Got this in my email today. I still can't believe how gullible people are. It had been forwarded to about a thousand people–at least–and they were all listed in the "forwarding" junk at the top of the email. A great way to harvest email addresses. (Mwahahahaaaa!)

THIS TOOK TWO PAGES OF THE TUESDAY USA TODAY - IT I S
FOR REAL

To all of my friends, I do not usually forward
messages,

AOL and Intel will follow through with theirpromises forfear of facing a multimillion-dollar class actionsuit similar to the one filed by PepsiCo against General Electric not too long ago.

Dear Friends: Please do not take this for a junkletter. Bill Gates sharing his fortune. If you ignore this,You will repent later.

When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft
can and will track it

(If you are a Microsoft Windows user) For a two weekstime period. For every person that you forward this e-mail to,Microsoft will pay you $245.00 For every person that you sent it tothat forward s it on,Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every thirdperson that receives it, You will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks,Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a check.

Thought this was a scam myself, But two weeks after receiving thise-mail and forwarding it on. Microsoft contacted me for my address and within days, I received a check for $24, 800.00. Youneed to respond

on this a few months ago. When I went to visit him
for the Baylor/UT game, she showed me her check. It was for the sum of$4,324.44 and was stamped "Paid In Full".

Yyyeaaaah.

I'm just sitting here scratching my head at people who believe this stuff. 

I need to send back an email with a link to Snopes.com, no? 

Does she not?

Best line in the book: "Not my daughter, you bitch!"

Your favorite line? 

I went to a big Harry Potter party on Friday night, then traipsed over to my favorite Borders to wait in line for my copy. Got home at 1:00am, read two chapters, then went to bed because I had a very busy day on Saturday.

Which meant that I didn't get a chance to pick it up again until 11pm that night (after wresting it from my 9 year old's hands after he finally fell asleep) (I think the only thing that kept him from staying up all night to read it was because he'd just returned from camping and was overtired). 

Got home today after church and was blissfully left alone for hours (miraculous, really) to curl up and finish it.

I loved it.

I was satisfied with all of it, and although it wasn't the same kind of feel or adventure as the other books…it fit. It worked. There were lots of things that had to happen and be worked out. I took my time reading it, refusing to let myself race through to see what was going to happen, particularly in those scenes where one really wanted to race through.

But now that it's over, I'm grieving.

So, a few questions for the house:

1) how long did it take you to read it?

2) did you get it at midnight?

3) did you peek at the epilogue?

4) were you right or wrong about Snape? 

Here it is, Friday again, and I'm taking another question from a reader. If you have a burning question you'd like me to try and answer, send it to me and you might just win an advance copy of The Bleeding Dusk.

In the meanwhile, Holli B. asks:

"How many books do you plan to write about Victoria? Is this a never-ending series?"

At this time, I'm contracted to write four books about Victoria, but my editor is aware that my plan for Victoria is a total of five books, at which time she'll get her "happy ending"–as happy as it can be for a Venator.

And then after that…well, my intent is to write about a different (female) Venator, likely in a different time period. In fact, if you've read Rises the Night, you might have some suspicion about likely candidates for other characters.

Furthermore, Holli asks:

"So, do you know what's going to happen? Or do you just plot as you go along?"

J.K. Rowling I'm not! I'm one of those organic writers who really doesn't know much of what's going to happen until it flows from my fingertips to the keyboard. I have vague ideas, and sometimes little bits of scenes floating around in my head (usually snatches of highly emotional ones), but I don't really know how it's all going to work out until it does.

I do believe, however, that the stories are all buried deep in my subconscious, and that it's just a matter of uncovering them. I've written enough books (both published and unpublished) to learn that even though I write sort of blindly, lots of times things appear in the early stages of the book that don't necessarily mean anything to me…until later in the book when it becomes clear why I included that part.

(For example, why, in Rises the Night an Imperial Vampire gets away during the battle to protect John Polidori…his appearing later in the book turned out to be quite important.)

Here's another example.

I had made a collage for The Rest Falls Away in January of 2005, long before it was published–or even before I knew how it was going to end, or what was going to happen.

As you know, I sold the book (along with the second one, which hadn't been written or even plotted out) that September.

The following spring, in March 2006 to be exact, while I was writing Rises the Night, I happened to look at my collage for the first time in over a year.

I mean really looked at it, not a quick glance like I often do, not a few seconds to drool over the picture of one of the men on it, but a close look. And I saw an image that I had put on the collage well over a year before that had nothing to do with the first book, but was a small detail in the setting of the very scene I was writing that moment for the second book.

That was weird.

Here's a picture of the collage, for the curious (click to make it bigger). (And here's a link to an article I wrote about collaging.)

Don't forget to send me your questions for next week!
 

I finished The Half-Blood Prince yesterday.

I'm so glad I waited to read it! I would have gone crazy along with the rest of you for the last two years if I'd given in to the peer pressure and read it right away, instead of waiting as I'd planned.

It was so worth the wait, and now that the final installment is going to be out in less than two days, I'm feeling like I can handle it.

(Spoilers for the HBP below) 

Now, as for Snape. You all know I'm an Alan Rickman girl, and I can't believe he would be playing the Bad Guy yet again (and of course, legend says that Jo Rowling had a private phone call with him that somehow convinced him that he needed to play this role)…but the book sure makes us believe it.

That's why I don't.

It's so heavy-handed (with the Unbreakable Vow and the actual witnessing by Harry of what happens) that I don't believe it. In fact, since the book is so heavy on using nonverbal spells, I'm sure that what happened was he used a nonverbal spell when he first pointed the wand at Dumbledore, in that moment of pause, and then used the death curse, and somehow something happened in between that we don't/won't know about until this last book.

I could be wrong. But I'm optimistic. (Did I tell you my other name is Pollyanna?)

So, what do you think? Is Snape good or bad? What do most people think?

Oh, and the winner of the 'Fess Up Tuesday contest is indeed Diana P…I'm dying to know how she smuggled a whole pizza in. I could use a few tips!