The Guardian recently interviewed inventor of the modern child’s imagination J.K. Rowling ahead of the September 27th release of her not-Harry Potter book called The Casual Vacancy. Rowling seems, on the whole, pretty nervous about this latest endeavor, because the book means a lot to her, since it writing it offered a clean break from the business empire she was suddenly managing once the Potter movies started lighting everyone’s ticket stubs on fire:
And it’s [the business] a real bore. Should I be more diplomatic? Oh, I don’t care. No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn’t sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours’ writing. Nothing. That sounds hideously ungrateful because it’s made me an awful lot of money, and I’m very grateful for that. But it’s not something that interests me, and there have been lots of opportunities to do things that make more money, and I’ve said no.
She also explained that one of her biggest fears was that her post-Potter book would get picked up by a publisher immediately, on the strength of previous success:
Absolutely, that was my worst nightmare. The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.
In a sense, Rowling said, writing such a different book — which she considered publishing under a pseudonym — without anyone to impress but herself was a bold way to go about moving on from her work on the Potter series:
But in some ways I think it’s braver to do it like this. And, to an extent, you know what? The worst that can happen is that everyone says, ‘Well, that was dreadful, she should have stuck to writing for kids’ and I can take that. So, yeah, I’ll put it out there, and if everyone says, ‘Well, that’s shockingly bad – back to wizards with you’, then obviously I won’t be throwing a party. But I will live. I will live.
Until her new book is released, — on the eve of Halloween (almost), spooky, scary! — Rowling will most likely be busy with a press tour and with stalwartly not reading Fifty Shades of Grey, which she “promised” her editor she’d stay far away from.
J.K. Rowling [The Guardian]