30 Days of HP -- Day 1

As you know, I'm a sucker for memes. This one offers an entire month's worth of opportunities for procrastination; it's stolen from ozma_katiebell, dreamsofpaprika, fox_murphy, and countless others.

**30 Days of Harry Potter Meme**

01. Discuss how you got into Harry Potter
Like most people in the US who weren't in a coma, I'd heard of the HP books in their early days, but I didn't pay much attention until GoF came out. A friend had been telling me that I needed to read them, and finally one Friday night at his house, he handed me the first volume and said, "just read one chapter this weekend and tell me what you think." I went home and read the one chapter, and then another, and then I stayed up late to finish the book. The next day, I went over to my friend's and got the other three books. I enjoyed them thoroughly and joined the hordes who waited impatiently for each subsequent title, pre-ordering each from a local bookstore as it appeared. I devoured DH in a nine-hour marathon, railed at the death of Snape, deplored the epilogue, and engaged in spirited on-line debates over gay Dumbledore.

But as much as I enjoyed HP, I wasn't obsessed with it -- not until the fall of 2008, anyway. That's when a broken foot confined me to a chair for several weeks, and I decided that I needed something fun and undemanding to cheer me. So I re-read all seven titles, one after the other. This reading experience was singularly different from my first one. This time I wasn't reading primarily to find out what happened next, and the complex construction of the books, their epic sweep, was much clearer when I didn't have a several-year gap in between reads. My experience of the characters was different, too; I saw them as much fuller, more layered, more interesting. McGonagall had been my favorite character (in a very noncommittal way) when I'd first read the books, but during this marathon second read, I developed quite the fangirl crush on her.

And then one morning (Sunday, October 12, 2008 to be exact; who knows why I remember these things?), I awoke with an absolute compulsion to write a McG fanfic. Now mind you, at this point, I'd never read a single HP fanfic, but sentences, plots, images started forming themselves in my brain before I even made it out of bed. Resistance was futile. So I crutched my way to the computer, resolutely ignored the piles of grading I needed to do, and wrote steadily for the entire day. At that time, the only fanfic outlet I knew of (outside of the Star Trek fandom) was Fanfiction.net, where I had an account that I'd never used. So I dusted it off, figured out how to post (it's pretty user-friendly), put up my story, and I have been a full-fledged obsessive ever since.

( The Remaining Questions )

At Least I Don't Write Like Stephenie Meyer. . .

Since the elaborate HP meme doesn't seem to have offered me sufficient procrastination time, I started playing around with this odd and fascinating little tool that is supposed to tell you what famous writer's style your own style resembles. You can submit any sort of writing in English -- fiction, non-fiction, blog, what-have-you. I have no idea what elements this program analyzes, but if it's not totally random (and it may be very close), it seems to be looking for key words.

The results of my experiments:

Experiment 1. First, I put in a passage from my McGonagall gen story, "Majesty." The computer said: "You write like J. K. Rowling."

Hmm. Either I have nailed JKR's style, or the analysis program was picking up on words like "Hogwarts."

Experiment 2. I tried putting in the same section of "Majesty" with any HP-indentifiers removed. This time, the computer said, "You write like Jane Austen." (Yay!)

Experiment 3. I put in a section from a Minerva/Poppy story in which the word "Hogwarts" appeared. Computer said, "You write like J. K. Rowling."

Experiment 4. I repeated the Minerva/Poppy excerpt, this time changing the characters' names to "Mary" and "Jane" and leaving out the word "Hogwarts." The computer said, "You write like James Joyce."

Experiment 5. I used the Minerva/Poppy excerpt again, leaving the characters' names intact, but removing "Hogwarts." The computer again said that I write like J. K. Rowling. So clearly, the word "Hogwarts" alone isn't enough to generate the "Rowling" response. But without any HP markers at all, the same story did not get the "Rowling" response.

Experiment 6. I put in two paragraphs from one of my more jargon-y academic articles. Computer said: "You write like Vladimir Nabokov."