?  Or did Charlie ditch it when it got old, and decided to get something newer and nicer.  Do cheap wands pick poor wizards?  Then there's the super wand that we learn about in the later books, that makes you invincible if you're its owner.  And then there's the whole complicated logical acrobatic argument that Rowling takes us through to prove who owns the wand, based on new rules she thought of as she went along that sort of work with the assertions she made in the first book.

In addition to the wand, you need to learn spells.  You learn the spells, but that's not enough.  You also have to really mean it when you say a spell.  That's fine.  Once you've learned a spell, though, you've got it and you can use it whenever.  There doesn't appear to be a personal cost in energy or sanity or anything to use a spell, once you've learned it.  This suggests that magic has an infinite source, or at least, there is more magic than wizards could ever use in their lifetime.

Wizard + wand + spell = magic happens.  However, this isn't always true.  Without the wand, you can still do magic, it's just not very focused.  You can put the broken pieces of a wand in an umbrella and secretly do magic, even if you're not supposed to.  You can use enchanted objects, like brooms, without using your wand. You can interact with magical beings without your wand.  You can do potions without any silly waving of wands, except when you have to wave your wand to finish the potion.  You can do magic with mathematics.  We call it calculus.  You can do magic without a wand by seeing the future.  A wand seems more like a jedi lightsaber.  The preferred tool for the job, but not the only one.

If I had to guess, I would say that Rowling didn't want there to be any limits on what magic could do, so she tossed every kind of magic she'd ever heard of into the pot, and called it Hogwarts.  This is still fine - I like that it's all possible.  However, it also means that anything you didn't set up as 'normal' magic in the first book needs to be justified in later books to prove that it's normal, too.  Some people don't have to speak the spell out loud to magic the magic work?  Oh, well that's something you learn to do when you're older.  Also, things that appear in the books that are actually extraordinary, but get presented as normal at first, need some kind of justification later.  The invisibility cloak is actually a unique item.  Ron says "they're really rare," when in actuality there's only one, and Harry has it.  If they weren't really rare, then that would mean other people could have them and use them, and chaos, man!  Chaos!  So let's back off on the availability of invisibility cloaks.  Why is a spell to breathe under water so hard to come by, while other, less useful spells are really easy?  Look, mom, I learned to summon a large snake!  Lovely.

It would be really easy to set forward a basic system of magic, with simple to understand but powerful rules, right off the bat, by having Harry learn about them in his first class.  It would then be fun to find the ways to bend or break the rules - the Weasley twins would dedicate their lives to hacking magic, I'm sure.  The Slytherins would have a high interest in sneaky ways to use magic to get what they want without actually breaking any laws or rules.  A system of magic gives characters something to act within or against.  If it's thoughtful, it can carry a whole series of books without limiting the storyline, and instead of being a clunky system with junk added to it every book so that fun stuff can happen, it can be a device that helps drive the plot and create great tensions.

Harry Potter and how is this all secret from the Muggles?

One of the key elements of the Harry Potter universe is that the magic stuff is kept separate and secret from the normal world where the Muggles live.  This is all very fun, and it's very appealing to children to think that magic could be lurking around any corner if they were only able to see it.  It's probably appealing to adults too.  But, as Hagrid asserts at some point, most witches and wizards have Muggle relatives.  Harry Potter lives with three muggles, Hermione's parents are muggles, one of the other kids has one parent that's a muggle and the other that's a witch.

Also, the Prime Minister of England knows about the wizard world, and by extension, probably some other key figures in government.

According to various places online, there's about 40 new kids at Hogwarts every year, resulting in about 280 students overall, with about 10 new kids in each house, each year, split roughly half and half between boys and girls.  It's great that magic obeys these rules, because it would be really inconvenient if there were 15 new kids one year, and only one of them was a boy, for example. Would he have to stay in a room by himself?  Would all 14 new girls stay in the same big room or would they split into two or three smaller rooms?  Whatever.  I thought maybe there might be other schools in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, though less prestigious, but according to Rowling, there are about 3,000 wizards in England, which works our mathematically pretty well with the '40 new wizard births per year' estimate.

So there's 3,000 wizards, and lets just estimate maybe 7,000 other people who are close enough relatives to a wizard that they know that wizards exist.  10,000 human beings in a population of 50,000,000.  That's .02%, which may seem like a very small amount.  But keeping secrets is tough.  If you're .02% of 5,000 then it's a bit easier to keep a secret, because you're the only one who knows it.  I think there's some saying about how a secret isn't secret if you tell someone.  Anyway...

Keeping a secret is tough.  Especially if it's a really cool secret, like "magic is real."  10,000 people would have a hard time keeping a collective secret, especially when they have no real knowledge of each other, no collective understanding or mission or goal.  Most of the wizards don't seem to know why they need to keep things secret from the muggles, they just do because otherwise they'll get punished by the bizarre, threatening dictators who run the Ministry and do mind wipes on anyone who learns something they shouldn't.  And why wouldn't people talk to each other about it?  I mean, not everyone is like Harry's aunt and uncle - in this world, the world that Harry Potter's world is supposed to be secret from, there are millions of people who would be very excited to know that magic is real.  Instead, all the non-magic adults in the Harry Potter books are either quietly excited for their children but happy to go back to their really boring jobs where there isn't any magic (sorry, no.  If my kid was going off to Hogwarts, I'd like like: "I want to live in Hogsmeade.  There's plenty of work that I could do there that doesn't require magic."  I'd be like 'Bicycle Repair Man' in the old Monty Python sketch.)

When children of muggles get their Hogwarts letter, it's not like the rest of their family get a different letter that says "If you share this with anyone your mind will be erased.  I mean it, Muggle.  Just trust us though, your kid is going to love it here, and you're going to enjoy having a wizard kid.  Unless your kid is one of the 25% of students who go to Slytherin, in which case, you've just stepped onto the set for the next Omen movie, prepare to die.  Even though we know for a fact that this house is essentially a training ground for evil, bullying, small-minded tyrants, we just keep sailing along because you know, kids gotta follow their hearts and stuff."

Whoa.  Tangent there.

Where am I going with this?  Oh right.  Knowledge of magic.  As is implied in the books themselves, muggles don't see anything that they don't want to see.  In general, the farther a person is from something extraordinary, the less likely they are to believe it's real, or think about it too hard.  There are many other examples of books where magic is real, no one tries to hide it from non-magic people, and because there's so few real magic users, most people just go about their lives and are kind of surprised when they see real magic.  But it doesn't change their own life in any significant way, so they set it on the shelf of their mind and worry about the things that matter to them.  Kiki's Delivery Service is a great example of that - Kiki goes to the big, modern city, and she's the only witch in the place.  People know that witches are real, but it's been so long since they've seen one in person that it's like they're a myth.  Kiki finds her place among them, with some people being very friendly and happy to have a witch as a friend, and others preferring to ignore her.  The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud is another example where magic and non-magic co-exist in the world.  In that series, magic users are also the power elite of the world, and there's a distinct class separation between magic and non-magic folks.  The magic-users become politicians and leaders, and everyone else is a peasant.  Not exactly fun-loving and 'magical' in the Disney sense, but a scenario that is easy to accept, if you accept that a small number of people can do magic.  In the books of Diana Wynne Jones, particularly the Chrestomanci series, and the Howl's Moving Castle series, magic users live amongst non-magic users, but occupy the fringes of society, or are just outside of normal people's understanding.  So there are ways to do it that make it easier, as a reader, to invest in the whole world.

Why is this important?  I mean, why not have it exactly as Rowling imagines it?  Well, as a grown up person who lives in the Muggle world, I'm being lumped in with a bunch of ignorant, blind, jerks who would respond to the existence of magic with hatred and violence.  And that's not true.  It also basically tells every kid in the world reading those books that by the time they've reached adulthood, they will be dead inside and incapable of believing in magic.  Now get back to work at the factory.  Or the office.  Or wherever it is you go to live out your non-magical life.

One of the draws of Harry Potter is that he's a 'normal' kid that gets caught up in the world of wizardry and gets to take part in it and have adventures.  However, in the Harry Potter world, the possibility of an actual normal kid being able to have those adventures is pretty much zero.  And if you do, you'll have your mind wiped because you can't be trusted.

I think it would be completely feasible to have non-magic people be marginally aware of but generally dismissive of the world of magic.  I think there would be a natural, non-forced separation between the two worlds.  I think there would be plenty of magic users who would caution their wizard friends to keep a low profile, because some muggles can get freaked out and violent when confronted with things they don't understand, while others can become obsessed fans.  Those are more realistic reasons to keep a low profile.  The flying car, seen by everyone in Book 2?  Still bad.  Still enough to make many wizards upset.  But on the muggle side, most of the people seeing that in the paper would think it's a hoax, a few would be angry about magic users, and a few would be excited.  Those would be fun elements to add into the story.  Voldemort, like other authoritarian style political figures, could easily twist the haters to his whimsy, using them as a blunt instrument against magic users who oppose him.  Some non-magic kid could go from obsessed fan to accidental hero and get pulled into the story for a time.

Harry Potter and the conveniently timed school year

One of the things I struggle with in the HP books is something I struggle with in any book that has a somewhat arbitrary goal of showcasing the whole year of a person's life, while at the same time revealing a sinister plot that must be foiled at all costs and at the earliest opportunity.

In the Philosopher's Stone (yes, I prefer the original British title) HP and company get introduced to Hogwarts and have all manner of little adventures, all the while discovering that something is happening in the background.  The villain makes several attempts over the course of the school year to get what they want, but somehow can't figure it all out until the very end of the school year.

In addition, the Mirror of Erised is not at the end of the path of puzzles at the start of the school year - so either the Stone is just sitting on a little plate waiting for whoever solves the puzzles to get to it, or it's already in the mirror, in what I assume is the Room of Requirement.  

But there's really no reason why it would take the villain 9 months to penetrate the depths of Hogwarts, considering that three first-year students figured it out in about twenty minutes.  Granted, there was Fluffy, the three headed dog, and the villain needed to figure out how to get past it. But this is Voldemort we're talking about, so why wouldn't he just kill it?  That's what I would do if I were an evil sorcerer trying to get to the Stone at any cost.  But he does get the word out of Hagrid mid-year by trading him a dragon egg.  Okay, so what's stopping him then?  Snape's watching?  All the time?  I have an idea.  Wait until Snape is teaching a class, and then walk over to the restricted wing of Hogwarts, put the dog to sleep, use bright light on Devil's Snare, play some chess, catch a key, drink a potion, and take the stone.  Or take the mirror, and flee to another location to figure out how to get it out of the mirror.

Why did it take exactly the same amount of time as the school year?  Well, because it's an obvious device by the author to also showcase a whole year in the life of the main character.  In general, this works okay for one book, but it gets really old and tired after four or five books.  The Tri-Wizard tournament is another example of what feels like very arbitrary timing for the evil plot to come to fruition.  The Chamber of Secrets does a little better with the device, in that the villain is sucking the life out of someone as quickly as possible, but it still takes a long time to get strong enough. However, it's awfully convenient to the book that it takes the villain about 9 months to get strong enough to make his move.

So, how would I approach this differently without destroying the overall plot of the books?  Well, I think as an author you have to decide which 'plot' has priority.  Either you're telling the story of a year, with many little pieces and parts, where the fruition at the end of the book is more in line with 'coming of age' or some success tied to way the year works.  These tend to be "small" books, with little victories, personal victories, life lessons, etc.  So boring.  But a choice that some authors make.  In books like this, the stakes are generally not super high, and generally don't reach outside the direct environment of the story.  If HP were written along these lines, Voldemort wouldn't be part of the series, basically.  Instead, it would focus on Harry's relationships, classes, successes and failures within the context of the school.  On the other hand, if the the story you're telling is one where an outside force is trying to do something, and Harry Potter finds himself in the position as the only person who can stop it, then just toss the school schedule out the window.  Who cares?  Maybe he gets to school in September, discovers the plot by October, and foils the bad guy by Halloween night.  Why not?  Well, because it's fun to read all the other stuff about Harry's school year.  Okay, so maybe there's five different attempts throughout the year.  Why not?  Maybe the book for "Year 2" starts in October and ends in November, because that's when the crazy stuff happened.

All I'm saying is that forcing your villain to obey the year-long schedule that your hero lives in makes for some clunky plotting.  I think the first time Rowling gets away from it is in book 7, when HP and friends basically don't go to school, and set off to do more important stuff.

Harry Potter and the really poorly conceived sports tournament

What exactly is a tournament, anyway?  The most basic definition calls it a series of games between teams or individuals to determine an overall winner.  Technically, the Tri-Wizard Tournament does that, but as a "Tournament" it's not very well conceived, and is almost completely pointless.

Let's look at most tournaments that people are familiar with.  Whether it's a chess, football, basketball, or poker, tournaments generally follow a basic principle, which is to start with a bunch of players, and narrow it down to one winner who is deemed the best of the initial group.  In general, players or teams are eliminated over the course of the tournament, either dropping out when they can no longer proceed, or losing a contest or match and being eliminated.

Let's take "March Madness" as a great example - 64 teams (or 68 depending on where you start in the process) play in a single elimination tournament.  The teams are paired up, and the winner proceeds while the loser is out.  Repeat with 32, 16, 8, 4, and 2 teams.  Super easy.

In other tournaments, contestants accrue points as they proceed through a series of different contests, and no one is 'eliminated' per se, they just become incapable of winning as the series continues.  You see this with diving tournaments, as an example.  But even these tournaments start with a lot of people or groups, and the field of likely winners is narrowed with each dive. Often, there are levels that divers progress through - so after five or six dives, the top ten divers move on, for example.

The Tri-Wizard Tournament is more like the 'point accrual' tournament than the 'bracket' tournament, but is less interesting that either.  Imagine if you were excited to dig in to March Madness, and instead of getting to watch 64 teams narrow down to one, you skipped all the earlier games and upsets as some all powerful cup belched out the "final four" teams before any games were played, based on it's own internal algorithms.  Lame.  Or if hundreds of divers were ready for a competition, and the four who actually got to dive were chosen by a process that is completely secret to everyone, but which everyone just needs to trust as fair.  Also lame.

In the Tri-Wizard Tournament, 3 (or 4) wizards compete, but not against each other.  They compete with a course.  They get points depending on how well they do, or how much they are Harry Potter. They steal an egg from a dragon, and get points for how fast they did it.  All of them manage to steal their eggs, but I'm guessing that even if they didn't steal the egg they'd still proceed.  Next, they get a clue from the egg about the next contest, which involves swimming underwater.  They show up and have an hour to find something under the lake.  One person drops out, one person wins the contest, one gets second, and one gets more points by being Harry Potter.

Whew!  Now they all have points.  The girl is in last place.  They all get to enter the maze that constantly shifts and moves and drives people crazy.  Having lots of points lets you enter early, having less points means you have to wait.

Okay, but the maze shifts around, so having a time advantage isn't necessarily going to help.  Having a shifting maze means you have to also get lucky.  The girl drops out, again.  I wonder if Rowling just doesn't think girls can kick ass.  One boy goes crazy.  The other two, from Hogwarts, win together.  If not for the whole Voldemort ending, if I were a member of the other schools, I'd be pretty concerned that the host school got two students instead of one, and those students won the tournament together.  

Now, forget for a moment that the other plot of HP4 is that Voldemort needs to get Harry away from Hogwarts so he can become human again, and once his servant is installed at Hogwarts that could pretty much happen at any point at all, so there's no need for this big production of getting Harry into the tournament and helping him win it...  Forget all that.  Let's just assume that having a tournament is a major and necessary plot point.

Here's how I would approach the Tri-Wizard Tournament, if I were a writer who wanted to make that part of my book interesting.

Start with a high number of contestants.  Everyone is eligible unless they fail certain pre-requisites, like they're in detention or something like that.  Potentially, that's hundreds of students.  Great!  Now you start to narrow the field through a wizarding decathalon of sorts.  Ten or twelve tasks that everyone is ranked and scored on.  At the end of the decathalon you have the top wizards and witches move on.  Let's say you are able to narrow the field to 32 students, with the top 8 from each school and 8 wildcards from the remaining top scorers.  

Now for wizard dueling.  Every wizard duels four or five other wizards, and is scored like in a karate or judo tournament - not just on ultimate victory, but on execution of spells, creativity, finesse, etc.  Some contests wouldn't result in a win by "KO" but would still have a win by decision.

This narrows the field down to the top 4 students from each school, plus 4 wildcards.  Now the contests get tough and deadly.  Now they have to steal from dragons, fight trolls, breathe underwater, and get creative in their problem solving.  Each contest has half the kids moving on, and it gets harder and harder as it goes on, until it's down to the top witch or wizard from each school, and the wildcard, the otherwise top score from the remaining students.  

Now lets back up to the 'story' of this tournament.  Yes, it's called Harry Potter and the Flaming Dr. Pepper, so we know he'll be in the tournament and working his way up the ranks.  But I think all the usual suspects should be involved as well.  I'd love to see some of the older Weasleys make a deep run, for example.  If this is my version of the world, then we'd already have at least one person from each of the four houses, with Harry in Slytherin, Ron in Gryffindor, Hermione in Ravenclaw, and Neville in Hufflepuff, but even in the normal HP universe, having kids from every house competing and winning and proving themselves in a different context would be a great opportunity to introduce some interesting people and also help build new relationships as competitors come to grudgingly respect each other, etc.  On top of that, you've got two other schools, one apparently all dudes, and the other all ladies.  What's up with that?  Are there no guy wizards in France?  Are there no lady witches in Bulgaria or wherever Durmstrang is?  Anyway, it would be nice if both the schools had more than just one or two characters that got to participate in the story and the tournament.  

For some reason, Harry needs to win some ultimately meaningless contest in order for Voldemort to feel like it's time to destroy him.  I'd toss that out, and have Harry get spirited away during the final 8 contest.  The Final Four continue with a desperate search happening behind the scenes, Cedric, also eliminated, follows Harry's footsteps and finds himself in the midst of Voldemort's party, and gets murdered.  Harry makes it back in time to ruin the final victory celebration, dropping into the middle of it all with Cedric's body and the story of Voldemort's return.

Overall, the big "Plot" of book four stays the same with this new treatment, but a better tournament structure creates dozens of opportunities for interesting storytelling that fleshes out the characters through their interactions with new people, both in friendships and in competition.

Harry Potter and the only important house at Hogwarts

The problem with good, fun book series is that they are full of problems.  Especially long book series that don't appear to have been thought out all the way through before the first book was published.  Harry Potter is a good example.  I have heard from several very indignant fans that Rowling had the whole series plotted out in her head before she wrote the first book, and that may be true.  But there's more to writing a book or series than getting the plot put down.

In Harry Potter, there's a system of magic.  There is a social structure, and a relationship between the magic world and the muggle world.  There are schools, and magical towns and villages and hidden places in major cities, and a magical railroad.  There are schools in other countries.  There are sports, and newspapers, and competitions, and politics.  I'm less certain that Rowling thought all these through prior to writing the first book, because she spends a lot of time in later books trying to prove that it all makes sense.

I really enjoyed reading these books, and I liked some of the movies a lot as well. But here are some things that I think would have made the series more interesting and nuanced without losing the key elements of the plot.

Hogwarts has four houses.  Each house is full of students that exemplify certain characteristics, in the spirit of that house's founder.  Gryffindor - brave and bold. Ravenclaw - Clever and curious. Hufflepuff - Kind and caring.  Slytherin - Cunning and proud.  And lots of other traits, I'm sure.

Between Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Neville, you have four friends who could exemplify the best qualities of all four houses.  What a rich source of material to mine for incidents and events over the course of 7 books!  First of all, certainly friendship between the houses seems frowned upon - you want to fit in with your house and do things that wins that house points.  So having four friends, one from each house, would create automatic tension for each person, as they deal with the conflict of fitting in with their house and maintaining friendships with the people they are drawn to.

By putting all four of these characters in the same house, it made it really easy to always want Gryffindor to win at everything.  On top of that, in the first book Gryffindor does win at everything, after all the last minute points are awarded.  Wow.  Lame.  As if winning the house cup means anything at all to the friends after defeating an incarnation of evil in the basement of the school.  Oh, thanks Dumbledor, now members of all three houses can hate us.

Harry is worried at the start of the series that he will get put into Slytherin.  He's worried because he doesn't like the kids he met who will probably be in Slytherin.  Rowling has a series bias against Slytherin as a house, making it pretty much a training ground for evil wizards.  They're all thugs, jerks, and sociopaths.  What a great idea to put them all together in the same place.  Implying, too, that people who are cunning or proud or interested in power are inherently evil and should be mistrusted and feared.  All Slytherins are one-dimensional cariciatures, at least until the sixth book when Draco Malfoy starts to feel conflicted.

Dumbledor drops Harry off as a baby to be raised by his aunt and uncle, because having him grow up around other wizards would surely turn him into a pompous ass or something.  But his aunt and uncle treat him like garbage and make him live under the stairs.  I would think that most kids, living in that environment, would begin to develop some deep psychological pain, and anger toward those who they perceive as having power over them.  He does lash out at times, and jokes about using his magic on his relatives if they give him grief.  But he grew up living in a closet.  That's like "A Child Called It" or something.

So I could easily see Harry being drawn to power initially.  I could see him trying to be friends with Malfoy, a kid who has all the things Harry doesn't.  I could see him looking down initially on kids who don't want the same things he wants.  But then I could see Harry learning to appreciate these different kids and also losing his interest in Draco and other Slytherins as friends.

Ron is a Gryffindor - brave...ish.  Not too bright.  In Harry's shadow all the time, and in the shadow of his older brothers, it takes him a long time to find his feet.  In Gryffindor, but without Harry there, he would be more likely, I think, to try the be like each of his older brothers at times.  So, sometimes he'd rush in ready for anything, like his brother Charlie that works with dragons, but other times he'd try and play pranks like the twins, or get up on his high horse like Percy.  In the end he'd just be himself - ready to do what's right, even if he isn't excited about how much it could hurt.

Hermione is a Ravenclaw, of course, the "cleverest witch or wizard of her age," and always interested in learning more.  She prefers to use cleverness to solve problems, rather than confronting them head on, at least until the third book when she punches Malfoy.  She wouldn't have to change anything to be a great Ravenclaw, and wrestle with feeling smarter than her pals all the time, as she struggles to set herself apart scholastically from other Ravenclaws, all of which would be smart, clever, and curious about everything.

Neville doesn't get much play in the early books, except as a comic relief type character.  Later he is key in defeating the dark lord.  He's a ringer for a Hufflepuff, as we can see in book four with his intense interest in Herbology.  He struggles to stand up to his friends in book one, earning ten whole points for the house.  His kindness and caring for others would be a great early way to help Harry temper his desire for power, choosing perhaps to be kind to Neville in return rather than cruel or uncaring.  For example, when Malfoy steals Neville's Remembrall (sp?) and tosses it, after Neville breaks his arm.

Making this one change would be major, and would completely alter many aspects of the books.  But I don't think it would affect the overall plot.  In fact I think it would enhance it.  Harry always struggles with the dark side - this would make that struggle more intense.  It would also make it hard to vilify one house entirely, or praise another house entirely.  Each house would have it's good and bad elements.  Gryffindors rush to adventure, but they get other people hurt.  Ravenclaws let their curiousity trump empathy, preferring to watch something happen rather than intervene.  Hufflepuffs avoid conflict altogether and shut themselves away from the world.  Slytherins can be bullies, but they can also be leaders.

Watch out, or she'll chew you up

I have had Maneater running through my head for days.  Days.  All in all, not as bad as some ear worms I've had, but it wouldn't matter if it was the best song ever, having it in my head over and over for days and days would make me hate it.

Now you can "enjoy" it too!

In other news, I've discovered the short stories and poetry of Clark Ashton Smith.  Check out his Ode to the Abyss.  Totally awesome.  A contemporary of H.P. Lovecraft, and I think, just as weird.

"The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" was my first introduction to him, and it starts like this:

"I, Satampra Zeiros of Uzuldaroum, shall write with my left hand, since I have no longer any other, the tale of everything that befell Tirouv Ompallios and myself in the shrine of the god Tsathoggua, which lies neglected by the worship of man in the jungle-taken suburbs of Commoriom, that long-deserted capital of the Hyperborean rulers. I shall write it with the violet juice of the suvana-palm, which turns to a blood-red rubric with the passage of years, on a strong vellum that is made from the skin of the mastodon, as a warning to all good thieves and adventurers who may hear some lying legend of the lost treasures of Commoriom and be tempted thereby."

Which immediately reminds me of many a good Lovecraft intro, in which the reluctant author is either mad, dying, or frightened for his life, yet compelled to tell his tale, lest others share the same fate or worse.

My next experience with Smith was his poem, "Ode to the Abyss."  Normally, I don't read a lot of poetry, but this one was pretty good.  Lots of potential band and song names in that poem.

In an effort to get something different running through my head, I'm listening to Nujabes "Modal Soul," an album by the Japanese hip hop artist responsible for the music on the anime Samurai Champloo.

The whole album is solid, but my favorite tracks are the first one, "Feather" and the ninth, "World's End Rhapsody," at around 34:50.