Fred and George and the Toilers of Trouble (Year 1) ✔

Author Note: Logic and Fantasy

Potterheads! Here's another fun exclusive for April Fool's Day!

Some time in early 2000, while driving in a caravan to Mexico to build houses for the poor with friends from college, we struck up an interesting conversation about superpowers, and, if we had the ability to create one, what would we choose? Keep in mind, I was already working on my Harry Potter fanfiction. My answer was the power of logic. Through logic and supreme cognitive thinking, you could solve any situation. That's why I included the 'Master of Mystery' into the list of hero figures in Angelina's favorite comic book - Dark Force Defense League. This is shown in finer detail through the character of their resident Magical Investigator and Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, Lexington Parsimonae.

Despite my future plans to include an Author Note between chapters about the specific language and use of Latin in JKR's novels, I have to pull back the curtain a little and allow you guys to see some of my motivations. Inspired by JKR's naming of Lord Voldemort ("vol de mort" meaning "flight of death" in French), I sought to replicate that decision in my first dubious character. And if you scratch at the surface, you'll discover that Lex Parsimoniae (slightly different spelling) is actually Latin for Occam's Razor, a widely-held principle of logical deduction, maintaining that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

If you couldn't tell by now, it was important to me, at the start, to make a conscious return to the origins of the Harry Potter series - I simply had to make my book a mystery!

And to showcase some of this logical thinking...if you're reading this, I can assume that you loved the original seven books and that you know them well. And, if that's correct, I can also assume that you noticed, just as most readers have, that the genre of JKR's series changed in part somewhere around Goblet of Fire, when the plot evolved to deal more with coming-of-age issues and the greater conflict, rather than individual, complex mysteries needing to be solved. They became fantasy novels for young adults.

The first three books, however, dealt with the motives of furtive characters, with crimes, deaths, suspects, and red herrings. With facts and clues, sometimes hidden in plain sight, sometimes impossible to understand without key details that wouldn't be provided until the latter half of the book. The format provided for long deliberations and even longer revelations, twists, and clarifications.

So often through the years, I've heard fellow fans of the first Potter novel saying things like, "If all these security measures to protect the Stone could be easily handled by first year wizards, how were they supposed to stop someone like Voldemort?" Much of this was explained by Hermione, when they went through the trapdoor in Chapter 16 and faced Snape's purple and black fire, and its accompanying riddle about the seven potion bottles:

"Brilliant," said Hermione. "This isn't magic - it's logic - a puzzle. A lot of the greatest wizards haven't got an ounce of logic, they'd be stuck in here forever."

Being Muggle-born, Hermione was accustomed to thinking like a Muggle.  The same went for Harry, having been raised without knowledge of the world in which he belonged. With their constant search for answers behind Harry's mysterious past and future, they were always involved in the biggest mysteries of their early years at Hogwarts. And since it was imperative that my books mirrored the themes and structure of the original seven, I knew I had to somehow ignite this desire in the Weasley twins, and concoct a reason for them to seek out the truth of the mysteries around them, when the notion of logic could be far beyond their everyday thinking, being from a family that was as magical as they come. The most intelligent way I found to do this was to have their first Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher force the concept of logic and deductive reasoning onto them during lessons. Professor Parsimonae's influence on the twins, good or bad, could then stretch into subsequent novels. And it does.

At the midpoint of my series, somewhere around Prisoner of Azkaban, you can come to expect that I will mimic JKR's style and tactics by turning my main characters away from the idea of solving mysteries and compel them to tackle the much larger story, in which they find themselves. Then, we dust off the dust jacket and move from the genre of Mystery to Fantasy.

Well! That does it for today.
See you April fools tomorrow!

Oh, and 10 points to whoever figures out where the name 'Master of Mystery' originated!