Finally after 39 days, 21 hours and ten minutes, my Pottermore welcome email granting me access to the beta site finally arrived. As you can imagine, I was rather excited to receive this long awaited missive, and it was well timed as I am on holiday from work this week. I logged on straight away and was immediately charmed by the beautiful artwork created for the site. Much of it is interactive, so that in Chapter 1, for example, when you move your mouse over Professor McGonagall in her cat Animagus form her tail swishes. The highlights of Book One on Pottermore have to be the choice of your pet avatar, Wand selection, and being Sorted into your Hogwarts House. When the time came to choose my pet avatar I knew I wanted a cat, being a cat lover. I was torn between the tabby and the ginger, but the tabby didn't look like my Isis and the ginger had a similar look to Noah, so the ginger it was. After purchasing my supplies at Diagon Alley, it was off to Ollivanders to be chosen by my wand. After answering a few simple questions I ended up with a…
To start I must disclose that this blog entry contains spoilers for all five of George R.R. Martin’s currently published A Song of Ice and Fire books. I am also obliged to preface it by the full and frank admission that I am a spoiler junkie. Anywhere I can hunt them down, I will. For those of you who do not know, a slip up by Amazon meant that a handful of copies of A Dance with Dragons (hereafter ADwD) were shipped a week or so early to customers in Germany. The internet being what it is, full and explicit spoilers were therefore readily available well before publication, and I drank them all up like a parched woman who has not had a taste of A Song of Ice and Fire for six long years. Now, I also know that George R.R. Martin detests spoilers and pleaded with those fans who got early copies not to spoil the book for the rest, and for the rest of us to wait until we had the book (or freshly fed Kindle in my case) in our own two hot, sweaty, little hands. Did this stop my hunting down spoilers? I confess not….