A Little Thing Called Pitchwars

Almost two months ago, I took a deep breath and entered my first writing contest.

It looked something like this.

But let's back up a bit. 

Way, way back in the social and developmental dark age we call "high school", I spent most of my time as a directionless mess of bad choices and pink hair. I knew that I wanted to be a writer someday, but I didn't trust my freshly-minted frontal lobes to come up with an original idea that anyone would think was worth reading. Instead, I cut my literary teeth writing tomes upon tomes of contrived anime romantic fanfiction, because I was that special kind of nerdy. Then, one day, towards the end of my twelfth grade year, I started drifting off in calculus class and came up with a rough story idea about a plain, ordinary teenage girl who would defy all tropes by coming to the aid of a mysterious, super-powered boy. It wasn't exactly the groundbreaking literary twist of the century, but I sketched out a wildly careering plot and jotted down a few pages here and there. 

Wasn't kidding about the pink hair, by the way. That really happened.

I then promptly got caught up in the whirlwind of graduation, heading off to the mysterious world of post-secondary education, and reaching the Alberta drinking age. Writing novels was something that old people did, and I'd get back to it someday. Then sometime in my second year of university, with a handful of writing and computer science classes under my belt and the novelty of sketchy nightclubs safely worn off, I stumbled across my old novel. And what I read made me chuckle. I dusted off the project, gave it a whole new plot, and had at it. As a student, I have roughly twenty-three hours of homework, courses, meetings, volunteering and sobbing scheduled per day, but when I found a spare moment, I wrote. I wrote before classes, between classes, after classes, during classes, on weekends, in the middle of the night, and around mouthfuls of ramen. Over two years, I wrote a 100,000 word novel in hurried, three-minute chunks, sometimes 50 words at a time. Even I'm not arrogant enough to assume that my first draft was perfect, so I went back over it time and time again, editing and nitpicking until the pages bled.

And that's when I came across Pitchwars.

It actually involved far fewer snowball fights than I'd been expecting.

For those of you who aren't aspiring authors with polished manuscripts in hand, Pitchwars is an annual writing contest hosted by tireless blogger and 2014 debut Young Adult author Brenda Drake. It works something like this: author hopefuls send in all-important query letters (the specifics of which I discussed in an earlier post), and then a group of author and publishing professional "mentors" dig through the slush pile to select their three favourites. Each mentor settles on a top pick and two alternates to make up their team, and provides six weeks of mentorship, feedback and guidance to help their mentees get their manuscripts and query letters polished. At the end of it all, the lucky writers chosen for a Pitchwars team get their work perused by literary agents looking to discover the next Harry Potter/Hunger Games/Shockingly Successful BDSM Porn Trilogy.

Google Images assures me that this is what a literary agent looks like.

This year, I was one of approximately forty gazillion aspiring authors who sent in a query letter and spent a week biting their nails down to the beds while decisions were made. Hopefuls were allowed to apply to a maximum of four mentors, and when the dust settled, all four of the ones I'd applied to reported that they'd received over 60 applications. Technically, that meant that my chances of landing a particular mentor were far, far worse than Katniss' odds of surviving the 74th Hunger Games. 

Kind of expected to be the one getting the flower burial in this scenario.

During the long, agonizing week between submissions and results, mentors flooded Twitter with statistics about submissions, helpful advice, and tortuously vague hints about the manuscripts they were choosing. Now I use Twitter the way most people use dental floss - sporadically, and at the urging of professionals. But that entire week, I was glued to the Pitchwars twitter feed. Any time a mentor I'd applied to even mentioned that they were considering a manuscript that contained words and a plot, I'd descend into a rapid, schizophrenic tailspin of simultaneously assuming it was mine, and couldn't possible be mine. 

And then it happened.

This. This is what happened.

Halfway through the week, my super-secret writing-only email lit up with a new message from a familiar name - it was one of the mentors I'd emailed, messaging me back! She liked my pitch! She wanted to read the first chunk of my manuscript! And I was at least 83% sure that my mother hadn't paid her to say so! I fully expected her to hate every word of it and express-mail me a bag of flaming horse turds as punishment for wasting her time - because I'm a self-defeating lunatic - but at least I could write a pitch that was decent enough to trick someone into reading more of my work. 

I sent off the chapters and went back to waiting. Just as I was about to run out of fingernails to bite, forcing me to take off my socks and strain to see if I could reach my toenails, the big morning arrived. Pitchwars results were in. I arose from my bed, dashed off to my computer, scrolled through the big list of winners... and I wasn't on it. It wasn't much of a shock. My novel had only been read by a handful of people who weren't my immediate relatives, and the eyeballs that had scrutinized it thus far almost exclusively belonged to people who were 15-20 years older than me. I assumed the praise they'd given me was more of a "I'm going to put this right up here on the fridge, sweetie!" than an actual indication that I could write a decent book.

Above: me and my critique partners.

Just as I was about to get on Twitter and bombard the winners with congratulations, my super-sneaky secret email lit up again. It was the mentor who asked me for chapters. She thanked me for submitting my work, and gave me some incredibly helpful advice on why she'd had to pass on my manuscript. I was thrilled! Getting quality critique was my entire reason for entering Pitchwars, and I had received some without even being chosen as a winner. That was all it took - I was tinkering and editing my manuscript before I'd even read the bottom of the email. 

I was so happy, I turned into an elderly Asian woman.

My mother, who became something of Pitchwars cheerleader during the contest, asked if she could read my rejection letter. So I brought it up and read it again. And this time, I read it all the way through, and I caught those sentences I'd missed before. She had ended the letter by congratulating me, and telling me that she was happy another mentor had chosen me as an alternate. Now I was confused. I went back to the winners list, and scanned it again for my obnoxiously French name. Nothing. But this time, I noticed that the contest had a little twist - six secret mentors had been scanning the entries and would announce their own picks the following day. That had to be what she was referring to. A second email from another one of my mentor picks confirmed it - I'd been scooped up by one of the secret mentors, and my name would be on the list the next day. My cheerleader and I were elated. 

This is how I picture literary cheerleaders. Sorry, mom.

If you've read any of my numerous analysis posts, you'll know that my favourite thing to do is pick things apart until they're bleeding carcasses of organized lists and bare-bones information, and I did the same thing with my possible mentors. Of the six choices, only three represented my age range - young adult. One of the remaining mentors stated that she only handled manuscripts with main characters who were 18 and up - my book is about a very confused 15-year-old. Another mentor stated that she preferred to work with books with strong Christian themes - my book has murder, sentient computer programs and a transvestite, and the only instances of "Jesus" that come up are pure blasphemy. That one also seemed unlikely. 

So then it came down to the last mentor. Renee Ahdieh. 

I took one look at Renee's biography, noticed that her favourite form of exercise was "Ugh", and her favourite form of transportation was "Alpaca" (a species that, I might add, appears in my manuscript), and I knew she was the one who'd picked me. A quick creep through her Twitter feed revealed that she'd selected one manuscript about the "Ordinary Extraordinary"; since once of those words actually appears in the title of the book, I figured my hunch was correct. A few hours later, I woke up to a text from my boyfriend that confirmed it - I was on the list, and Renee Ahdieh was my mentor. 

I was so happy, I tracked down a dandelion field in December and temporarily looked good in white pants.

After that, my life turned into a blur of final exams, edits, Christmas, a new term, and preventing my seven-month-old Newfoundland puppy from eating various household goods. Renee tweaked my query letter to make it snappier, and she transformed my lacklustre, one-sentence plot recitations into kickass, intriguing teasers that I could splatter across the Internet.

This dog is alive today because she's cute and because she will drop anything she's holding in exchange for cat food.

As an alternate, I took place in two agent showcases throughout the contest. The first, #PitMad, was entirely Twitter-based. I had 140 characters to sum up my novel, introduce the genre and include the #PitMad hashtag. Agents and editors perused the feed all day; if they saw something they liked, the favourited the tweet, signalling the writer to submit a query. My #PitMad was, on the whole, extremely successful. The second showcase - the Alternate Showcase - was hosted on a mentor's blog, and it featured a 35-ish word pitch and the first 250 words of my manuscript. Agents perused the showcase, and if they liked what they saw, they commented with instructions on how to submit the manuscript to them. That showcase was slightly less successful than I'd hoped - but still a rewarding day of Tweeting and poring through other writers' pitches while cursing the Old Gods that none of their incredible stories were in print yet. 

Submissions and querying are things writers just don't talk about. No specifics for you.

And now, after all that - after all the nerves, the waiting, the hoping and the incessant Tweeting - Pitchwars 2013/2014 has come to an end. In a way, it feels like summer camp is over; I've gotten so used to creeping through the Twitter feed, seeing familiar faces, cheering on my favourite writers and swapping stories of edits with my fellow alternates and mentees that I'm not entirely sure what to do with my Twitter account anymore. My editing and submission process are far from over; I've still got feedback yet to come, and besides, nothing I've written is ever "finished" until I've run out of deadlines and someone is physically tearing the manuscript from my cramped, scribbling hands. Pitchwars was just the beginning. Maybe the feedback and exposure I got from it will help me land an agent for this novel. Maybe it won't. Maybe this experience will give me the boost I need to make my next novel even better. I have no idea where my writing career will end up. All I know is that I couldn't have asked for more from my first contest, and that if and when I finally snag the elusive Literary Agent, it will be due, in part, to having taken that deep breath and sent off those four little emails almost two months ago.

And I will be so happy that I will put on a sheer curtain, wrangle up a unicorn and ride it into the sun.

Any fellow Pitchwars alumni out there with stories to tell? Anyone polishing up a manuscript for next year? Tell me about it!

2

Psychology "Fun Facts" That Are Driving Me Insane

Hey, you. You in the body.

You might think of yourself as a complete human being, with arms, legs, fingers, toes and butt cheeks, but it really comes down to it, everything that makes you 'you' - your hopes, dreams, quirks, personality traits, memories, goals, haunting recollections of that body you buried in the woods - are all contained within a 3lb chunk of flesh inside your skull.

This is you.

But as important as our brains are, most people don't seem to know a heck of a lot about them. Most of my regular readers probably know that I'm an undergraduate psychology student, and that I am all about brains. Love 'em. Big fan. The only problem is, now and then someone finds out what I study, and they hit me with some piece of brain-related trivia to see if I knew it. Most of the time, I did not. But it has nothing to do with holes in my education - an overwhelming amout of psychology 'fun facts' floating around are just straight-up wrong. 

So before I push someone in front of a train for bombarding me with tidbits of bad information, let me shed some light on common email-forward facts like:

We only use 10% of our brains. 

Here's a quick question: how much of your brainpower do you suppose it takes to coordinate every single muscle in your body, maintain spacial awareness, interpret visual information, process audio information, deal with touch signals from every inch of your skin, hold on to the definitions, pronunciations and spellings of the roughly 20,000-35,000 words in your vocabulary, assemble your nebulous thoughts into sentences, comprehend human speech, recognize the tens of thousands of items in your environment, keep track of time, experience and cope with emotions in response to environmental and internal stimuli, recognize human faces, store memories of lifetime events and facts you've memorized so that they can be recalled at a moment's notice, hang on to handy skills like the ability to tie your own shoes and drive your car without mowing down the neighbour kids, identify smells, and keep all of your internal organs functioning properly?

How about all of it?

You need this.

Your brain has a strict 'use it or lose it' policy; if your neurons stop firing, they die. After all, why should your body work so hard converting all those Cheetos and Kit-Kats you eat into energy, just so you can fuel lazy, freeloading brain cells? It would much rather let the useless cells die and use that excess energy to construct a third chin for you. If you really allowed 90% of your brain to die off, you'd be little more than a vegetable with a functioning brain stem. I mean, think about it - if you only used 10% of your brain, having a stoke would be no big deal. Yeah, a chunk of your brain dies, but so long as you've still got the 10% you needed, you'd feel no effects.

Look at that, he's got way more than 1/10th of his brain left. Bet he won't even notice.

I'm completely baffled as to where this little 'fun fact' even came from, because it has two horrible possible implications:

a) No matter how hard you strive and strain and push yourself, you're still way too lazy to even begin to access your full potential. Everyone on earth is harboring Mensa-caliber intellect that they could use to cure all known diseases, make great contributions to the arts and increase the efficiency of all the systems we rely on, but ensh, that takes work and Duck Dynasty is on.

b) Mother Nature chose to endow us with immense brain capacity that we're somehow capable of detecting, but entirely incapable of accessing. All of humanity is essentially carrying around a 50 exobyte external hard drive, but no one has the mini-USB cable needed to actually connect it. 

Either way, it's total crap.

Left-brained people are logical, and right-brained people are creative. 

Chances are, if you ever managed to draw a straight line on a graph without getting confused and falling down a flight of stairs, someone quickly labelled you 'left-brained' - you favor the left side of your brain, and in exchange, it grants you the power to compile lists, do calculations, and bore the ever-loving crap out of everyone you encounter. Likewise, if you took a magic marker to your own face as a child, someone might have popped up to call you 'right-brained' - you favor the right side of your brain, which enables you to paint masterpieces, compose symphonies, and see the merits of wearing maxi dresses and skinny jeans. If you're curious to find out which side your talents lie on, don't worry! There are hundreds upon hundreds of online quizzes that will tell you. There's just one little problem.

This. This is the problem. 

Remember that thing we were just talking about? About how you rely on your entire brain to do things? That still applies here. It's true that your left hemisphere and right hemisphere do have slightly different functions; in most people, language and verbal abilities lie on the left, while music and non-verbal abilities fall on the right. That said, there is considerable overlap. Consider this - young children with catastrophic epilepsy will occasionally, as an absolute last-ditch effort, have an entire hemisphere of their brain removed. After an initial period of recovery, during which their squishy, adaptable little brains do some rewiring to adjust for the missing hemisphere, these children retain their full range of cognitive abilities. Kids who have had the left side of the brain hauled out have gone on to get graduate degrees in language, and kids whose right hemispheres were removed can still sculpt, sketch and figure out that Nicki Minaj is just awful. 

If you're really desperate to figure out where the functions in your brain are located, all you need to do is pick up a pen.

One of those hands is about to drag itself through wet ink. Poor lefties.

Handedness has a bigger impact on the orientation of your brain than personality or hobbies ever will. If you're right-handed, as most people are, there is a 95% chance that you have the "language on the left" orientation. The other 5% of you have this either reversed, or your functions are shared between the two sides. But if you're a lefty, there's only a 70% chance that your language is originating from your left; for 15% of you, it's on the right, and for the other 15%, it's split. The proportions aren't always exact - but they're a hell of a lot more scientific than the left-brain, right-brain personality divide.

Learning styles are a thing.

Little Tommy likes to read, so he must be a visual learner. Suzie remembers what her teacher said in class, so she must be an audio learner. Timmy likes to chew on keys and gargle paint, so, uh, he must be a tactile learner.

Dammit, Timmy. 

Teachers swear by learning styles, and if you went to school in a year that starts with a 2 (assuming you're not a time traveler from the 200's), you were probably evaluated for learning style at some point during your school days. The results likely had absolutely no impact on your education, but at least you knew. And if you were tested multiple times, you might have found that you had a different learning style each time. Did your learning style change? Why is that?

Samantha was shocked to discover that she learned best by taste.

A large part of it is that no one can find a model that holds up to scientific testing. 71 different models of learning style have been proposed, and not a single one has actually been shown to have any validity in psychological experiments. Fundamentally, all humans learn in similar ways - the reason that Jack might prefer to read while Jill would rather listen to a lecture is far too complicated to attribute to an abstract, stable trait like a 'learning style'. Maybe Jill's entire family was bludgeoned to death by books, you don't know. When it comes down to it, we all learn best by doing, and putting our skills to work. So all you apprentices in the trades, you're in luck! To those of you studying theoretical mathematics... good luck with that.

People with concussions need to be kept awake. 

First, some clarification: if your loved one has just miraculously survived a head-first tumble down an elevator shaft and is incapable of seeing, thinking, walking, talking or refraining from vomiting, do not let him or her go to sleep. It's notoriously difficult to evaluate brain damage when someone is asleep, since you have no way to tell if their symptoms are getting better. Worst case scenario, they'll slip into an irreversible coma. Best case scenario, they'll choke on their own vomit and go out like a rock star. Either way, it's not good.

This is not necessarily a man you want to emulate.

But if your friend just got a little bump on the head as they were walking through low doorframes or scoring a touchdown during the 9th inning of their hockey game, and they're coherent enough to stomp over to you and declare that they're going to bed, you should let them sleep. Contrary to popular belief, your brain doesn't make you sleep so that it can put its feet up and have a little 'me' time until it's ready to entertain you again. Sleep is the only time you stop using your neurons long enough for them to be tuned up and repaired. 

She's about two hours away from restoring her brain to its pre-college state.

You might recognize 'brain repair' as something that's pretty important for a person who's just bounced their brain off the inside of their skull. So unless you have a vested interest in seeing the concussed patient's IQ drop, so long as they're coherent and not vomiting, you are safe to let them sleep. In fact, you should command it.

The Myers-Briggs Personality Test will tell you exactly what you should do for a living.

If you've ever been on a dating site, or worked at an overzealous workplace, you might have seen people identifying themselves by a four-letter string that looks something like 'INFP', or 'ESTJ'. These are the shorthand codes for the Myers-Briggs personality types, which measures personalities on four dmensions: Introversion vs. Extroversion; Intuition vs. Sensing; Feeling vs. Thinking; and Perception vs. Judgement. And once you know which side of each dimension you fall on, you should be able to use that personality score to determine your dream job. It's that easy! Holy crap, why isn't this test mandatory?

This man. This man is why.

The Myers-Briggs test is based on the work of Carl Jung, who in turn spent his academic career licking the hypothetical feet of Dr. Sigmund "Mom sure is lookin' good" Freud, a man who simultaneously founded the field of clinical psychology and made it difficult for anyone to take it seriously. The problem with Freud was that his work was scientifically flawed from the get-go; it's one thing to claim that males live their entire lives terrified of being castrated by their fathers and that all healthy three-year-olds are obsessed with their own buttholes, but if you can't actually come up with an experiment to test your ideas, they're worthless. 

Also, he prescribed cocaine for, like, everything. 

All of the problems with Freud's work show up in the Myers-Briggs test. How is anyone supposed to evaluate the test? 'Personality' is not something that shows up in a blood test or an MRI, and following so-called 'Feeling' types around to see if emotions really do run their lives is hardly feasible. This is the reason why the Meyers-Briggs test never pops up in psychologists' or psychiatrists' offices; they have far stronger, more reliable personality inventories that aren't available to the general public. In any case, official indexes of personality mostly look for major disruptions that indicate you have a whopping personality disorder going on; they don't tell you that you would be just the best oral hygienist that Western Canada has ever seen. 

And that's why the Myers-Briggs has continued to thrive. It'd be so convenient to fill out a questionnaire and figure out exactly what you should do with your entire life. The alternative is to spend years getting to know yourself, making mistakes, and trying out things that might be new and scary to you. 

And really, who wants to do that?

What other psychology myths have you heard floating around? Let me know!

6

Things You'll Find in Every J.K. Rowling Book

I recently finished reading J.K. Rowling's 'A Casual Vacancy'.

Those of you who stalk me on Goodreads already know this. 

I had had the book for some time, but never managed to psyche myself up to reading it. The only thing I'd heard about the book - over and over again - was that it wasn't Harry Potter. Eventually, though, I caught sight of it on my bookshelf and, despite it not being Harry Potter, my curiosity got the better of me. And after I'd finished it, one thing really stood out to me.

If this cover were one shade brighter, you could actually land planes with it.

Harry Potter and The Casual Vacancy are practically the same book.

Sure, on the surface, one is about an orphan conquering the twin demons of blood purists and puberty, and the other is about a small town realizing that people die sometimes. But when you really delve into it, there are some oddly specific things that the two worlds share. Things like:

(It's worth noting that I'm not including The Cuckoo's Calling in this analysis, because technically, that was a Robert Galbraith novel, and seriously, people, I'm a student. I don't have the time or money to read things that aren't textbooks right now.)

Twins

Twins account for somewhere between 9 and 16 births for every thousand episodes of pushing out a live baby. In other words, if you're pregnant, your odds of getting an extra bonus baby are between 0.9 - 1.6%. That's not a lot of twins. Statistically speaking, you are more likely to believe that lizard people run the government than you are to bear dual versions of yourself in one go.

Of the 149 important characters who show up in the Harry Potter series, six of them (Fred & George Weasley, Padma & Parvati Patil, Hestia & Flora Carrow) are twins, which leaves the Harry Potter cast clocking in at 4.0% twin - roughly quadruple the actual rate. Apparently twins are magical beings, because even Loony Luna Lovegood goes on to have her own set of twin boys. But as twin-filled as Harry Potter is, The Casual Vacancy is even worse. Two (Niamh & Siobhan Fairbrother) of the 34 characters are twins, which puts this book at a whopping 5.9% twin rate.

No good can come of so many twins.

So what does this mean for any future books? Readers should expect to see more and more incidents of multiple births, until Rowling finally gets her hands on a copy of Brave New World and writes a novel starring eighty-three identical teenage clones.

Shitty, Shitty Fathers

Look, it's not exactly a secret that J.K. Rowling has some daddy issues. She and her own father have what Wikipedia calls a "difficult relationship"; in other words, he auctioned off a collection of the autographed first-edition books she gave him for Christmas in order to save his failing burger truck business. Rowling's animosity towards her burger-peddling paternal figure shows up in more than just her adolescent diaries, however; it's splashed all over her writing.

Peter and Joanne Rowling, in a rare moment of not despising one another. 

Virtually every character in both the Harry Potter series and The Casual Vacancy has a catastrophically shitty father figure. Look at Harry Potter. Voldemort's father abandoned him, and his mother's father was an abusive, shack-dwelling hobo. Snape's father may or may not have liked to 'argue' with his fists. Sirius Black's father disowned his teenage son for not being enough of a wizard Nazi. Dumbledore's father got a life sentence in prison for torturing three Muggle children. Malfoy's father indoctrinates his only son to a life of serving an immortal lord of racial purity and death, and makes his 17-year-old child promise to murder the most powerful wizard who ever lived. Even Remus Lupin, who is portrayed as kind-hearted, responsible and trustworthy, instantly turns into a child-abandoning shithead the moment he's entrusted with offspring. In fact, the character who is arguably the purest of heart - Mr. Neville Longbottom - is one of the only characters who grew up without any father figure whatsoever.

Father-son bonding just interferes with snake slaying.

But the Harry Potter books aren't the last stop on the 'horrendously irresponsible father' train. Oh, no. The Casual Vacancy is so chocked full of heinous fathers that it's actually the driving theme of the book. Andrew Price's father steals things he can easily afford and beats his entire family whenever they dare to breathe too loud. Stuart 'Fats' Wall's father loudly and openly expresses that he can't stand his child and he never wanted a son in the first place. Sukhvinder Jawanda's father is too busy performing open heart surgery and making middle-aged panties drop to notice that his own daughter is carving herself up like salami every time someone calls her stupid.

In other words, if you live in a J.K. Rowling novel and a person came out of your balls, you are probably a horrible human being.

Good Fathers Coming Perilously Close to Death

Even J.K. Rowling seems to have realized that filling up her novels with nothing but child molesters and offspring-abandoners is a quicker ticket to therapy than to a book deal. In order to keep the psychiatrist's prescription pad at bay, she sprinkles in the occasional father figure who truly loves and cares for the tiny humans he humped into existence. Harry Potter has James Potter, Arthur Weasley, and Sirius Black, whom I'm counting as a father because I seriously don't have a lot to go on here, Rowling. The Casual Vacancy has Barry Fairbrother and Howard Mollison.

Anyone noticing a pattern here?

Here's a hint.

Every single one of those men either dies, or comes incredibly close to being offed before his time. In Harry Potter, James Potter's death is one of the events that sparks the entire plot. Arthur Weasley picks the wrong night to take guard duty and inadvertently ends up as a snake's midnight snack; interestingly enough, that run-in with Nagini in book five was supposed to be Arthur Weasley's ultimate demise, but J.K. Rowling realized that his death would leave her series completely devoid of decent fathers, and changed the outcome of the scene. Sirius Black stepped out of the blue to prove that good parents don't have to be your birth parents, and that even people from cartoonishly evil Nazi families can overcome their past, but all of that amounts to nothing when he suffers a tragic death by haunted curtain.

Bed, Bath & Beyond just got deadlier.

In The Casual Vacancy, Barry Fairbrother's death is the entire point of the book, and (There be spoilers up ahead, mateys), Howard Mollison suffers not one, but two attempts on his life... at the same time. This goes way beyond coincidence. If you're a father in the London area, try to avoid holding hands with your children in public, lest J.K. Rowling spot you and bludgeon you to death with her typewriter. 

Teenagers Meddling in Things They Do Not Understand

And now we come to the real underlying theme of J.K. Rowling's books. Harry Potter is essentially a seven-volume instruction manual for how to screw up absolutely everything and then stumble ass-first into success. It starts from the very first book. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Sorcerer's Stone, if you're south of the 49th), Harry is told, over and over again, to kindly stay the fuck away from the third floor corridor, because it's not entirely unreasonable for adults to want to keep an 11-year-old child away from a giant, feral 3-headed dog. 

Puppy! Er... puppies?

Of course, Harry the Wonder Boy doesn't listen, and promptly charges through Dumbledore's Seven Circles of Hell to retrieve the Philosopher's stone, defeat Voldemort and save the day. He's the hero here! Except... had Harry not intervened, Quirrel would have stared hopelessly at the mirror until Voldemort got bored and mind-crushed him. He had no way of getting it out. Harry is literally the only human capable of getting the stone, so if he never shows up, Voldemort's plot is still just as foiled. The outcome of the story is exactly the same if Harry isn't in it at all. 

Reminds me of someone else I know...

Harry's further exploits including playing with evil diaries when he's told not to, playing mind-footsie with Voldemort when he's told not to, and fighting the world's most evil snake lord behind Dumbledore's back when he's told not to, only to have other people swoop in at the last minute and help him save the day. But he and his friends aren't the only teens to stick their noses where they don't belong. The Casual Vacancy is the adultiest adult book ever, about adults doing adult things like holding elections and dying of brain aneurysms, and it's still chock-full of curious teenage meddlers. 

Growing up sucks, kids.

The entire plot of the novel is driven by shitty, shitty kids doing shitty, shitty things with consequences they can't even begin to comprehend. The book blurb may tell you that it's about a small town trying to throw an election to find a replacement for a dead town counselor, but don't be fooled; it's really about chronically unsupervised teens trying to find out what happens when they post their parents' secrets on the internet and make out with their friends' parents. 

So if you're anxiously awaiting the release of Miss Rowling's next masterpiece, you're welcome; I've already given you a sneak preview.

What other patterns have you noticed in your favourite books? Leave 'em in the comments. 

3

Over-Analyzing Harry Potter: Why Everything is Aunt Petunia's Fault

Buckle up, readers, because I'm about to take on the most beloved books the world has ever seen.

If you grew up in a literate, first-world family that didn't engage in ritual witch burnings, you've read Harry Potter. At the very least, you've seen the movies. If you were alive in the 1990s and you've made it this long without being exposed to the famous boy wizard, you are a statistical anomaly on par with the existence of an albino humpback whale.

This is you.

For all the albino whales and forgetful readers in my audience, here's a quick synopsis: Harry Potter is a seven-book series that tells the story of a bespectacled, cupboard-dwelling orphan with an AC/DC logo on his face who teams up with a redheaded welfare case and an encyclopedia with tits in order to defeat an immortal, snake-faced racist. The final book culminates in the deaths of approximately everyone, including Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, Lavender Brown, Fred Weasley, George Weasley's ear, Rufus Scrimgeour, Alastor Moody, Dobby the House Elf, Hedwig, Charity Burbage and a host of other characters whose names you don't recognize, Bathilda Bagshot, Vincent Crabbe, Nymphadora Tonks' father, a substantial number of Death Eaters who had it coming, Nagini, Colin Creevy, Severus Snape, Lord Voldemort, and your childhood. What the book fails to mention, however, is that every single one of those deaths could have been easily prevented by a single character: Harry's Aunt Petunia. 

This woman killed Dobby.

This might be a good time to mention that this post is absolutely lousy with spoilers, but c'mon guys, the last book came out in 2007. It's been seven years. Snape kills Dumbledore, and Harry is a Horcrux. You should know this by now. 

Also, they had bitchin' lightsaber battles, like, all the time.

Let's get right to it. At the start of the fifth book - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Harry and his chunky cousin are strolling through suburban England when they're accosted by spooky, soul-sucking magical prison guards called Dementors. This is Dudley Dursley's first direct encounter with the magical world, and he reacts by running home to his mommy and throwing a spectacular hissy fit. That scene prompts the following exchange:

"De - men - tors," said Harry slowly and clearly. "Two of them."
"And what the ruddy hell are Dementors?"
"They guard the wizard prison, Azkaban," said Aunt Petunia.
Two seconds of ringing silence followed these words before Aunt Petunia clapped her hand over her mouth as though she had let slip a disgusting swear word. Uncle Vernon was goggling at her. Harry's brain reeled. Mrs. Figg was one thing - but Aunt Petunia?
"How d'you know that?" he asked her, astonished.
Aunt Petunia looked quite appalled with herself. She glanced at Uncle Vernon in fearful apology, then lowered her hand slightly to reveal her horsy teeth.
"I heard - that awful boy - telling her about them - years ago," she said jerkily.
"If you mean my mum and dad, why don't you use their names?" said Harry loudly, but Aunt Petunia ignored him. She seemed horribly flustered.

Gee, it seems awfully strange that Harry's aunt can't bring herself to name his parents. Rowling makes it clear throughout the series that the woman is going through life with a stick of generous circumference firmly lodged up her hindquarters, but surely even Petunia isn't too uptight to use her dead sister and brother-in-law's names. So why doesn't she just say Lily and James Potter?

Because she's not talking about James Potter.

I just wrote this post as an excuse to look up pictures of Alan Rickman.

When Harry takes a leisurely swim through the silvery goop of Snape's memories in the seventh book, the second memory he sees is a young Severus telling Lily all about Azkaban and Dementors while Petunia eavesdrops. In comparison to all the other life-changing memories Harry witnesses in the Pensieve, that one is relatively minor. The only reason that it's included is because J. K. Rowling has a lady-boner for keeping tiny details in her universe consistent. That 'awful boy' referenced in the fifth book wasn't Harry's father at all - it was Petunia's creepy neighbour, Severus Snape.

I wonder what other sorts of things Petunia caught them doing...

So let's go back to Petunia and Harry's little chat about Dementors. We know that Aunt Petunia is hyper-sensitive to criticism, and that there are approximately no circumstances in which she's willing to shut her big, horsey mouth for even a moment and stop talking. And yet, her hatred of magic is so strong, she's not even willing to continue the conversation long enough to let her own nephew know that she's not insulting his dead father. Its not as if Petunia has any reason to conceal Snape's identity. He started working at Hogwarts after Lily's death, and Harry's education isn't exactly discussed at the Dursley dinner table; she has no way of knowing that the 'awful boy' from her childhood grew up to be Harry's least favourite teacher. So in that one little phrase - "Aunt Petunia ignored him" - Mrs. Dursley damages her relationship with Harry, disrespects her dead sister's memory, alarms her son and husband, conceals the identity of a man she has no reason to protect, and sentences dozens of innocent people to die in the battle of Hogwarts. How?

If she had corrected Harry's assumption, he would have learned about the connection between his mother and Snape more than two years early. 

"Connection".

Remember, Harry is desperate for any link to his deceased parents, to the point that his 'deepest heart's desire', shown in the mirror of Erised, is just to be with them. There's no way that he would have overlooked Petunia mentioning "the Snape boy" - he's hungry for knowledge of his parents, and finding out that any teacher knew his mother as a child is something he'd be sure to follow up on. By this point in the fifth book, he already has plenty of information about his father; he's seen his awards, learned about his Quidditch career, met his friends, discovered his shape-shifting and acquired his map and cloak. Keep in mind, James Potter was only twenty-one years old when he died; Harry essentially knows his entire life story, and if there's anything he needs to know, he can ask Lupin and Sirius for more stories about that time they smuggled a ravenous werewolf under a homicidal tree. Everywhere Harry goes, adults blurt out "You're just like your father", as if it's a Tourettic tic. 

For Lily, however, Harry has nothing. The only person in Harry's life who spent substantial time with her when she was alive - her own sister - has no interest in talking about her, and Harry won't meet Professor Slughorn until book six. He knows nothing about her hobbies, achievements, classes or friends, and he doesn't have any of her old possessions. She might as well have been a pair of sentient eyeballs, because the only information Harry ever hears about her is that she was good at school and had the same remarkably noteworthy green eyes as him. 

Either it was really dark in Hogwarts, or all wizards suffer from blue-green colourblindness.

Finding out that Severus Snape was the only living connection to Lily's childhood and school days would have profoundly changed the nature of their relationship. Harry's desire for information constantly overthrows his common sense - he threw himself at a murderous tree in the middle of the night and snuck out to an abandoned shack to single-handedly confront a man he believed to be a dangerous mass murderer, just because he knew the man had a connection to his father. Harry changing his mind about Snape is not just idle speculation on my part, either; when Harry learns about it in book seven, it prompts him to name his freaking son Severus. Imagine the connection the two of them could have had if Snape had been alive to discuss Lily after the revelation, instead of being a dead husk of snake chow.

You monster.

Having a trusting relationship between Harry and Snape isn't all about Harry finding closure and emotional fulfillment, however. That wouldn't be worth writing about. What is worth writing about is that nearly every single bad thing that happens from book five onward could have been prevented if Harry had trusted Snape. Don't believe it? Let's start with Sirius Black. Specifically, with the death of Sirius Black.

The only man ever killed by a mysterious archway.

Sometime during the fifth book, Voldemort figures out that he can do a Vulcan mind-meld with Harry, allowing the two of them to sense each other's thoughts and feelings. After Harry uses it to witness an attack and save Arthur Weasley's life, Voldemort realizes that the connection goes both ways. He then starts filling Harry's head with visions of a hallway filled with glass balls. Dumbledore doesn't feel comfortable having Wizard-Hitler rooting around in Harry's brain, and he orders Harry to start taking private Occlumency lessons with none other than Severus Snape.

"Private lessons".

The lessons go nowhere. Lack of trust and a bad memory viewed out of context lead to a complete breakdown, and Harry's mind remains completely vulnerable. Since Harry can't protect himself, Voldemort takes advantage of the mind-link and feeds Harry a fake memory of Sirius being tortured at the Department of Mysteries, luring Harry into an obvious trap that results in the death of his godfather. If Harry had had a chance to confront Snape about his childhood relationship with Lily and clear the air prior to starting Occlumency lessons, he might actually have been able to stick with them long enough to block the fake vision from getting in. 

Even if Harry's angsty teenage brain never did get the hang of Occlumency, he still could have prevented Sirius's death by trusting Snape. When Harry first has the vision, Hermione is clever enough to realize that they should verify that Sirius is in danger before they go skipping off to the ministry. Problem is, there isn't a member of the Order of the Phoenix handy. Dumbledore has been chased off, and McGonagall is in the hospital after being stunned to the tits by Umbridge's lackeys. That leaves Harry with absolutely no one to go to, except for maybe Severus Snape, a full-fledged member of the Order and a Death Eater double-agent, who could have easily told Harry that the vision was fake and ordered him back to his room to sip pumpkin juice and read page 394, because everything was fine. No one would have died. The only reason that Harry himself doesn't die in the fifth book is because Snape correctly interprets Harry's cryptic, half-garbled warning, based on a three-second conversation with an evil house elf.

As it turns out, this was not a reliable source of information.

Things only get worse from there. Having proven himself to be an impulsive and irresponsible shithead, and having completely alienated himself from Snape, Harry is not informed of Dumbledore's inevitable death or of the 'Snape kills Dumbledore so Voldemort doesn't get suspicious" plan. When the moment of Dumbledore's death actually arrives, Harry's blind hatred for his teacher leads him to completely misinterpret Dumbledore's "c'mon, seriously, you promised you'd do this" begging and Snape's "I would really rather not murder the only person who ever gave me a second chance" glare. 

"Thanks, bro, I owe you one." - Dumbledore

Harry's completely avoidable distrust of Snape culminates in the seventh book. Harry and friends spend most of the book camping out in the wilderness, gathering Horcruxes and destroying them with a sword that conveniently turns up in a nearby pond. Of course, the trio isn't nearly competent enough to be managing this all by their lonesome; though they don't know it, Snape is is babysitting them from afar the entire time, sneaking them help and sending his Patronus to lead them to things they need, like convenient pond-swords. Really, Snape has everything locked down; as Headmaster, he's exercising his power to keep Voldemort and the Death Eaters out of Hogwarts, preserving his students' safety while keeping them just miserable enough to be convincing. With Harry well on his way to destroying all of Voldemort's Horcruxes, all Snape really needs to do is keep sending help and bide his time until his master is left defenseless. 

Then Harry comes along and fucks it all up. 

Goddammit, Harry.

Things come to a head when Harry figures out that one of the last Horcruxes is probably Ravenclaw's diadem, but since Hogwarts isn't real big on vocabulary tests, he doesn't know what a diadem looks like. He decides that the only way to find out is to break into Hogwarts and stand around, undisguised, in the Ravenclaw common room. A passing Death-Eater-turned-teacher walks by and sounds the alarm, summoning Voldemort and crew to the castle and prompting the battle that brings out the truth about Lily and Snape, and results in the death of just about everybody. All because Harry and Snape didn't trust each other enough to realize that they were on the same side. 

Come on, guys, even Voldemort knew how to hug it out.

So, in summary: your favourite character died because Petunia Dursley was too stuck-up to admit that she'd heard a greasy poor boy talking to her sister once. She had a perfect opportunity to overcome Harry's pride and Snape's shame to unite them just in time to take down the world's most evil wizard together without all their friends and colleagues dying in the process, but instead, she chose to say nothing. At least Tom Riddle had a motive for all of the terrible things he caused, and paid the price for his actions. Petunia Dursley was just uptight and petty, and went about her life not knowing what she could have prevented. 

Yes, that makes Petunia worse than Voldemort.

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A Little Thing Called Feedly

Ladies and gentlemen, if you direct your eyes to the sidebar on the right of the page, you'll see a bright green button clashing with the rest of the page. If you're functionally literate in the English language, you might even notice that it says "Follow on feedly" on it.

So what is feedly?

It's the name of the unicorn you can follow me around on.

feedly is a news aggregator, which in real-people terms means it's an application that will gather up all the new blog posts and news stories from your favourite sites and put them in one place for you, so that you don't have to strain your delicate finger muscles by typing in all the URLs each day.

To get feedly up and running, all you need to do is download it for free on your Android or Apple device and set up an account. If you have a pathological fear of smartphones, you can just go to the website and use the browser version. And if you've got rich parents and a pathological fear of sunlight, you can dig out every electronic you own and have a blog party. Just make sure you follow janelcomeau.ca, so you can get my new blog posts sent to you no matter where you are.

There is no escape.

So in other words, it's now 237% easier to read my blog posts on the toilet. 

Enjoy. 

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