I think there might be a short story set a bit between Swordspoint and PotS, but I can't remember where it is. Fall is after PotS, yeah.

I had a bit of synchronicity with a local author today. A year back, a member of a mom's group loaned me the book, The Prodigal Troll, a decent fantasy saga. I quite enjoyed it. I find him commenting in the LJ of one of DH's coworkers. So I told him I liked his book and where I got it.

His reply:

Thanks. I want to be the number 1 author in mom's groups everywhere! (Alas, the next book is about witches fighting in the American Revolution, and I don't know how moms will feel about witches, whereas the middle part of Prodigal Troll was very much about being a good mom.)

Witches fighting in the American Revolution. I told him he just found a member of his target demographic.

...AND passed it on to us lot, we're as demographic as all get out.

This seems like the right place to announce to my local book lovers that I have become a teenage girl's Reading Fairy. I started out by loaning her a copy of Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty because someone recommended it here once upon a time, way upstream. Maybe it was AmyLiz?

Now I've loaded her up with 10 YA novels including Tanith Lee, Charles de Lint and especially Clive Barker's Abarat, because I like the illustrations a lot.

Go me. I've enabled a literary addiction. Moooah-haw-ha.

I started out by loaning her a copy of Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty because someone recommended it here once upon a time, way upstream. Maybe it was AmyLiz?

Possibly! I adored it, but Teppy read it, too. I'm panting to get the last one in the trilogy, but she's been revising it, apparently, for almost longer than it took her to write the first draft.

Harry Potter timeline question: how long ago was Voldemort supposed to have been at Hogwarts? I thought I remembered that it was supposed to be 50 years ago, but that leaves a whole lot of time between him graduating and him become The Dark Lord that we really know nothing about, doesn't it?

It sure does! He was contemporaneous with Hagrid, we know that much.

In HPB, Dumbeldore posited that Voldemort was wandering to places hither and tither, learning more of the Dark Arts, making Horcruxes, finding artifacts that belonged to the Hogwart's founders, and gathering followers. He spent a small amount of time at ... that store in Knockturn Alley before taking off with Hufflepuff's cup and the locket from that one witch's house.

Kind of like Jesus' missing years, but without the John Prine song about him becoming a mechanic.

50 years is correct, I think. In Chamber of Secrets, we learn that it's been 50 years since the chamber was opened and Hagrid was expelled.

Although I'm liking the idea of Voldemort as a mechanic ... I think he may have worked on my parents' car when I was a kid.

Thanks. I reread a bit further in HBP last night after I posted that.

So that would make Voldemort somewhere around 70 years old, and Hagrid a few years younger? Which would make Dumbledore and Slughorn probably somewhere around 100?