It’s the word of the week. Or something. If I had a better title, I’d probably use that instead, but since nothing as good as ‘Snape killed Dumbledore’ has come out….
Yes. I’m talking about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows again, because there’s actually something to talk about besides ‘god, those amazon.com discussion people are almost as dumb as those imdb board creatures’ and ‘why the fuck do I know more than you do about your own fandom [It’s Godric’s Hollow, not Hallow, now hold still while I beat you to death].’
Yes. I am ashamed of myself. Not only for having gotten into the series [curse you, Stephen Fry, for your pleasant voice and your enjoyable readings of the books], but for…well, lots of stuff to do with the final book. Like the fact that I’ve been killing time waiting for it by reading fan theories [better than their fiction] and watching for possible leaks.
One of them is a 659 page PDF, and there’s something about that page count that causes people to say stupid shit like, “It must be real! No fan could ever write a story that long!”
Let’s look at a few things….
I might be a little off, but Word tells me that this story has a wordcount of 285,698. Big, impressive number, right? Makes it even more credible, right? No fan has ever written that many words in one story, right?
I’ll just take the first site google lists when I search for ‘Harry Potter fanfic’, and hope they happen to have a ‘novel length’ category.
It does! And, better, it lets me sort by wordcount. The longest? 559,585. And it’s listed as a “Work In Progress.”
So, yes. There are fans out there that leave massive, horrible globs of word-mess all over the place. Stop using this argument.
There are some other, more obvious hints that it’s a fanfic. Like the ‘Author’s Note’ at the bottom of page 86 saying that the chapter had been written ‘before JKR clarified how a Secret Keeper worked.’ And the fact that it’s found in several HP Fanfic Archives. Look for The Seventh Horcrux, by Melindaleo.
The other leak is a bit more…credible. It’s in the form of a series of [several hundred] pictures of a hardcover book on some rather painful office-ish carpeting, with someone’s hand holding the pages open in most of the shots. I haven’t taken the time to go through each and every one of them to make sure all the information matches, but they seem to all have the same dimensions [1229 x 819], and the same camera model [Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL]. There’s occasionally a shoe sticking in from the right. For a while, you catch an occasional glimpse of some open, tipped-over, gold can of something, and in the last batch there seems to be a remote of some sort, and an empty[ish] bag of something orangey [possibly cheesy].
I have my doubts about this one, too, and not just because of all the comments I’ve seen about iffy grammar and the mixing of English and American terms.
My doubts are all based on what is and is not in the pictures. Like the complete lack of an inside-flap shot of the front cover, where the price would be, even though there’s a picture of the back inside flap. And the apparent stringy-type tape holding the [rather incredibly] deeply folded-over cover.
There’s also a slightly odd and sudden change in the printing on that back flap, but that could be nothing.
The lack of outside pictures makes me wonder, too. If I were doing something like this, I think I’d make sure to get pictures of the book’s spine, front, and back cover — with and without the dust jacket.
It doesn’t really matter, though. There’s really no way anyone can actuall ‘spoil’ the story for me. The author herself could stop me in the street and tell me all about how Harry defeats Voldemort, only to get eaten by Norbert in some weird twist of fate, and it wouldn’t matter.
Much.
I think I’d be pretty annoyed if she came up to me and said anything at all, because I really don’t like it when people just come up and talk to me like that. Y’know?