home stretch now, is it?

[fox]

Okay, so everyone's on about how spoiler-y their friends are prepared not to be in the run-up to Book Seven. So I will take this opportunity to reiterate that my spoiler-phobia extends even to speculation-phobia. I am not interested in people's opinions on Various Questions; I am not interested in Various Questions, because the minute I ask them, I start Thinking, and the odds of turning out to have spoiled myself are non-zero. Yes, there are some questions that are obvious, but I'm trying not to think about them either. Fence around the Torah, y'all. If I could have got this far without knowing the title of the damn thing, I would. (Thanks, WaPo.) As it is I imagine I'm going to have to put on dark glasses and noise-canceling headphones and have ellen_fremedon and wordplay guide me by the elbow through the release party.

I know it's hard for people to grok how not-kidding I am with this, but I am not even shitting you. Couple of months ago I explained this very head-in-the-sand-ness and the next words out of the mouth of a friend of mine were exactly the kind of speculation I'd just spent three minutes saying I wanted to avoid -- which she wouldn't have done, if she'd understood I was serious. So I'm saying here: I really am serious. A couple of you have posted things recently (by which I mean, since the publication date was announced) that have caused me, knowing they were there (but not, thank god, having actually read them) to temporarily move you off the default view. If I had my druthers, all discussion of the book's content (potential or actual) between now and 22 July would take place behind cuts. Can I have a show of hands, please, of people who think I am sufficiently silly that there's no chance they'll indulge me in this?

I suppose I could pre-emptively de-default everyone I know to be an HP fan, but that seems a little extreme at this juncture ...

Comments

[thefourthvine.livejournal.com]

For reasons I explained to tzikeh this morning, I am likely to be the last kid on the fannish block to read HP7. I have a phobia of last books in series (Thank you, C.S. Lewis! No, wait, I meant fuck you.) so extreme that I will need to have been thoroughly spoiled for it and for the emotional impact of those spoilers to have worn off before I can face reading the book.

In the meantime, I live in a zone of Last Book Denial: I'm pretending you are all talking about some series I don't even read, one that is definitely not destined to end on book 7, and while I'm happy to take the polls, read the posts, etc., I'm not going to be bringing it up, because I'm not thinking about it. To me, in my Denial Zone, it does not exist. Seriously. No HP7. Refuse to believe in it. Firmly in denial. Secretly, I'm pretending you are all just crazy, thinking there will be a book in that series this summer.

In short, the odds that I will make any kind of post about HP7 are vanishingly slim, as that would require that I entirely recover from my phobia between now and whenever the book is coming out. (It's symptomatic of my Denial Zone that I don't know when. I've been told many times, but my brain instantly discards that information, since it doesn't help me to pretend that there is no book if I know its release date.)

If I'm on your default view, in other words, feel free to keep me there; the odds are probably better that you'll spoil me than that I'll spoil you, with speculation or any other thing. (And, for the record, once you've read the book, I totally invite spoilers; I have to know them so I can start getting over them so that I can eventually - probably sometime in 2019 - read the book.)