A Call From… Jo Rowling (!!!)
“Hello, Emerson? This is Jo.”
[pause]“You believe me, don’t you?”
[pause] [thinking: did you think there was even the slightest chance I wouldn’t recognize your voice?] [laughs] “Yes, you believe me.”The rest of it, I’m sorry to say, went by in a blur. Unlike Melissa from The Leaky Cauldron, I had no prior warning to expect this phone call so I didn’t have my thinking cap on and was caught unawares. It was 9 a.m. and that’s still middle-of-the-night according to my messed up body clock.
OK, getting to the point: she invited me and Melissa to interview her in her house on the day of the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince release. This is especially cool because this will (we think) be the only interview she’ll be doing for the book launch. And we of course won’t be asking any of the stupid questions most Harry Potter-ignorant reporters ask. Yes, we’ll make ours count. In fact, we’ll be working with you guys on them, but we’ll get to that later.
This was 10 days ago. Bloomsbury, of course, wanted us to keep it hush-hush (which is an understatement – we couldn’t tell anybody…even our pets! OK, we could tell them, but only if we were sure they could keep a secret.) until they announced it officially. But as you can imagine, we had a very difficult time doing that. In her post, Melissa pasted in mountains of IM conversations we had trying to keep each other sane which consist of mostly exclamation points and random scrambling of the keys. I would encourage you not to read them. Oh yes, it was a rough 10 days…but now you know.
Edit: I can fit two small people in my suitcase if anyone is interested.
