This weekend the wife and I went to see the final installment of the movie version of Harry Potter. We had worked up to this by re-watching all of the movies in the couple of week prior to Deathly Hallows, Part 2 coming out. Now that I’ve seen this film, which was simply marvelous by the way, I’ve found myself reliving many of the memories surrounding Harry Potter.

For one thing, it is really due to Harry Potter that I am a podcaster today. The first podcast I ever listened to was a Harry Potter-themed show called Mugglecast. This was followed shortly thereafter by Pottercast, which I still listen to today. Once I was hooked on the medium, a little searching for other podcasts led me to Scott Sigler, podcast author extraordinaire.

The success of Harry is also an inspiration to me as an author. It is the dream of every one of us that work on our fiction that the world we create so captures the imaginations of our readers that it comes alive for them. Who wouldn’t want to become household names and become fabulously wealthy based on our writing alone? The unbelievable success of these books is something I’d like to experience with my own fiction, and I’m sure most of my fellow authors feel the same.

I have fond memories of the excitement we would have when a new Harry Potter book came out. It was an electric thing. A couple of the installments were released while we were on vacation, and we’d stop at a local Wal-Mart and buy a copy. While we were driving my daughter would be in the back seat with her nose in the book, and when we reached the hotel that night she’d have to give up the book so Mom and Dad could get a little reading time in.

When Deathly Hallows came out we were home, and we had a copy bought early in the day. However one copy of this tome for the three of us was not cutting it, so we checked with the local library. They had a pile of copies, many of which were not spoken for yet. The wife and I went directly there and we soon had copies of our own. The rest of the morning the three of us sat quietly experiencing the last of Harry’s adventures. The wife and I had a wedding that weekend that necessitated getting a hotel room in mid-Michigan. We drove there in the afternoon, and once we’d checked in we spent an hour or two sitting in our room reading until it was time to go. When we returned from the wedding and reception, it was back to the book until bedtime. As nice as the ceremony and celebration was, the entire time a small part of me kept thinking that I should be reading.

In a real sense the Harry Potter phenomenon has run its course. There are no new books forthcoming; the movies are now done. Of course we always have them to go back to, and I’m sure I’ll be re-reading the series many more times in the future. But there won’t be that thrill of a new book, that keen desire to find out what comes next, and that is what I miss most about Harry Potter.

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