Thursday, January 21, 2016

What Keeps You Motivated While Writing A Novel?

The Snowflake Method? Bourbon? Classical music? TELL US YOUR SECRETS!

Congratulations! You've decided to write a novel!

Congratulations! You've decided to write a novel!

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You're convinced your idea is pretty genius, you have parts of the plot figured out and now all you have to do is write the thing!

You're convinced your idea is pretty genius, you have parts of the plot figured out and now all you have to do is write the thing!

NBC

So now what? How do people discipline themselves to write every single day?

So now what? How do people discipline themselves to write every single day?

HBO

How do you combat the fear that your writing might just be a pile of shit?

How do you combat the fear that your writing might just be a pile of shit?

Warner Bros. / Via hellyeahhorrormovies.tumblr.com


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The Making Of "The Magicians"

Syfy

Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy — about a group of young people with magical abilities — has climbed a difficult path to get to viewers. So Sera Gamble and John McNamara, who are bringing the books to Syfy, have been scrupulous in their vision, and a tour of the Vancouver sets reveals their thoughtful precision.

The settings created for Brakebills University, the magical graduate school in upstate New York to which Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph) finds himself mysteriously summoned, are cozy. The dorm rooms, the magical lab, and the student café are all laden with dark wood: the aesthetics of a university library you'd never want to leave. The cottage where Quentin's clique — the Physical Kids, who do Physical magic, the rarest discipline — spend their time is laid out like an actual, spacious house, with glasses and dishes stuck to the ceiling as remnants of past, drunken spell-casting; liquor bottles and cocktail glasses everywhere; and genuinely comfortable chairs and couches on which to sprawl out. On this unseasonably warm fall night, there was even a smell of incense.

"I almost cried when I saw the Physical Kids' cottage for the first time," Gamble said as she gave a tour of what Rachel O’Toole, the show's production designer, and Kendelle Elliott, its art director, had created.

The set for Julia's Brooklyn apartment was another matter. Julia (played by Stella Maeve of Chicago P.D.) will be a main character in The Magicians' first season despite her ancillary importance in Grossman's first novel. She doesn't get in to Brakebills — and she literally can't forget it; her socially agile perfectionism, which had set her up for a nice life, all goes to hell after her rejection. And forging her own dangerous path to teach herself magic will lead Julia into some dark shit that Quentin, her bygone best friend, will never see at his fancy magic school. So by the middle of filming Season 1, her apartment looks like a small, possibly insane tornado destroyed it. "She's going through things," Gamble said, as she gestured at the mess. "So she has bras on the floor."

As for the sets for Fillory, the magical otherworld that Quentin always thought was fictional (because he had read about it only in novels — and yearned for it), to describe them would spoil the story. But they do exist, and will begin to be revealed on The Magicians as early as its first episode.

Syfy

After The Magicians was released in August 2009, the New York Times review of it said, "Grossman has written what could crudely be labeled a Harry Potter for adults." But the comparison was not crude at all — Grossman's ode to other fantasy novels such as J.K. Rowling's beloved series and C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia was explicit and deliberate. For smart young adults, ones like Quentin (and Grossman in his own twenties), who grow up devouring fiction about magic — so much so that they would prefer to live in those stories than in their own world — an inability to move forward is real.

"They're about being launched out in the world with all kinds of hopes and an expensive education and all the goodwill in the world — and a whole lot of wrong ideas about how the world works," Grossman said in November over coffee in Los Angeles. "And then having to find your place in the world that is much darker and more confusing and chaotic than anything that you've been led to believe."

In other words, yes, The Magicians "is Harry Potter's missing twenties," Grossman said.

The trilogy — completed by The Magician King (2011) and The Magician's Land (2014) — works on two levels: as fantasy novels, and as meta-texts about fantasy. When you combine those things, the novels enact depression, boredom, parental neglect, the difficulties of growing up, and the lasting psychological damage of violence.

Syfy

Perhaps as a result of their complexity, there wasn't much interest in adapting the books, despite all of them being New York Times best-sellers. According to Grossman, there were no takers from the movie side of the entertainment business. Then Fox bought the rights to the books in 2011, but the project died without even producing a filmed pilot. It seemed like The Magicians would never live onscreen. "I was super bummed," Grossman said.

But then Michael London, a producer who had been involved in the Fox pilot, had a meeting with Gamble and McNamara in 2013 and mentioned that The Magicians was again available. "And I jumped out of my chair, because I am obsessed with those books," Gamble said.

McNamara has been a writer and executive producer on a number of inventive and — as he would be the first to say— short-lived TV shows: the sinister, ahead-of-its-time Profit in 1996; Fastlane, the stylish crime drama in 2002–3; and the underrated 2011 adaptation of Prime Suspect, to name a few. "Someone once described when looking at my IMDb page as, 'It looks like the names of made-up TV shows on a Seinfeld episode,'" McNamara said recently during an interview at the Langham Hotel in Pasadena, California, characterizing what he called his "stellar commercial career." (He also wrote the screenplay for Trumbo, for which he has been nominated for a Writers Guild of America award.)

Sera Gamble, left, and Raelle Tucker on Project Greenlight in 2003.

HBO

One of those cut-short, yet interesting shows was ABC’s 2005 series Eyes, on which McNamara was Gamble's first boss. She and her then-partner Raelle Tucker had been screenwriting finalists on the second season of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon's Project Greenlight in 2003, having written a script called Cheeks that was inspired by their past experiences as strippers. They did not win, but Project Greenlight executive producer Chris Moore was one of the people who called McNamara to urge him to hire Gamble and Tucker for Eyes.

When the show was canceled after only five episodes had aired, Gamble sought advice from McNamara for her next job amid several offers. "He said, 'Which one do you have ideas for? Which one do you like the best when you watch it?' These are basic questions, and I was such a green writer I didn't even know to ask them."

Heeding McNamara's advice, Gamble picked Supernatural, where she ascended from story editor to its showrunner over her seven seasons on the show, which is still thriving on The CW. The two of them remained friends, and occasionally, Gamble said, "We would end up hanging out and having a cocktail and saying, 'What show should we do?'"

In spring 2012, Gamble left Supernatural, and then immediately did a pilot. After that, she was "burnt out." McNamara also did not have a job at the time. "Egregiously," he said, making Gamble laugh. "Not just unemployed, but borderline unemployable."

When Gamble was halfway through reading The Magicians shortly after its release, she asked her agent about its availability, only to find out that it had been optioned by Fox at the time. Now — Michael London was telling her — she had her chance with the series. McNamara, however, not only hadn't read them, but doesn't particularly like fantasy. Taking in London and Gamble's excitement, McNamara set about reading them: reluctantly.

John McNamara and Gamble at New York Comic Con in October.

Syfy

"I was, like, I feel like I know what's going to happen from page one," he said, "And boy, did I not. Boy did I not expect the depth, and the challenges to one's own precepts about heroism, cowardice, destiny — everything." They optioned the books, and Gamble and McNamara wrote the pilot script to sell through London's Groundswell Productions.

They shopped around the finished script, and while "there was no HBO offer," McNamara said, "there were interesting streaming, digital, or BBC-ish kind of offers." Plus, Syfy was trying to find its footing after several years of creative and ratings doldrums, and wanted to meet with them. McNamara, a friend of the channel's then newly installed executive vice president of original content, Bill McGoldrick, told him, "I don't know if this is really right for you — it's not really science fiction."

Nevertheless, London, Gamble, and McNamara decided to talk with Syfy. One executive at the meeting told them that the channel was determined to set history right, and get to where Syfy should have gone after its Battlestar Galactica run from 2004 to 2009, when the critically adored, geek-worshiped drama had brought the channel both respect and business success. "We should have done The Walking Dead; we should have done Game of Thrones," McNamara recalled the executive saying. "We were the leader in genre. We won the Peabody Award for a cable science fiction show. We turned that opportunity into dreck. He said to us directly, 'We took what was filling the halls at Comic-Con and turned them into empty rooms.'"

Gamble hadn't even noticed Syfy's faded place until that meeting. "But then I realized I was a huge genre fan and wasn't really watching much of their stuff," she said.

"We just left the room saying, ‘At least we know one thing: We're going to work people who are self-aware and honest,’" McNamara said. "’Are we going to get the biggest budget? No. Are we necessarily going to fit their corporate identity? I don't know.’" But the idea of being an important part a rebuilding brand had its appeal: They sold The Magicians to Syfy, which made the pilot in December 2014, and then ordered it to series in May of last year.

Syfy

Grossman is a consultant on The Magicians. With the Fox version of the show, he'd had almost no involvement, but when Gamble and McNamara began working on the project, "There was much more information flowing back and forth, which was nice," he said. He hadn't thought he would want to be involved at all. "I just thought, Off you go, god be with you — this is TV, and I'm in the books world," said Grossman, who is not only a novelist, but remains Time's full-time book critic. And yet, "I couldn't help but be interested when I started seeing the scripts coming back."

Some of Grossman's thoughts were about what he, a fantasy expert, thought The Magicians could give to the genre's fans that they had never seen before. Which started with the portrayal of magic itself. "I've never seen people do the arcane hand motions and have these wonderful orbs and lines of force develop around them in a way that I always pictured it, which exists in a lot of fantasy novels,” Grossman said. “I've just never seen anybody do it onscreen properly."

"I would be at 10,000 feet saying, ‘Here's my childhood dream of what I've wanted to see onscreen,’" he added.

Grossman's wish has come true — the spell-casting in The Magicians is unlike anything we've seen before — thanks to Paul Becker and Kevin Li, whom Gamble hired to choreograph each spell: They specialize in finger tutting, a precise, geometric, yet flowing offshoot of the interpretive hip-hop dance tutting, but done only with one's arms, hands, and fingers. "We now have the basic vocabulary of the kind of movement of hands and fingers that would make something catch fire or blow wind," Gamble said.

It looks dramatic and weighty, which is what altering the physical properties of the universe should look like. It's also clearly readable as a language, one that the characters are learning and getting better at.

Learning that magic is real is presented as a revelation for the characters in The Magicians. But once they are living as magicians, they're still the same people, with the same problems that have always tormented them. "I think it's a really fun thought exercise that Lev started with: What happens if you find out about that stuff, but you're of age?" Gamble said. "And you're drinking and you're fucking. What does magic do for you then?"

It was Syfy's suggestion to make the characters older than they were in Grossman’s novels, which begin with Quentin and Julia as high school seniors. If the show runs its full course through to the end of the books, the characters will end up on the other side of 35, and McGoldrick thought it would be easier to find actors who could look 22 and age appropriately than actors who look 17 now and could age into their thirties. The producers were worried about Grossman's reaction to this change, but, he said, "I didn't care at all." They also worried he wouldn't want them to change the name of Janet, another main character, to Margo (because "Janet" and "Julia" might confuse viewers). "I didn't mind," Grossman said. "I like the name Margo!"

"What mattered to me is that the core of the characters stay the same," Grossman said. "And they really have to a remarkable extent."

Syfy

Translating those cores into television, though, has meant a few instances of laying bare some of Grossman's subtexts — Quentin's depression, for example. In the novel The Magicians, it might take awhile for a reader to realize Quentin's sorrow isn't only circumstantial. On the show, when viewers first meet him, he has checked himself into a mental hospital because, as his psychiatrist repeats back to him: "The feeling of not belonging anywhere was overwhelming. And that you were the most useless person who ever lived." Gamble said, "It's clear when you read the books that he's pretty depressed, and we wanted to make that real: We wanted to put him in a mental hospital."

For Gamble and McNamara, they feel loyal to the spirit of Grossman's work, but the novels aren't their bible. "There's been a time or two when I've sat in a movie and felt how hamstrung a screenwriter was, because they had to hit every single beat that is beloved in a book," Gamble said. "It was clear to us from the beginning that the TV show couldn't function that way. The scope has to be different for us to produce it effectively."

For The Magicians readers who turn into viewers, that will mean finding out more about Eliot (Hale Appleman), Margo (Summer Bishil), Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley), and a very different sort of Penny (Arjun Gupta) — less of an annoying gnat, more of a carnal provocateur. At first, Grossman thought about the changes to Penny, "What are you doing? I don't get it.” But as soon as he saw the pilot, “it was great. He's a great counterweight to Quentin, he gives Quentin shit when Quentin deserves to be given shit."

And Quentin and Julia — the two poles of magical privilege — will remain central. Quentin was Grossman’s fictional stand-in from the beginning, and he is pleased with Jason Ralph's portrayal. "He has to project a lot of intelligence; he has to project a lot of sadness," Grossman said. "He has to be a little bit maddening, because he is much smarter intellectually than he is emotionally. He has to be both disillusioned and deeply idealistic. And he has to go from being kind of a depressed shoegazer to being a hero."

As for Julia, she is Grossman too — even though he originally intended for her to be only in the first scene of the first book, never to be seen again. "But for some reason, she kept coming back," he said. Julia became a main character in the second novel, because, he said, "Once I started writing in her voice, her character just exploded. She was so angry, and so insistent that the story was about her and not about Quentin. I couldn't stop telling that story."

In this world, the consequences of magic can sometimes lead to sad, if not ruinous, turns. Syfy's McGoldrick, echoing a theme of Grossman's, said in a recent interview, "These kids that are in these big fantasy things, if they saw and witnessed the things they do, the death and destruction, it would damage them. They wouldn't come out the other side all pristine and happy — it would really, really affect them."

It’s clear The Magicians books — and now the television show — are very much for adults. There is sex and violence and swearing and scares and some sexual violence. According to McNamara and Gamble, Syfy, an ad-supported network, has not been afraid of those things. After they began writing, they got their first notes back from the Standards and Practices department. "I was ready to either just ignore them or have a big fight or whatever," McNamara said. Before he could decide which, they heard from the Syfy executives: "We've told Standards and Practices they can't give you notes," read the email.

"There's a word we have to dip sound — the word 'fuck.' It means either the 'f' has to go or the 'k.' We basically have to follow the same rules Mr. Robot has to follow," Gamble said, referencing the Golden Globe–winning drama on USA, Syfy's NBCUniversal corporate sibling. "We should send them a fruit basket."

In the era of peak TV, with more than 400 scripted shows on television, it would simply be stupid to water down The Magicians, a series with a vigilant, skeptical fanbase. "It can't be neither here nor there," McGoldrick said. "We can't soften it. That's the whole point, that's why you like the books — that's why it's different from just, Oh, they're doing a fantasy show. We have told them: ‘Just go for it.’"

With its narrative digressions and thematic seriousness, The Magicians promises a lot. And the suffusion of television right now means there is actually less pressure to be an immediate, or even a linear, hit. So maybe the show will get time to dive into all the ideas it wants to.

"I felt connected to the emotional stories that Lev was telling that go beyond romance, drama, comedy, to human experience," McNamara said. "So at certain junctures, when maybe someone — one of our overlords, in a very nice way, because they're very nice people — would say, 'But shouldn't Quentin be more heroic here?' We were, like, 'No!' In fact, we think we've actually made him too heroic — and we're going to go back and make him even less heroic!"

In the same vein, they want to undermine conventions of fantasy and genre that frame everything from Harry Potter to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "We wanted to have a pointed, onscreen way of talking about this very interesting theme that runs through Lev's books, which is that destiny is bullshit — nobody is special," Gamble said. "Everyone wants to be the Chosen One. There is no Chosen One! In our case, we have a character look at Quentin and say, 'You have a destiny.'

"But very quickly," Gamble continued, "someone says, 'Oh, did someone tell you you have a destiny? That's bullshit!"

It's as if Harry Potter never had Voldemort to fight, or Dumbledore to teach him — Quentin, Julia, and their friends have to find their own way. Or, as Grossman put it plainly: "I'm a big Harry Potter fan. But there's a certain point in your life — when you're, like, a middle-aged American — that you have to come to terms with the fact that you're not an English schoolboy. Even though it really feels like you are. You're not!"

The Magicians airs Mondays at 9 p.m. ET/8 p.m. CT on Syfy.


I Built A Goddamn Bookshelf With My Bare Hands And You Can Too

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

Books are ace. Just like reading on a Kindle, but with a souvenir at the end! The trouble with books is that they multiply. Before you know it, you're an octogenarian hoarder squeezing through tunnels of books and collecting jars of your own piss.

This, storage fans, is where shelves come in. By far the easiest and cheapest way to get shelves is to wait for a relative to die and steal theirs. Or you can go to Ikea. Not me. I decided to build something I saw on Etsy, because it would look better on Instagram.

As we discovered when I built my desk, and again when I made my blanket fort, I live for the sweet, sweet validation of social media approval. Here's how I built my shelves:

1. Source materials

1. Source materials

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

In order to build a bookshelf from scaffolding, you need some scaffolding. I got mine from the internet. The design called for six 2.4-metre wooden boards, 12 metres of 33.7mm steel tube, and 88 cast steel fixings. Not a cheap way to make shelves, granted. But you save a lot of money when you're aggressively single.

The place I ordered from will cut the tube for you, which is definitely the best option if you don't have precision cutting tools. I don't have precision cutting tools. All I have is a junior hacksaw and a deluge of mood disorders. I asked them to cut it for me.

2. Measure up

2. Measure up

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

You can buy new wooden boards, but I bought used ones for that authentic "yes, I'm a bit of wanker" look. There was originally meant to be a seventh shelf, upon which I'd place my dreams. But that won't be necessary now, will it, Julie?

I marked out the fixings at 50cm intervals along the first board, 1cm from either edge (this is so the wall clamps line up properly later). Because they are used, and because scaffolding boards aren't meant for construction, there is a slight variation in width and length. A bit like me over Christmas.

3. Drill it good

3. Drill it good

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

In order to get the fixings in a uniform place on each shelf, I measured up and marked the holes on one board, then I used that board as a jig to drill into the other 5 boards, lining up the back edge and clamping them together while I drilled.

For those not familiar with DIY terms, a jig is a type of dance.

4. Score and seven years ago

4. Score and seven years ago

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

I then cut the boards cut down to size, but with a saw, not with the kind of words my parents use when they text me.

Wood tends to splinter when sawn, so to get a neater edge score the line with a Stanley knife first. This breaks the fibres and makes you look like you know what you're doing.

Before you actually cut anything, measure it a second time just to be certain. Carpentry is like a date with Cara from Accounts: You don't get a second chance. As my dad always says: "Stop calling us, we don't like you."

5. Sand another thing

5. Sand another thing

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

Being used, the boards were stained with various building materials and dirt, and had plenty of dents and rough edges. You want the boards to look used, but not this used. A good sanding will sort them out. Instagram filters only hide so much.

I used a rough-grade paper on an orbital sander. It stripped the undesired rustic hue off quicker than I shed my jeans when I get home at the end of the day. If only it were as easy to get rid of memories. Sigh.

6. And the rest was rust and sawdust

6. And the rest was rust and sawdust

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

It being a rainy day, I had to sand indoors, and that meant dust. A lot of dust. I spread dust sheets over my bed and other furniture and got to work. A couple of passes on each board and they turned out pretty clean.

After an hour of sanding I was covered head to toe in dust, turning me prematurely grey. Unfortunately I forgot to buy a dust mask. You should have seen what came out of my nose in the shower. Nothing makes you contemplate your life choices quite like violently ejecting clumps of sawdust-encrusted mucus from your sinuses.

7. I need a fix

7. I need a fix

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

Now the timber is fully prepped, you can start bolting the whole thing together. At this stage it's a bit like hipster Meccano, with a kit you've made yourself. Mostly. If you're too young to remember Meccano, it's what virgins did before video games were invented.

I used 6mm nuts and bolts to join two "feet" fixings at either side of the board. The first board I did by hand with a wrench but with four bolts per fixing, that took forever. Then I bought a socket driver for my electric drill which was much quicker. Until my drill died.

RIP, Bosch: You died as you lived, screwing everything in sight.

8. Build it

8. Build it

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

With fixings attached to the bottom two boards, I slotted in the scaffolding tube. I had the tubes cut into 30cm sections, 36 in total, plus six 10cm sections for the feet. The tubes fit easily into the feet and are then held in place by a "grub" screw, which you can tighten with a ¼-inch Allen key. Simple.

I fitted together the first three boards flat on the floor, along with the feet, before standing it upright. Because you're adding a lot of steel, the structure is heavy as fuck, so if you don't stand it up at this stage you might not get it up at all.

A bit like that time I went out with Cara from Accounts.

9. Layer cake

9. Layer cake

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

Adding boards from here gets trickier. I found it best to place the tubes into the feet on the lower shelf first, leaving them loose, then lifting the new shelf up and slotting the tube into the bottom, working from one end to the other. I also pulled the unit away from the wall, because one slip and you can say goodbye to your pristine white paint.

If you have friends, call them, it'll be much easier. I don't have friends, and strangers are just people I hate whose names I don't know. Like any reasonably self-serious anti-hero in the Western canon, I work, invariably, alone. Luckily I'm tall as shit.

10. Another level

10. Another level

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

Yes. Unlike me, this shelf is well balanced. I quickly realised that the floor in my room, however, is not level, so I was able to adjust the shelves as I went to make sure they were right at least. Take that, Victorian-era builders.

The floor is only out by a centimetre or so, but it's worth keeping an eye on. If you just assume everything is fine, that's when you get to the end of the project only to realise the shelves have left you for a waiter. I'm only kidding. Shelves have a heart.

11. Are we nearly there yet?

11. Are we nearly there yet?

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

Slowly, like really slowly – this project took for-fucking-ever – the shelves began to stack up. Bolting the feet to each board is seriously time-intensive without a power screwdriver (you live on in our hearts, Bosch!) so leave yourself lots of time.

Again, because they are used timber boards, there is some slight warping to contend with, but I think it adds to the overall aesthetic. You hear that, Julie? Sometimes wonky is good!

12. Details schmetails

12. Details schmetails

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

For the top shelf, I decided to cut slots for the bolt-heads into the wood, so they'd sit flush and make that shelf useable. There aren't many problems in life you can't fix with a Stanley knife and a hammer.

The shelves will stand upright without any weight on, but you don't want them tipping over once laden with books, so securing them is a must. To fix the shelves to the wall, I slipped four of these brackets over the back poles before putting on the top shelf.

You can fix the brackets into the wall with your preferred plug/screw combo, depending on whether your wall is plasterboard or brick. Knowing my landlord, my wall is probably made of Ryvita and disenchantment, so I took no chances.

13. Books!

13. Books!

Yes, that is a very tall door.

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

A bookshelf without books is just a ladder to nowhere.

The finished article is 2 metres x 2.4 metres. It won't hold all my books, but it'll hold enough. I still haven't figured out how I'll organise the books (chromatically? autobiographically? drunkly?) but until then, I just made it look pretty for Instagram.

Here are some highlights:

My Catcher In The Rye collection in its new home.

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

My almost-finished Penguin Drop Caps collection (six to go).

Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed

After three days – around 20 hours of work – and £450 in materials, my bookshelf is done. It was a terrible idea. It took forever to build, and for that price I could have had about six double-width Billy bookcases from Ikea, and had space to store many more books.

But anyone can go to Ikea. Just like anyone can leave me for a waiter. Not everyone can have a goddamn handmade bookshelf, especially one so majestic. Just look at it. Legitimate bookshelf boner. If only Cara from Accounts could see how upright I am now.

It won't keep me warm, but it will keep me happy. Bad ideas never looked so good.

Previously:

I Built A Goddamn Writing Desk With My Bare Hands And You Can Too

I Built A Goddamn Professional-Grade Blanket Fort And You Can Too

What Percentage Muggle Are You?

Or maybe “YER A WIZARD, HARRY.”

Which Hogwarts House Would You Definitely Not Be In?

“Anything but Slytherin.”

49 Things You Probably Didn't Know About The "Harry Potter" Books

You’re really going to want to read Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-To-Dragon.

Peter Macdiarmid / Getty Images / BuzzFeed

1. J.K. Rowling abandoned another book that she was writing in order to start working on the Harry Potter series.

2. The series wouldn't exist without Alice Newton, the (then) 8-year-old daughter of the chairman at Bloomsbury Publishing, who read the first book before it was picked up for publishing and called it "so much better than anything else".

3. There are only 500 first edition copies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in existence: around 350 hardback copies, and 150 proof copies.

4. In contrast, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had the highest initial print run in history, with 12 million copies released at midnight on July 21, 2007.

5. In 2014, a full set of first edition Harry Potter books sold at auction for £11,250.

6. The Harry Potter series is the biggest-selling book series of all time. As of 2011, it had sold more than 450 million copies.

7. According to Rowling, in the Potter-verse, there are about 3,000 wizards living in Britain.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

8. In 2006, Rowling said that "The Mirror of Erised" is her favourite chapter in the first book, and one of her favourites from the entire series.

9. She has since said that her favourite chapter in the series is "The Forest Again" from Deathly Hallows. Both chapters involve Harry interacting with the memory of his parents.

10. The character of Rubeus Hagrid was based on a Hell's Angel who J.K. Rowling met in the West Country. According to Robbie Coltrane, "he was just huge and terrifying. And then he would sit down and talk about his garden and how his petunias had been very bad that year".

11. In Philosopher's Stone, Hagrid says he bought Fluffy from "a Greek chappie" he met in the Leaky Cauldron. Three-headed dogs are prominent in Greek mythology, the most famous being Cerberus, who guards the Underworld.

12. Despite this connection to Greek mythology, in the film version Hagrid says he bought Fluffy from "an Irish fella" instead.

13. In the Harry Potter universe, a gold Galleon is worth around £4.93 ($7.35), a silver Sickle is worth around 29p ($0.46), and a bronze Knut is worth about 1p ($0.02).

14. That means that, in the first book, Harry paid £34.51 – or $51.45 – for his wand at Ollivander's.


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You Can Personalize Your Own Adult Coloring Book With Your Name On It

Keep calm and color on.

The popularity of adult coloring books has never been more evident — they're clearly having ~a moment~.

The popularity of adult coloring books has never been more evident — they're clearly having ~a moment~.

Photo courtesy of Put Me in the Story

And now there are even adult coloring books that you can personalize with your own, individual names on them.

And now there are even adult coloring books that you can personalize with your own, individual names on them.

Photo courtesy of Put Me in the Story

Put Me In The Story is a company that sells different kinds of story books, mostly aimed at children, and allows customers to put their names and other personal information into the actual pages.

Put Me In The Story is a company that sells different kinds of story books, mostly aimed at children, and allows customers to put their names and other personal information into the actual pages.

Photo courtesy of Put Me in the Story

The pretty designs are supposed to be tranquil and relaxing for adults who feel anxious and stressed out.

The pretty designs are supposed to be tranquil and relaxing for adults who feel anxious and stressed out.

Photo courtesy of Put Me in the Story


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