J.K. Rowling - how she did it

Hello Fellow Writers!

Yesterday I had big plans - I was going to do character studies of my heroine and hero for my new romance novel, and I was going to plot the whole novel out ahead of time in meticulous detail using Evan Marshall's "The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing". Instead, my infant son took such a nice long nap that mommy ended up - you guessed it - falling asleep too. Since the plan was to write during his nap time, I suddenly found myself with no more time to write, since we went to synagogue shortly after my hubby came home from work.

Although - now that I'm thinking about it - if I really had to I could have (should have) written when we came home from temple around 9pm. The only thing that I got accomplished was thinking up a working title for my new book. I'm thinking "Snowed in With a Millionaire". I'm not 100% certain on that just yet, but for now it will do. So today the plan is to get what I had promised to do yesterday done. It should be easier to accomplish today with Jeff around to take care of baby Jake.

J.K Rowling, billionaire author of the "Harry Potter" series,was meticulous about her plotting and character studies.

She plotted out all seven novels before starting the first one! There's a BBC special about her that was done in 2002 that chronicles how she went from single mother on welfare to being the only author to ever make a billion dollars from writing - although I don't think she had hit the billionaire mark quite yet back in 2002. I won't post the whole thing here, since it's a) quite long b) belongs to the BBC and c) you can find it yourself on YouTube by searching for "J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and Me".

But I will share a segment of it that I found very inspiring - it shows J.K Rowling on the floor, surrounded by pieces of paper that contain all of her pre-writing notes about the world of Harry Potter. She has a list of all of his classmates, their lineage, now magical they are, etc. She drew pictures, wrote notes, basically anything and everything she could do to make her fictional world complete. It's fascinating.